First things first

Who is Grothendieck?

A very important mathematician actively working in 1950s-1991 years, who has many interesting scientific works unpublished. You may read more about his biography in this Wikipedia article.

What's this all about?

We are going to understand the ideas contained in Grothendieck works. It seems the good point to start is by reading these works but here we are confronted with some difficulties.

What's the problem? The texts are already on the net

Oh. You mean these PDFs of La longue marche a travers la theorie de Galois? Do you know how many parts are already typeset? Only part 1b. 110 pages. (And 130 coming soon). Do you know how much there should be? 400 TeX pages. And 1000 more of additional comments, that are unavailable even in the scanned form. They are handwritten!

Then, Pursuing stacks. It's a letter. How long are your letters? Perhaps 10 pages. Perhaps 50 pages if you are very talky. This letter is 500 pages long. And it's not about one's relatives health. It's about mathematics. Still if you're going to read it you have no choice but downloading the PDF with scans of typewritten text (what's the current year?)

Then, Récoltes et Semailles is already OCRed! Great! 0 and 1 part (of 5), so you may read them here. You don't read French and want some translation? Or you think some editorial work should be done after OCRing? This is exactly what we are doing with this document. Look at French original, or to English translation (originally copied from user:Roy Lisker homepage and continued by volunteers).

But even if you've read all these texts you may still wander what a topos has to do with space, what is derivateur and how topology needs to be tamed. And this is the place for you to get the answer. You already know? Please write it for a dummie which doesn't understand it yet - I mean, me!

So what are you doing?

Right now we are typesetting major texts by Grothendieck. We are also trying to expand his work by commenting on what's going on with these ideas right now (for example, w:motivic homotopy theory is widely believed to be inspired by Grothendieck - I'm not specialist in this stuff, sorry). We're trying to clarify the meaning of difficult words, like w:anabelian geometry, w:topos, w:stack (You've certainly heard these words - but there are many more)

Doesn't it sound like Grothendieck personal cult?

Guys, I'm not going to put Sasha's portrets on streets. But he really made good mathematics. And an honest statement that his ideas are great and worth understanding may be right or wrong but anyway is far from being a cult.

Wiki

How is the work organized?

This site is a wiki, which means that anyone, including you, can edit most pages right now. This was inspired by Wikipedia. We've copied w:MediaWiki, the system that runs WIkipedia, so the Wiki-syntax is exactly as there. See Wikipedia:Help for more details on how to create articles and enter text.

What different namespaces do you have?

As usual, fr:, en:, es:, etc mean different languages. Prefix W: links to Wikipedia articles. Talk: is Talk: and User: is User:. We don't have many general pages yet, so we hardly need Meta:.

How do I work on a single book?

To distinguish the sections of one book, use slash: RS/Promenade means the first chapter of RS, which equals to Récoltes et Semailles, english of french depending on your current language (I find it preferable to keep original titles in translations). One day the links to next/previous chapter and index will be made automatical, so don't bother with them at this moment. The naming conventions are yet to be developed, so invent them by yourself.

How do I do math?

Use it in the usual TeX way enclosed into math tag: $e^{x}=1+x+{\frac {x^{2}}{2!}}+\dots$ .

What can I do?

Typesetting the text

The whole process may be:

find the source
scan it
make it available from the internet
OCR it or type by yourself
don't forget math
format text
proofread it
translate it to another language
make all inter-text and interlanguage links
comment on what's going on
try to understand the text
summarize some ideas from there
write an original article on the topic

Sounds too big? Never mind. Just do what you can. Others will correct you if you're mistaken. For example, if the source is generally unavailable, scanning it would be a great step forward. For the textes which already have the source scanned you may want to type it or correct others doing it. If nobody started doing the book, just create an entry for the book. Some will proceed with the contents page, others will follow with the text itself. Somebody else will translate. And so forth.

Are we going to work as typers?

Of course, there is a lot of more intellectual work than correcting text recognition software mistakes. At any time you may start a general article about, say yoga of motives. In this case I encourage you to start in Wikipedia and to link there from here and here from there. However, if we find out that Wikipedia's style is inappropriate, we will create such articles here.

Legal issues

What's about copyright on source texts?

I'm not a laywer, but it seems that if a book is unpublished, its copyright is held by an author. And at least some texts were distributed by Grothendieck himself. Other texts were found in the papers given to his friend, so we'd ask him before typesetting these papers. There are also many published texts, like SGA or various articles, for which we'll examine the situation in details. See Grothendieck Copyrights. In any case,

Shall Grothendieck, or someone in his name, indicate that the copyright owner doesn't want these things to be done in this way, they will be stopped

As for initial sources for translations into English (by User:Roy Lisker) and Russian (by user:Yu Friedman and M Finkelberg), the authors explicitely allowed a distribution of their work.

What's about the copyright on the produced texts?

While I'm not certain about the copyright on the text that is simply copied from a typewritten book into the computer, there will be much more valuable work -- translations and commentaries. Our License is being developed. Its main postulates will be:

You give everybody the right to distribute freely the texts, provided Grothendieck's authorship and our coding/translating efforts are acknowledged
You will be mentioned somewhere in this project with as much information as you want to write about yourself on your user page
Whether we should prohibit or encourage commercial use of the texts is still unclear for me. See below for my personal views on publishing.

What about publishing the books?

I like it the way it is - electronically. If you are really fond of old-fashioned paper books you may want to publish some of the texts. Perhaps RS could be a big sale (it's been already printed in Russia, and it's all sold). I think we should explicitly permit non-commercial publishing (for me, it's when a book costs the price of print and not more). As for me, we can permit even commercial publishing if each book contains a notice that the text can be obtained at no cost at different place.

Why don't sell the books by ourselves?

While our license will explicitly permit distributing the text in many ways, we may want to reserve the right for commercial printing. In this case I don't know who legally will hold the copyright. None of individual contributors can have the copyright for the whole work and nobody's inividual copyright should be transferred to another entity (what for?), be it me, university which hosts the project or somebody else. One may suggest that we form some 'foundation', print the books and give the profit to something like sponsoring Grothendieck-related meetups. While in principle I'm not against this I find it really hard to organize such a thing. However, your ideas are welcome.

Further questions

While comments on each individual page should be directed to its Talk: page, the best place to ask general questions is the village pump.

Now start browsing with main page. Don't forget that everything is editable (not ediable, such a pity!).