Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant: PlanetMath Books Project

[Joe Corneli]

Dear Planetary Dev Team:

Raymond Puzio and I have put together a technically-focused grant
proposal that involves work on the Planetary platform. As the
deadline is approaching soon, any speedy feedback on the proposal
would be deeply appreciated! Endorsements are also welcome :-)

Joe

The proposal is here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/PlanetMath_Books_Project

And here's the summary:

The purpose of this project is to make it easy to produce mathematical
textbooks from pre-existing, freely available material.

PlanetMath is a free/open mathematics community that uses the same
license as Wikipedia. It is best known for its encyclopedia. In recent
years, PlanetMath's software has been rebuilt, with a new focus on
free/open problem sets, course outlines, and textbooks. In order to
expand our collection of mathematical learning materials, we plan to
reuse existing material from PlanetMath, Wikipedia, and
math.stackexchange.com, along with other free/open or public domain
sources. PlanetMath's special-purpose software makes it an ideal place
to assemble this content -- but a key part of this project is to
publish mathematics textbooks "downstream", e.g. to Wikibooks.

This kind of content exchange has a precident in the earlier
WikiProject PlanetMath Exchange), which brought hundreds of articles
from PlanetMath to Wikipedia. If we can do something similar with
books, it will be a huge step forward for the Open Educational
Resources movement.