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Encyclopedia of Practical Farm Knowledge on GitHub

Topic Type: 
Idea

Using the GitHub for writers manual I've been working on, I'll try my hand at getting this massive Microsoft Word document into a plaintext format that will be presented nicely on GitHub. I'll format it using the Markdown syntax that we use on our wikis here on FarmHack.net.

This approach has the following advantages...

  • plain text will live forever, we may not be able to open Word docs in the future (as crazy as that may sound)
  • it can live offline or online because it's plain text
  • Putting this on GitHub will allow anyone to fork the project and send pull requests if they want to

Disadvantages...

  • there's a steeper learning curve to writing on GitHub than on a FarmHack.net wiki page.
  • we don't get Farm Hack credit for our edits on GitHub

In regards to the disadvantage, tools like Prose.io give me hope that we'll be able to make writing on GitHub easier to learn and actually do. In regards to getting credit on Farm Hack, I could write some code that watches the GitHub repository related to a tool which then finds the edits that Farm Hack users are making and adds that to their Farm Hack credit.