Create flexible pathways through documentation
People would be very grateful to know what to read first. As a corpus of documentation
builds up, someone could contribute a lot just by writing a web page that explains what
type of audience each document is for, and what order the documents should be read in.

and was reminded of something I had always wished for, but had not the resources to bring
into being.

I've always wished that I could attempt to approximate the exact steps taken by the best learners
in human history. So, maybe O'Reilly could attempt to put together a DVD, or another Safari
website, that offered the complete library of books read by Newton and Gauss from kindergarten
to PhD level. They were mortals and thus read a finite number of books in a certain order during
their lifetimes. I would just like to know which books and in what order (and have copies in both
the original language --Greek, Latin, or German-- and in English translation). In fact, why doesn't
O'Reilly attempt to collect the entire intellectual lives of all Nobel Prize winners (again from
kindergarten to at least PhD level) as represented by the path of books read during their lifetimes.
This could be construed as a sort of educational archaeology -- an approximate reconstruction
of the educational paths of geniuses throughout history (sort of like Gordon Bell's "MyLifeBits"
Project:

http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56734,00.html

Also, this project could be similar to MIT's OpenCourseware Project:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

(but starting from kindergarten and having a deeper historical aspect: rather than standing on
the shoulders of giants, actually looking over the shoulders of giants.)