

How Citable Public Documents Will Change Your Life - bootload
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/stop-fishing-and-start-feastin.html


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10ren
I've often wanted a way to reference web documents at the paragraph level in
general, since most web documents don't include many anchors (<a
name="here"/>), that you can use in the URL with a "#" ("#here").

One solution I tried was to write a greasemonkey script that would add anchors
to all headings, using their text as the name.

Another solution is to google for a unique string in the paragraph you want,
then use google's cached version of the page. This highlights the text, but
doesn't actually add an anchor. eg:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L9bpHCe...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L9bpHCeNlSYJ:www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html+%22The+only+real+role+of+patents,+for+most+startups,+is+as+an%22)

A webservice to add anchors for every paragraph is pretty simple (probably
several already exist) - but I think it would be a great addition to the html
standard itself so that, in effect, each paragraph gets an URL.

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lotharbot
To paraphrase the guy from the thread on Visa predicting divorce [1]: Slightly
off-topic: if you post something with a misleading title that you can improve,
please do so. This article has no real information on how citable public
documents will change your life, just the assertion that they will and that
you should help.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249539>

~~~
thirdstation
Perfect summary! The linked article was almost information free.

There is more information on their wiki. The elevator-pitch version is here:
<http://citability.pbworks.com/Onepager>

IMO, it goes off the deep end after the WHY section. The scientific community
has been dealing with the issue of citability for a couple of decades now
(that I have witnessed) but, it seems like the folks at citability.org are
intent on reinventing the wheel on this one.

~~~
bonsaitree
FWIW, the legal community has been dealing with citability for a few
centuries.

In criminal cases, people's lives are on the line. In class-action civil
lawsuits, billions of dollars are at stake.

This wheel most-definitely does not need re-inventing.

Flagging this article for it's total lack of content.

~~~
Estragon
That's a false analogy. The legal community deals with well-documented,
stable, and easily cited statutes. There are strong incentives driving clear
presentation of current law. The objectives outlined in the OP would not be
served by those incentives, because they are concerned with _all_ government
documents, whether they have made their way into law yet or not. Such
documents can be unstable and hard to find, so providing clearinghouse through
which they can be cited in a time-aware fashion would be incredibly useful for
tracking the evolution of proposed laws.

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blahedo
Good arguments in general (though yes, careful not to reinvent any wheels
here...) but to me the most important thing I got out of the article was the
link to

League of Technical Voters <http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/>

which is a _great_ idea.

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Silona
if you want more meat - go the the wiki where the projects are and the links
to the code

<http://dccodeathon.pbworks.com> or readup more at
<http://citability.pbworks.com>

after the event I will post all the links to source code. There isn't much yet
only discussions about architecture.

We don't require anyone to follow any standards - and we aren't reinventing
the wheel. We are just dressing up the distributed versioning wheel for govt
people so they can understand it. That is why I think we can get it done in a
weekend. Re-inventing a wheel takes more than that...:-)

