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Metus comments on Open thread, September 9-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Git(hub) is for collaboratively writing major or minor software projects under which books written in latex should fall. Is there any interest in writing a book about a rationality topic in that way? I want to learn the ins and outs of some kind of versioning system and write something major in latex.
Here's an example of a book written with git.
Under git's model, there will be as many 'versions' of the book as there will be authors. Remember that most major projects on github have many branches. Git doesn't treat any branch as 'priviliged'.
This would definitely be a very different way of collaboratively producing books than, say, the wiki model, where you have a central branch that everyone simultaneously collaborates on. Under the git model, everyone would essentially be writing their own book, and if you liked some of their articles you could insert those chapters into your 'own' book as well.
If you start this project, put up its github address here so that the interested (including maybe myself) can fork it.
This is not necessarily true; you can organise your project that way, but you don't have to. There's nothing stopping you from maintaining a canonical version and asking contributors to do pull requests, or even just giving them push privileges. True, there's also nothing stopping anyone from forking the project and doing what they want with their version, but it seems to me that short of really Major Creative Differences, most who are interested enough to contribute in the first place will want to contribute to the main branch. Just because Git doesn't treat any branch as privileged doesn't mean humans won't. :)
People don't have to 'announce' their branches on github, and even seperate github branches can push/pull to each other. However, it's true that in practice a lot of projects wind up having some kind of community-selected 'mainline' branch. Linux is a good example of this.
I don't think Linux is an example of this at all. If I'm not mistaken, the "mainline branch" of the Linux kernel has always been controlled by Linus Torvalds, not by the community in general; and if you wanted to create your own version of Linux, you wouldn't be allowed to call it "Linux", because Torvalds owns the trademark on that term.
How does that contradict what I said?
To me, your post seemed to imply that the mainline branch of Linux is selected by the community rather than by Linus Torvalds.
I've wondered if there would be any interest in a "gitipedia", a git-model analogue of Wikipedia. The idea sounds pretty cool.
This just seems more natural to me. The wiki model implies that one version is best for all, a git model implies that there are as many good versions as there are authors and the user can choose..
I don't really have a topic to write about, as I am by far not knowledgable in any subject to write a meaningful book length text, not to speak of my writing skills in general. But feel free to propose some!
relevant - https://www.writelatex.com/ I don't know what kind of version control it has, though.