Library Gnomes and wiki-fiddlers, stand up and be counted!

I've fallen in love with wikis. I'm not very keen on mediawiki for long term RepRap stuff because we'll have to do so much to build it into a parts and project library and personal artworks gallery that we'll end up doing better hand-coding our own content management system / blogging framework.

But the wiki is neat. You just log in, click 'edit' and it works.

I was wondering who's in the practice of editting RepRap's wiki or other wikis like wikipedia.

How many other library gnomes are out there, really? Because Recent Changes is my home page:
[objects.reprap.org]



Speak up here and tell us what you want to do to the wiki and with the wiki.

I update Wikipedia all the time, but I have never updated the Makerbot or Reprap wiki, even when I have seen errors, because they have the "combed" feel. If I saw a miss spelling I would not feel comfortable editing it.

What I have always thought would be neat was a Live update copy of the "official" Rep rap wiki.

Something along the lines of Google wave, but handled by a group of Etherpad pages.

So basicly what would happen is you would have an exact copy of the RepRap Wiki copied into a matrix of Etherpads. These Etherpads would be be COMPLETELY editable, without even logging in. You could go in, delete everything, rearrange it, do what ever you wanted.

Every so often someone from the "official" wiki (someone who has logged in, and actually has some connection with the group. Goes through, copies all the "good bits" into the official build, or just replaces the "official" build with the pad version.

Good thing about this system is Ether pad/wave systems is it allows you to scroll through time and look at the updates. So when the moderator went fishing, he/she could just scroll to the changes

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

I update Wikipedia all the time, but I have never updated the Makerbot or Reprap wiki, even when I have seen errors, because they have the "combed" feel. If I saw a miss spelling I would not feel comfortable editing it.

No worries. As a nod to Adrian, I enabled a "lockdown" extension for some Mendel stuff, but it is really, really ok to edit anything and everything you can.

Etherpad sounds cool, I'll take a look at it sometime, and mine it for potential ideas for post-mediawiki RepRap. Along with this, which popped up on my radar today. I think I may want to see if they'll want to help hash out the post-mediawiki and user-created library solution.
[designfiles.org]

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But really, there's no "official" RepRap wiki, at the end of the day it's just guys like you and me and the "edit" button. It's like saying there's official forum posters, and only they are allowed to post on the forum.

To demonstrate this, I introduced a misspelling here:
[objects.reprap.org]

You are very welcome to fix it. Because it's looking at you, tauntingly, foully replete with surplus "o"s and "s"s.

The only style guide we've really got is "no plastic handguns" and maybe try to be scrupulous about citing previous work, original text, and link to where you found stuff. Which is politeness, really.

Oh and "Generic" is handy.
[objects.reprap.org]

And it may not be wise to indulge your sense of humor too much. That's what the forum is for.
[objects.reprap.org]

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I think we need a Patch function:
[objects.reprap.org]

If you see something that looks wonky, and you're not comfortable editing the page of "Foo" or the talk page, make "Foo/Patch" and let one of the other library gnomes get it.

Cheers.

Hi Sebastien,

... where are all the new Wikis listed?

When clicking on "RepRap Wiki" it's the old "Builders Wiki", but how can you find all the new themes from there on?

Viktor

Generic is a good example of new themes; click 'edit' to get the source (mediawiki markup code and text) from [b[Generic[/b], cut and paste, and use it as scaffolding for your new pages if it is convenient.

There are some new categories (theme-like objects) that Generic uses
"http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Category : Development"
(delete spaces from that previous line to make the url work)
TheOtherRob did most of the work to set those up.

But really you just want to cut and paste from Generic right now.

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Regarding 'new Wikis':

Right now we've got the old twiki we're copy-and-pasting into mediawiki, and the mediawiki. That's the software behind the scenes. (Here I'm going to start using lots of words in order to speak precisely.)

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Moving from software to poorly defined wiki organizational issues, we've got the mediawiki website, which contains everything. On it are things like the front page and a page called Builders:
[objects.reprap.org]

Builders might get nuked from orbit, as it used to function as a ghetto, and hasn't done a very good job of incubating new pages for the wiki.

But right Builders is still a good place to start for new wiki-fiddlers. So the new policy is for users/builders and other developers is to just add =Working Notes! Stub!= to the top of all new pages that aren't perfect yet. And to go crazy creating new pages, linking to them from Builders, along with inserting cross-links from other established pages.

Once the new user realizes (s)he is actually a user/builder, aka a RepRap developer, they don't have to add links to Builders if they don't want to.

I think we'll call this the "You are all developers!" policy. I haven't run it past Adrian yet, but he's a busy guy.
[objects.reprap.org]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2010 03:50AM by SebastienBailard.