Had an email conversation with Frits, THE LMR Webmaster, and he gave me the scoop on a soon (days not weeks) to be added Wiki to the LMR site. If you aren't familiar with a Wiki, look it up on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia.org.
The LMR wiki will be the Go-To place for articles on all the various aspects of making robots and possibly articles (not reviews) about the various robot kits on the market.
In anticipation of the new wiki I thought it would be a great idea to:
A) Brainstorm on topics we want to include in the wiki. You can add topics below or create lists in txt documents and I'll combine them all into a single spreadsheet.
B) Solicit for volunteers to author the articles from the list. This will not be as difficult as it may seem since a lot of the info already resides in robot, forum, blog and other posts. I can keep the list of the volunteers as we build the topics list.
This wiki is an exciting addition to LMR. It will help newcomers in particularly to find answers to their questions and help others document their information so they won't feel like a broken record when every newcomer comes along!
I estimate there are 520 posts in Tips/Walkthroughs. We should screen them for ones that would make good WikiPages. I suspect not all 520 would be suited for this purpose, but a good number of them probably are.
I have to say, the response to this thread has been a bit on the light side. I’m sure there are hundreds of topics we can organize into the wiki when you really think about it. What nuggets of know how do you use to make robots? I can imagine everything from chassis types to arduino PWM to wheel encoders right down to how to make and LED Glow and NOT blow!
At the time of writing this, more info can be found from the front page, after logging in (Members only)
My take on the Wiki: No fear! By that I mean; The worst thing that can happen is that nothing is in there, the beginning is hard. Outdated and wrong information will not be a problem when everyone has editing rights - as long as it’s busy.
I’ll do what I can to make sure it will be busy - let’s see, but we will make sure there’s plenty of linking options, like when you post something, it’s easy to link to an article etc.
Discussing ‘top most important articles to have made first’ is what I see as the essense - everything else will come if that is in place.
I am so thrilled and silly today, am so looking forward to be doing this with you guys
What happens to all the old articles when the WIKI gets populated with them? Are we simply making an organized road map to all the content that is already here, or are we rewriting LMR in it’s entirety?
This might be an excellent opportunity to optimize the site and give the server a well deserved breath by implementing leaner and more concise pages and dropping some that are severely outdated. I know I have a post or two that are purely useless, but no way to delete them.
A post I made when I first became a member, as Basile points out in the comments, there are posts that already exist regarding the material, but I have no way to delete it now.
I’m guessing there are MANY pages here on LMR that are just as non-relavent, and porting a lot of these pages will give us the chance to sort through and optimize.
I’m not thinking that we should delete any old content. For a ton of reasons.
However, I do think that we can ‘push evolution together’ better, if we sort of accumulate. Right now we have learned, invented and discovered one brain after the other, and the remains are scatteered around in bits here and there.
Personally I’m so much looking forward to be writing articles of own discoveries, I don’t think our Wiki should be boring: One article I have been wanting to write for years is something along the lines of “Why the hell do so many parts have 3 wires”
I remember it puzzled me that for instance potentiometers needed 3 wires when they supposedly where just variable resistors. Why do Analouge In need 3 wires? Servos? Transistors? What’s up with it I know the answers now, and woudl like to write a Wiki page about that.
There are more ‘normal brains’ amongst us, and so we should also have more ‘normal’ articles - like I figure many of the great tips’n tutorials out there could be re-written together - and we could link back to the original post (like ‘how to calculate resistors to LED’s’ with comments etc)
Down the road I figure one would want to read in the wiki for knowledge, newbees questions could be answered with a link to the page where we have accumulated all knowledge on the standard question…
