Mediawiki Bad?

Hey Sebastien,

Catalog tree FTW! thanks for the install!

check out the development catalog tree in action at the bottom of the page:
[objects.reprap.org]

That semantic mediawiki looks very cool, I think it would be worth trying
out on a test server if we end up bringing one online. Semantic wiki doesn't
look to be a replacement for Widgets - in fact they list it as a useful
extension to use with semantic wiki (
[semantic-mediawiki.org]). Some of the
functionality of Widgets I'm looking for could be alternatively obtained by
updating Media Wiki (so that we can have conditional statements in the
development template which i think are in a later version).

MW stuff: can you clarify? Why is mw bad for documenataion? What
alternatives are under consideration? Why are we porting to mw if it is not
where we want to be in the long term? I've read similar discussion on mw in
the forums but just assumed they were out of date.. If mw is not the end
goal then I may not be appropriately applying my efforts here in moving
everything over to it - I personally prefer MW but honestly as long as we
end up with documentation in one clean, accessible and concise location I'll
be happy.

Cheers,
Rob

Mediawiki is bad for RepRap for a few different reasons:

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Here is a major example:

The developers instinctively run off with shiny things and tuck them away in their own private blogs and CMSs

[dev.forums.reprap.org]

Repeat this several hundred times.

If we were a formal research collaboration under on roof, Adrian would sort out this sort of behavior with a few quite words in over tea. "We probably should document our research, you know?" We're not, so we have to build in blogging, and so on.

Also, blogging is more fun then writing anonymous docs.

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Here's a really major example:

This is cutting edge research, which we can't support right now:
[www.thingiverse.com]
I was extraordinarily frustrated when I saw this, because this is the sort of thing that RepRap.org exists to support, but no one is using it, because it sucks.

And it's on a system which is probably going to be bought for USD5M by MS or Amazon two years from now, and then, *poof*, we've got zero influence on our CMS because the people who run it are too busy with their own projects to merge everything they're doing with RepRap.org, like, say a laser cut RepStrap or something. Or every extruder developed by the community in the last year.

It forks the community a bit. For inexplicable reasons, no one thought to set up the thingiverse software up as RepRap.org, with a bit of blogging tacked on, so ... here we are. It would have helped keep things as one community, rather than fork it a little bit.

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Fundamentally, mediawiki is supposed to be a small kernel with lots of extensions. Community is bolted on using "talk", which is really fucked up on wikipedia - major nasty personal politics and catfighting. And all the real community-support for mediawiki is done on www.mwusers.com, meaning mediawiki can't eat its own dogfood.

Mediawiki is great for anonymous text articles and non-original synthesis of stuff trawled off the net.

RepRap.org is (should be) a space that is organized around parts, assemblies of parts, and discussions of those parts. Parts can be {extruder chunk, a RepStrap, or a sculpted figurine}, and the person who put it up needs to get the validation/critique/praise/discussion/etc. in order to want to do it. They'll want their personal page, and so on. And at the same time, we probably want articles+objects to auto-enter themselves into a reprap.org wiki as people blog them.

Vanilla mediawiki fundamentally fails this. We can bolt on extension after extension to do this, but eventually we're probably going to be utterly overextended and wishing we had started from scratch, like trying to turn a Ferrari into a cargo hovercraft, especially after we upgrade an extension and other things break, or we upgrade mediawiki to a new version, and our hand-coded glue and everything else breaks.

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I think we do want to transition the twiki stuff to the mediawiki, but we need to keep our eyes on a postmediawiki solution which can track 10,000 users, 10,000 files, without us having to manually hand code into each page what the thing is. Because I think that would be the mediawiki solution.

Hmmm ... I just deleted a personal self serving rant.

I believe this video neatly illustrates the current fuckupedness of th RepRap.org server(s) and trying to keep track of so many different reprap hardware and software subsystems.
[www.youtube.com]

I have to say Sebastian that I totally disagree with everything you have posted recently. Forks are not a bad thing, they are a good thing and the best thing about RepRap. Adrian has often likened RepRap to evolution and you don't get more forked than that. I can't see why reprap.org should document anything more than how to build and use Darwin, Mendel and its successors. Having lots of variations in there is just going to confuse people trying to find instructions to build a machine.

Why we should document every form of home made fabrication process, both additive and subtractive and non-self replicating in a single website is beyond me. It would be a massive job to create and maintain and just duplicates information available elsewhere. Anybody capable of making one of these machines is capable of using Google. Google does a very good job indexing 10,000 users and 10,000 files and many orders of magnitude more. It also handles the translation to other languages, not perfect yet, but more practical than an army of volunteer translators trying to keep up with thousands of people's research. yes you can translate the instructions to build Mendel because it a finite scope and is fairly static, but imaging having every extruder design in the world in there and trying to keep the documentation and up-to-date and in several languages. It would be completely impractical and most will be evolutionary dead ends anyway.

Documenting PMMA, HDPE, etc, on reprap.org would be downright misleading because Darwin and Mendel do not support it at the moment. Maybe the next generation will have a heated bed and a sturdy enough extruder, but maybe not as it reduces the self replication percentage. Something that Reprap is precious about, but not a big priority for a lot of people because the off the shelf components are easier to get.

How Zach and his friends finding a way to make a living enabling them to spend all their time creating things like thingiverse can be considered a bad thing I don't know. It is much better than objects.reprap.org was simply because they are able to get revenue from it so they can afford to spend much more time on it than rest of us can. there is no inconvenience for a user more than following a link from one site to another. If you google reprap sarrus linkage you find fdavis' brilliant creation. Who cares which server you land on.

Reprap is a distributed evolutionary project, it is spread all over the world but the web and search engines bring it all back together again without the need of an army of wiki gnomes.


I apologies for many missing capital letters. Somehow my keyboard can only capitalise some letters at the moment.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I think both of you have a point, but I come down more on the side of Nophead than Sebastien.

In the End RepRap.org should be the wikipedia of Reprap. Does Jimmy Wales get angry at Brad Pitt because he didn't update his Wikipedia article when he adopted his new kid? NO! Does Pitt have a right to get angry when someone updates his wikipedia article? No!

It took me 2 times as long to make my Makerbot because I filmed EVERYTHING. It then took me a week to process and edit all the videos so I could post them to Youtube. I didn't update the Makerbot or RepRap Wiki with these video's because I didn't feel like it. But on the other hand if someone wants to they are more than welcome to do it. Most of us that have productive RepRap projects are more than happy to give out our advice and designs, on our own terms.

If you want the wiki updated, update it yourself, and let the people who are building designing desiminate their designs how they wish, as long as they leave it open. They can post it on their blog, in the forums here, or not share at all. That's what open source MEANS. As long as they are not claiming it as their own desings or locking up the designs for products they are selling they are being true to the idea of this community.

Just as much as I can't wait to see the day someone uploads all the board designs for BfB Rapman into the Wiki on RepRap, because what BfB has done is nothing short of theft (How long after someone makes a lasercut Mendel will they start selling Rapman II! The all new Delta RepRap, now with exchangable heads and more stable design!!. Such wankers.

Face it, the reason there is no unified Linux wiki is the same reason that there will never be a unified RepRap wiki.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

I have to say Sebastian that I totally disagree with everything you have posted recently. Forks are not a bad thing, they are a good thing and the best thing about RepRap.

Well, I think "Forking Developers" is a curse word, myself. And I won't use it in a polite conversation. This is a good space to have disagreements, up to the point that we start repeating ourselves, talking past each other, and wasting our research time making noise on this channel.

Documenting PMMA, HDPE, etc, on reprap.org would be downright misleading because Darwin and Mendel do not support it at the moment. Maybe the next generation will have a heated bed and a sturdy enough extruder, but maybe not as it reduces the self replication percentage. Something that Reprap is precious about, but not a big priority for a lot of people because the off the shelf components are easier to get.
Right. That's a good point. That fact should be in the wiki, along with heated bed stuff. And the sturdy extruder. Would one of you guys like to add that to the wiki? I think it would be very helpful.

We've got a good stub for PMMA here:
[objects.reprap.org]
but we still need to pad it out with pictures and everything so that they don't need to get that information from random offsite blogs.

Documentation task #0018
Sun Jan 17 14:15:48 EST 2010

In the End RepRap.org should be the wikipedia of Reprap.
Yup. With a critical mass of content, adding internal hyperlinks. The only reason wikipedia manages to exist is because one guy adds a link to nonpage like [[Heated_Bed]] and then leaves it, and he or some other poor bastard who likes wiki-fiddling fills it, unless the original Heated_Bed guy bothered to write it up the wiki the first time. But it's all about the internal hyperlinks motivating and creating internal content.

there is no inconvenience for a user more than following a link from one site to another. It's impossible for us to add a link to [[PMMA]] on the [[HeatedBed]] wiki page right now. And it's impossible for the library gnomes to work on that stuff when it's on personal blogs, or to start adding internal links to stitch things together.

And I agree with you that it is annoying to have the same information in more than one place, which is why developers currently publish their research as blog entries rather than as documentation. And why there are no new extruders being developed on the wiki.

If you google reprap sarrus linkage you find fdavis' brilliant creation. Who cares which server you land on.
Hmmm ... it's not on the wiki, which means for our user/builders it doesn't exist. The guy who doesn't add it to the wiki externalizes the cost to the guys who do. Which frees him up for more research, which is useful and good.

So please go on and do research and externalize the work of documentation to the people who think it is needful. As it is, we're wasting each other's time.

Sebastien, I understand your frustration, we at this point have between 100-200 blogs (maybe 20-30 active), 3 fully functioning but separate Wikis (Makerbot, RepRap, and Bf, 2 forums (Reprap and Bfb), 1 google group (makerbot).

The sad thing to me is not that the development is so spread out, but that the people are compartmentalizing. I don't see many of the RepRap folk in the Makerbot group or at BfB, and the other ways around also.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

spacexula, thanks. I've been a bit frustrated.

I'll try to leave the personal politics to one side and concentrate on technical issues and polite and thoughtful discussion for a change.

I never realize I'd grow up to be someone passionate about documentation. Now I just have to learn to not waste people's time trying to badger them into doing things they don't want to do, especially when they have good reasons for disagreeing.