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I have been reading some of the papers available on Monero, and they contain a lot of typos and other small errors. It would be great if we could fix and clarify them. Don't get me wrong, I greatly admire the work that those authors put into producing those papers, and also the speed of production that we see both in research and new code, which is all the more reason not to bother them with rewriting papers that are already "clear enough" for those that are already in the know.

On the other hand, I would love to have a place where we could have these papers posted, and edited by anyone who wants to contribute. This would be something kind of like Wikipedia (in its permissionless editing ways), but for editing a paper (TeX and PDF), so kind of like Github in that sense. I was hoping that if such a website exists, or can be made, then the authors would kindly provide the TeX file to the repository as a starting point.

Does that exist? Could we do this? I have a lot of small corrections I would like to make already.

user36303
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user141
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1 Answers1

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Find everything you asked for at https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab

I do not know how well PRs will work on that though, but do try.

user36303
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  • I wonder how easy is it to modify those papers freely, as the repository seems to be used more to develop papers with more or less defined authors with Monero research Lab, and not a wiki-like project with diffuse authorship and permissionless editing which is what I was hoping for. I took this view from their about page: "Contributors are welcome and warmly invited, but are expected to work in their own forks before submitting pull requests to this repository". Thanks for the link though, I wasn't aware that the repository existed, and I am glad to have found the tex files! – user141 Oct 22 '16 at 21:00
  • @user141, don't be thrown off by that statement. Its not intended to discourage you from contributing, but pointing you towards the correct procedure for contributing. – Winston Ewert Oct 22 '16 at 22:39
  • @WinstonEwert: Thanks! I am not discouraged by that. But it would be really nice to have something less formal for those that don't want to invest a lot of time and still want to contribute very minor changes. I don't know if such process would converge to something great, but I would be curious to see. Perhaps a good place to try that would be a Moneropedia page, if it can display a PDF document. That could be an entirely orthogonal project to the Research Lab papers, although stemming from them, and of course hopefully somethings could feedback into MRL papers as well eventually. – user141 Oct 22 '16 at 22:47
  • I think you are reading too much into this. The point is probably that no change will be accepted if it's not well reviewed, but simple typos and the like are likely to need only a read before being deemed correct. – user36303 Oct 23 '16 at 12:30
  • @user36303: I just think that there should be a place where people could collaborate in a more relaxed way for any kind of research, so this suggestion goes far beyond Monero. I am not trying to pick on MRL's way of doing things, they just turned out to be the ones producing the papers I would like to edit in that way, so I brought it up :)// BTW, it would be great to see the peer-review model switch to one run on monetized social networks where bounties can be place for certain proofs, split between the author(s), reviewers and those who find bugs too. No credentials needed to participate. – user141 Oct 23 '16 at 13:45
  • @user141, I think you are overestimating the formaility of the process. The only real difference between the pull request and a wiki-style is that your changes have to be approved by the owner for the pull request. You can see why it wouldn't work to have free-for-all editing of important papers, but it should not be a big time commitment to propose minor changes. – Winston Ewert Oct 23 '16 at 15:44
  • See https://help.github.com/articles/editing-files-in-another-user-s-repository/ for details about how to send a pull-request from the web interface, ideal for small tweaks like the ones you are talking about. – Winston Ewert Oct 23 '16 at 15:45
  • @user141 it's not permissionless editing like Wikipedia, but it's completely permissionless to submit a PR, and it will be merged (as long as there's not obvious malice / brokenness:) If you'd like to be part of the MRL more formally (i.e. Have a pseudonym, listed on the site) you'll need to email or PM me and I can sort that out for you. You'll notice that many MRL papers have more authors than just the MRL members:) – fluffyponyza Oct 30 '16 at 12:34
  • @user141 also I like the idea of monetising research, let's chat about it and see if we can flesh out a workable model! – fluffyponyza Oct 30 '16 at 12:35
  • @fluffyponyza: Yes, I would love to. I am just a bit pressed for time right now. Maybe next week? Let me know how to contact you. – user141 Nov 02 '16 at 17:48
  • @user141 ric@getmonero.org is good :) – fluffyponyza Nov 02 '16 at 20:33