The problem of deletionism is that it removes users' confidence that their precious data will be safe. It's almost like having a database that constantly resets itself. Who will be willing to post on a website that deletes the content they created for free half of the time thus wasting people's precious time?
Closurism is a term invented by Ciro Santilli to refer to content moderation policies that lock threads in online forums, preventing people from adding new comments from that point onward.
This is similar to deletionism but a bit less worse, as the pre-existing content is maintained. But new relevant content that comes up cannot be added in the future, so it is still bad.
The outcome of closurism is that new forum posts must then be made about up-to-date aspects of the topic. But then those may fail to reach the same PageRank, so most people never get the new information, or create new posts leading to useless duplication of work.
While this has some of the metrics features that Ciro Santilli wants to implement for OurBigBook.com, it limits the number of articles your readeres can read.
Ciro Santilli publishes videos of this not-so-common visual programming experiments on his YouTube channel occasionally: www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli. Ciro should however not be lazy and also upload each video produced to Wikimedia Commons, since YouTube does not offer a download option even for videos marked with a Creative Commons license: www.quora.com/Can-I-download-Creative-Commons-licensed-YouTube-videos-to-edit-them-and-use-them/answer/Tarmo-Toikkanen!
This is also where Ciro's downtime converged to in his early 30's, since he long lost patience for stupid video games and television series.
Ciro developed one interesting technique: while scrolling through YouTube's useless recommendations, when he understands what a channel is about, he either immediately:and no matter how much you say you don't want to hear about them, YouTube juts keeps on sending more.
This helps to keep this feed clean of boring stuff he already knows about. There is unfortunately an infinite amount of useless videos out there however on the topics of:
- sports
- music, mostly idiotic top of the charts
- news and political commentary
- food
- programming tutorials. Meh, got Stack Overflow.
- stuff that is not in English, and notably languages that Ciro does not even speak!
- motorcycles
- ASMR
- cute animals
- gaming and movie commentary. Ciro is interested only in a very specific number of video games
- nature life, e.g. hiking, cycling, or living in isolation, this Ciro enjoys
- science for kids (popular science)
Things Ciro hates about YouTube:
Likely FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube.
Bought by Google in 2006.
- www.youtube.com/channel/UCM2YmsRUeIbRkqjgNm0eTGQ Journeyman Pictures. Basically a VICE-like, focused on fucked-up things happening in poor countries or regions.
- Mediocre Amateur
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact





