History of Wikipedia by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A 2022 clone of phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki.git gives first commits from 2003 by:
TODO when was wikipedia open sourced from Nupedia? The early days of Wikipedia are quite obscure due to its transition from Nupedia.
Ciro Santilli wants to make sure that you get clear highlights of what your donation money is going into!Sponsors also receive the "Ciro's Edit" email newsletter if desired, which contains similar updates to the above, but delivered directly to their inbox.
Video 1.
OurBigBook Project 2025 one year funded work debrief by Ciro Santilli
. Source. This video debriefs the end of the 1-year-funded 1000 Monero donation work in 2025, in addition to some personal remarks and what might come next.
chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/7696/how-do-i-distinguish-between-internal-energy-and-enthalpy/7700#7700 has a good insight:
To summarize, internal energy and enthalpy are used to estimate the thermodynamic potential of the system. There are other such estimates, like the Gibbs free energy G. Which one you choose is determined by the conditions and how easy it is to determine pressure and volume changes.
People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Editor. As last time. And the one before. But now it is for real.
I guess ended up doing all the "how things should look like" features because they clarify what the website is supposed to do, and I already have my own content to bring it alive via ourbigbook --web upload.
But now I honestly feel that all the major elements of "how things should look like" have fallen into place.
And yeah, nobody else is never going to contribute as things are! WYSIWYG is a must.
I was really impressed by Trillium Notes. I should have checked it long ago. The UI is amazing, and being all Js-based, could potentially be reused for our purposes. The project itself is a single-person/full trust notetaking only for now however, so not a direct replacement to OurBigBook.
This experiment seems to be really hard to do, and so there aren't many super clear demonstration videos with full experimental setup description out there unfortunately.
For single-photon non-double-slit experiments see: single photon production and detection experiments. Those are basically a pre-requisite to this.
photon experiments:
Non-elementary particle:
Video 1.
Single Photon Interference by Veritasium (2013)
Source. Claims to do exactly what we want, but does not describe the setup precisely well enough. Notably, does not justify how he knows that single photons are being produced.
Momentum operator by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One dimension in position representation:
In three dimensions In position representation, we define it by using the gradient, and so we see that
Video 1.
Position and Momentum from Wavefunctions by Faculty of Khan (2018)
Source. Proves in detail why the momentum operator is . The starting point is determining the time derivative of the expectation value of the position operator.

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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