I feel like there was a radiolab or freakonomics episode about this exact problem. What am I thinking of?

Yeah, most academics I know collaborate on git. They have zero code. Just use it for datasets and such.

Another example is datasets on covid infections and deaths from John Hopkins Uni. They used github.

I’m consistently surprised by the number of my friends that use github who are not coders.

Specifically for writing textbooks, you might enjoy looking at https://www.americanyawp.com/ for inspiration. Their documentation is light on technical details but you could email the contacts at the bottom of https://www.americanyawp.com/text/about/ with questions about how to structure your specific project.

There’s a pizza recipe on github.

You could totally use GitHub for this if you format it with LaTeX or Markdown.

There’s a different hub, where people all share their porn. A porn hub if you will.

It’s called Xhamster.

We always used Overleaf (LaTeX) for assignments because we couldnt figure out how to compile it on 3 different OSs lol

Git is for text in general, not only for code. As long as it’s human readable (I don’t know if doc or odt files can be used), git can work with it.

If it helps, a number of courses at my university used open source git based textbooks. For example, you can replicate this Statistics textbook using any static site generator designed for documentation: https://moderndive.com/ (https://github.com/moderndive/ModernDive_book/)

• https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/
• https://www.mkdocs.org/
• https://vitepress.dev/

We use vitepress for our docs: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

Or you can get even simpler by using plain markdown files organized into folders.

In my opinion, it’s better to start off simple while writing the content since then you can pick a tool based on what type of formatting you end up needing

I haven’t found anything better than codeberg. The following novella is a reflection on my experience with a similar problem.

I have all my poetry and short stories (and D&D snippets and board game / video game design snippets and screenplays and draft policy proposals and diatribes on the nature of being and other misc stuff that’s hard to categorize) in a single giant git repo. It works okay though I find it really hard to organize everything in a strictly hierarchical structure and I often have a hard time finding things I wrote because I can’t remember if it’s in the “boardgames” dir or the “video_games” dir, etc. I don’t think anyone but me would ever be able to use it. Not because it’s too esoteric, but because the organizational structure grew up organically over the years and makes no sense when viewed in its current form without an understanding of the history of the repo. It’s a very similar phenomenon to opening up an old code repo for the first time and being overwhelmed by the messiness of it, when someone who has been maintaining the repo for years has a built up schema of how the repo is acutally organized and can navigate it somewhat more effectively than someone new to the project

What I’m saying is that keeping git repos organized sensibly over time is really hard, even when dealing with something as highly structured as source code, and IMO it’s much harder with more loosely-categorized creative writing snippets, if for no other reason than there’s not a strong tradition of creative writers using collaborative editing tools like VCS (though there are, I think, other good reasons why it’s harder).

If I were to reformat my repo, I would probably start by trying to come up with a more formalized type system, a formalized metadata system, and a linking system (e.g. I would like to be able to create a link from a scene in a script to a character bio or a macguffin description). You can do links with markdown if you’re familar with it, I sometimes do that but I am pretty inconsistent with it, most of the time its too much bother to maintain them when I keep shuffling documents around (because I don’t have a well-defined type system…). Obsidian also has this feature; I haven’t been able to get myself into a natural flow writing Obsidian documents, but it’s worth checking out I think as a tool for creative writing on top of a VCS like git. If none of these sound immediately useful they can be put off until they’re needed since it’s easy to overcomplicate projects in the beginning by anticipating future problems that may never materialize, these are just things that I want for my own writing style.

Whether or not you use something like obsidian, I think for creative collaborative projects it’s perfectly doable to use git, but it makes sense to spend some time at the top thinking about the shared rules that collaborators will need to know in order to keep all the contributors from stepping on each others’ toes. These rules should be in the repo itself in a README and should be regularly reviewed by collaborators because you will almost certainly find better ways of doing things as the project grows. These rules should cover things like:

• How are files structured? Does every project get its own top-level dir?
• Do projects share a common structure or does every project get to define its own structure? if the latter, should each project be a separate repo?
• Do you have a metadata system? If so, what types of metadata do you anticipate and how should it be formatted?
• Who gets to commit to each project? Is there a review process? The answers to these can be “anybody” and “no” but I would recommend at least thinking about it before
• how do edits work? Are you going to commit everything to main before it goes to editorial review? or do you want to have feature branches that editors review and approve before merging to main?
• How does the team update the rules? which collaborators can submit PRs for the rules document? what is the mechanism for making sure that the rules are being followed, at least well enough to keep the project usable?

If you are like me, all this might sound like extreme overkill for something as simple as loosely structured creative writing. That’s because it is, until a project grows beyond a certain size, and historically I do not recognize that size boundary until I am well past it and my repo is an unmaintainable mess. It might help to discuss with your collaborators what they think the project would look like when it’s a few years and a few complete projects old: what problems will you want to solve then? Can they be anticipated in a way that doesn’t unduly burden the very difficult task of getting the whole endeavor started? A little of that can go a long way to preventing the project from losing steam because they repo just gets too unwieldy to be fun to write in.

If you’re into self hosting and you want to collaborate with other writers, there’s Bookstack

Plenty of people use git hosting to host non-code, like documentation, books written in markdown/LaTeX, etc. I personally use git to maintain a few personal wikis.

Different git forges will have different rules about what content they allow. GitHub definitely allows non-code. I’ve seen Codeberg repos be used for non-code too. Codeberg’s only requirement is that you only host free (as in freedom) content, so I suppose for non-code that means using an appropriate CC licence for example. I can’t imagine any of the popular git hosting sites taking issue with someone hosting their book, unless you’re hosting, like, the whole of Wikipedia or something.

I used to use github for my course materials, currucula, and syllabi when I was a teacher.

Google sheets or Microsoft office. I don’t know if a dedicated platform exists but I would not expect a large demand given the alternatives.

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