Wikibook-Bot – Automatic Generation of a Wikipedia Book

FYI: If you put a bunch of text files (with formatting in the markdown convention) in a folder, that is, a github repo and add _config.yml with the octobook-book-2018 remote theme you will get a book "automagically" build (and hosted on a content delivery network) all for free thanks to GitHub (Pages). See https://github.com/octobook and for more details the talk notes on octobook https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/octobook.md Cheers. Prost.

TIL there are not just Wikibooks [1] but also Wikipedia books [2]. TFA is about the latter (but calls them Wikibooks).

I guess the difference is that Wikibooks are written from scratch and expected to have a coherent structure like a normal book, whereas Wikipedia books only need to link to existing Wikipedia articles, so they're easier to create.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books

This is a fascinating idea, which rings very similar to the idea of "trails" as described in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...): the creative forging of trails through existing works as a way to generate new knowledge, except in this cases its done automatically by a machine! Even more interesting would be an editor interface to allow a natural intelligence (ie a person) to make edits in the trail, rather than in the ultimately-produced book.

There's a surprisingly large amount of research done based on Wikipedia. Those interested might want to check out the Research Newsletter: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter.

By the way, I found this linked in the sidebox that might be more understandable to laymen: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612726/this-algorithm-bro...

This is not a new idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OmniScriptum#Wikipedia_content

http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-p...

Also discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183986