tenlittlebullets:

*bursts into the room flailing and shouting* HERE IT IS I FINALLY GOT IT UP OFF THE GROUND— *trips, falls on face*

…okay, try again.

The LES MIS ANNOTATION PROJECT is a freely-editable wiki meant to crowdsource all the footnotes and literary/historical references and stuff that fandom can possibly track down. All of them. All that communal nerd knowledge. As obvious or as nit-picky and obscure as you want. All, hopefully, in one place.

HOW IT WORKS: There are (or will be) wiki pages for each chapter of the book, with the Brick text in French and English followed by people’s textual and translation notes. I’ve started it up with a few chapters’ worth of footnotes from the Donougher translation, but you don’t have to copypasta from a published version if you don’t want to (actually, it’s better for copyright issues if you use your own words). Citing sources is good, but if you don’t, someone will probably come along later with the requisite links, so don’t freak out if you don’t have flawless MLA citations handy. Signing up for an account is also good (for keeping track of your own edits, for example), but anon editing is enabled if you don’t want to.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION: …guys. Guys. There are 365 chapters in this book. And even though I love it to death and got frissons of awesome just from the chapter titles while I was setting up the tables of contents, that is more copy/format/paste grunt work than one person should have to do when anyone can edit this thing. So the price of admission is: if you want to add footnotes for a chapter that doesn’t have a page yet, please please please take the time to set up the page properly and copy the chapter text in. There’s a template and formatting instructions and Project Gutenberg links and everything! Let’s get this sucker filled out and kill those pesky red links.

FEEDBACK: Always welcome! The format of the pages is still totally up for revision if it’s not working for people.

(Sorry for posting this to the Brick!Club tag—a lot of the people who’ve expressed interest in this before are participants, and plus, I’m guessing this is relevant to the interests of most of the people who check it? I promise this will not devolve into repeated spam posts.)