LuminousWebs
| LuminousWebs | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Status of the proposal | |
| Status | rejected |
| Reason | no interest in years. Pecopteris (talk) 06:44, 19 August 2023 (UTC) |
| Details of the proposal | |
| Project description | Use HTML5 and MediaWiki to Typeset Gorgeous Internet Texts free for use on digital devices |
| Is it a multilingual wiki? | Many Language Versions |
| Potential number of languages | Many Languages |
| Proposed tagline | Reset the Web (optional) |
| Proposed URL | http://www.luminouswebs.com |
| Technical requirements | |
| New features to require | The project requires several new, though basic, features. Many have already been written as MediaWiki extensions though they are as-yet unreleased. As the project grows, it may benefit from several more features, such as the ability to upload and employ open-source and custom fonts. |
| Development wiki | It does not at the moment, though one can easily be created on the demonstration project. |
| Interested participants | |
| If you are interested in the project and if you want it to join, please subscribe at the end of this list by clicking "Join!"
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Proposal
[edit]With the advent of the iPad and the coming revolution in digital reading, it will be beneficial to move much of the content on Wikipedia and other WikiMedia projects into a more attractive and useable form for consumption in the browser. This move to making these internet texts more attractive should grow from within the WikiMedia community, rather than outside it.
Now with HTML5 and the revolution in browser-based typography it entails, it would seem to me that we can use the MediaWiki platform to typeset beautiful internet texts. This would involve significant collaboration, but the result would be the same. It would make WikiMedia content more attractive and more available to the world--an aim at the core of the WikiMedia mission.
LuminousWebs would be designed to allow anyone, anywhere, to typeset any of the millions of public-domain works in the world. There would be no limit to the number of versions that could be created, how they could be laid out or formatted, or what they might look like. People would be able to edit and update each other's projects like a Wiki, or ask that their creations be set aside and protected just for them (though the source for their formatting would still be freely available for others to build upon and use).
Books, poetry, verse, and lyrics that are out of copyright and in the public domain would all be welcome. The end-goal would be to create ebooks and other digital texts that could be cherished just like print media.
To get a sense of the range of possibilities, consider this, this, this, and this. Each is a copy (or stub copy) of a potential collaborative edition of the Epic Poem Paradise Lost. Each is the same underlying source material, but each offers readers a different kind of reading experience from the others. And each was created using MediaWiki.
This project presents somewhat trickier copyright issues (at least in the United States) than other MediaWiki projects. That, however, is more a limitation of existing American copyright laws than the potential for the idea, and it would seem to me that we should not be stymied by those limitations.
I look forward to thoughts, suggestions, and recommendations. If we work together, perhaps we just might be able to "reset the web."
--Aleutian island (talk) 10:10, 3 January 2013 (UTC)