what about attaching a wiki to the forum

friends and colleges,

what about adding a Wiki to the forum ? for tech documents and to slowly grow knowledge about studio electronics. This could be a very slow process beginning with ohm's law and speed of sound.  A condensed version of the knowledge in the forum to lookup the basics.

I like that idea. I think the metas are too hard to search.

https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=47657 

You can already find most basic electronic  topics on wikipedia.

I have seen several forums try and peter out.

Who is going to edit the wiki for accuracy... (hint.... not me).

JR 

JohnRoberts said:

You can already find most basic electronic  topics on wikipedia.

I have seen several forums try and peter out.

Who is going to edit the wiki for accuracy... (hint.... not me).

JR

Click to expand...

Abraham Lincoln said you can't believe everything you read on the internet just because it is on wikipedia.

pucho812 said:

Abraham Lincoln said you can't believe everything you read on the internet just because it is on wikipedia.

Click to expand...

Yup... wiki thinks I'm a historian...  (you made me look).

A lot of the basic (electronics) information is decently vetted as far as I can tell.

JR

Diyaudio has a wiki, but I'm sure it's quite sparse compared to coverage of the same topics on Wikipedia. This probably shows about how it would work here:

http://www.diyaudio.com/wiki/

I get the concept that the wiki wouldn't maintain itself - that literally it's no better than the current metas since it would depend on members to update, and the consensus is that few would.

Where I think it would shine, however, would be on the many projects. Having one central location for project information, instead of it being spread over hundreds of pages, is a great idea. It could be a project wiki only then, per project.

There could be sections for BOMs, Mods, Corrections, Schematics, etc. I have to echo the sentiment that it would be nice to have a better organization structure in place, at least for projects. The project organizers would have a great incentive to keep those wiki's up to date, as opposed to general basic info that veterans here would deign to waste time on.

Just a thought. I learn a lot by reading dozens to hundreds of pages of forum posts, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to have a central location for commonly needed information.

Also, soooo many times I've wished there was a way to favorite a post. I have resorted to using OneNote to copy/paste data into, with relative links back to the pages where the posts were found. It works, but it's a lot of work.

Anyway, thanks for considerations.

Phrazemaster said:

I get the concept that the wiki wouldn't maintain itself - that literally it's no better than the current metas since it would depend on members to update, and the consensus is that few would.

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everybody would like to have a comprehensive forum wiki, but few would flesh it out and even fewer edit it. Like I said I have seen other forums try and give up due to lack of effort. 

Where I think it would shine, however, would be on the many projects. Having one central location for project information, instead of it being spread over hundreds of pages, is a great idea. It could be a project wiki only then, per project.

There could be sections for BOMs, Mods, Corrections, Schematics, etc. I have to echo the sentiment that it would be nice to have a better organization structure in place, at least for projects. The project organizers would have a great incentive to keep those wiki's up to date, as opposed to general basic info that veterans here would deign to waste time on.

Click to expand...

we all have our own personal ideas about what is most important.

Just a thought. I learn a lot by reading dozens to hundreds of pages of forum posts, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to have a central location for commonly needed information.

Also, soooo many times I've wished there was a way to favorite a post. I have resorted to using OneNote to copy/paste data into, with relative links back to the pages where the posts were found. It works, but it's a lot of work.

Click to expand...

agreed a voting system with both likes and dislikes, in combination with a comprehensive search engine could make it slightly easier to sort through and extract the wealth in our archives.

Almost every day I see the same old questions repeated...  I have also seen some recent forum members step up and help the even newer members (a good thing).

Anyway, thanks for considerations.

Click to expand...

I'll ask Ethan about the like feature.... maybe if it isn't too much work or complication (or cost)  we can bring it back, we used to have it (at least the like part). That might help separate the wheat from the chaff.  If forums could be sorted by most liked, the cream would rise to the top.  8) (but we know what else floats. )

JR

Manual Like ^

My point about project-specific wikis is they would be self-organizing. Each project owner would have high motivation to make the wiki clear and up-to-date.

As opposed to general wikis where it's a burden on everyone.

That would be a huge boon for the many many projects running around here.

Phrazemaster said:

My point about project-specific wikis is they would be self-organizing. Each project owner would have high motivation to make the wiki clear and up-to-date.

As opposed to general wikis where it's a burden on everyone.

That would be a huge boon for the many many projects running around here.

Click to expand...

I would be happy to copy my project docs to a wiki. It is quite difficult to organise the data on a web site so that all the relevant stuff is available in each project without duplicating a lot of stuff. I find it quite hard to remember in which folder I have put certain things I regularly get asked about. A wiki with search facilities would make it much easier for everyone.

Cheers

Ian

I think a wiki with all of the relevant project links would be nice. Or even just better organization for some of the meta threads. I find the search feature on this forum pretty poor.  :-\ The amount of golden information on this website is truly incredible, it can just be hard to find. Especially as some members have passed away and faded into obscurity, I wish I could buy Brad Wood a beer for the number of times his replies to obscure threads helped clarify concepts for me. Okay enough rambling.  ;D

I hope this makes sense, but I wouldn't want a wiki to promote laziness. Just some good organization. The last thing we want is a flood of new posters with nothing to give back, asking older forum members to do work for them.

In an ideal world all data would be organized logically. We don't live in an ideal world. The best I would hope for is improved search engines that can present random data in an organized order.  To help the search engines, posts would need keywords or tags to make organization after the fact easier.

In addition to likes, if forum members could tag posts that they found helpful for doing XYZ, that might improve search engine results.

This is pure blue sky speculation, and not a suggestion, but I don't see other people doing all the work to make our life easier.

JR

PS: search software on forums is probably a cost/money issue.  Here is a comment from Ethan about search engines 10 years ago. https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=9982.msg118302#msg118302

The Wiki idea is great and i think is needed for some time now.

Meta-threads never worked properly, at some point I tried to help and update and organize info but the persons in charge of those specific meta's just didn't follow the necessary edits.

diystompboxes, although a smaller forum has a nice wiki:

http://www.diystompboxes.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page


So if a Groupdiy Wiki project advances I offer my help and contribution