Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I was able to edit it. Make sure you're logged in; otherwise, i have no idea why it won't let you.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

No, I was able to edit the http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/Index_of_Regionals page, but the table on the right of all the separate regional pages still shows the St. Louis Regional as being in the southeast.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

ah. im not the most studied up on wiki code and whatnot, so i think i know the problem but im not sure how to fix it. The regional pages' code has "{{FIRSTwiki_regionalindex}}", which is the template with all the errors. if you type in regional index into the search, you'll find that regional index redirects to the index of regionals page. So somehow it doesnt reference the index of regionals page. :ahh: :confused:
Oh well, hopefully a firstwiki admin will see this thread :o

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Somehow, it was corrected. Unless someone did another change, the wiki must have taken a while to update itself.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

The problem is that as Tristan pointed out, the current wiki is under the GNU FDL, which is a rather cumbersome license - see sections 2 and 4, which require a copy of the license to be present whenever all or part of the wiki is copied.

From a practical standpoint, I doubt that anyone will care that much. Most of us don't mind someone including our work in another document; neither will we try to steal a bunch of content or do something devious with it. But from a legal standpoint, switching entirely to CC-BY-SA can only be accomplished by creating an entirely new wiki and rewriting the content.

Maybe someone can fill me in here, but how would we effectively dual-license new contributions? Does the new license apply only to new pages? New paragraphs? If I copy text from one page to another, does it "contaminate" both pages?

From a technical perspective, creating a new wiki is about as easy as trying to upgrade the current one. Just move the current wiki to archive.firstwiki.org, change the appropriate database and URL configuration settings, and install the new wiki in its place.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I will be a fan of creating an entirely new FIRSTwiki and ditching the existing one.

Starting over with fresh minds, new formats, new templates will create a new level of quality. We can create new 'look' standerds for these things, and new sysops can be voted in by the new community. Overall creating a new wiki is like creating a beautiful community vs trying to bring back a dead community that dissolved several years ago.


This isn't even mentioning the linencing benefits of creating a new wiki.

But hey, if we truly want to make this a community site, we can start a new thread here on chiefdelphi with a poll for starting over with a new wiki.
Better yet, we can start a poll in the discussion area on the current wiki.
:cool:

Edit: we can even take it a step further and have a vote (with simple a discussion) on the #firstchat IRC channel between a certain time period.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'd be willing to help administrate/update/nag the wiki from a non-software standpoint.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/79

Ours was updated a few days ago! :) So far with our team it has been updated from 2007-present.

Its a cool little website!! :)


Tori

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

A poll has been created on this thread ::rtm::

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

There's one other reason you wouldn't want GFDL-only: if FIRSTWiki had a very well-written, comprehensive article—I'm envisioning one about Falcon Robotics, since they've received a lot of major media coverage which can be cited—relevant parts couldn't be imported to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has its own content rules, one of which is that imported text needs to be unencumbered by copyright problems and attributed properly. (They are, after all the gold standard of wikis, and they tend to have a rather high barrier to entry for articles that have anything to do with schools—presumably because too many students created four-sentence articles about their school's juggling teams, or things like that.)

You basically note on the submission page that all (further) contributions must be simultaneously licenced under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and GFDL. But that takes care of new stuff only.

FIRSTWiki uses GFDL 1.2 only. If you copy content from a GFDL page to a non-GFDL page (even a tiny bit), the new derivative work is now contaminated. Similarly, if you start with a GFDL page, and modify it (even extensively), the work is still contaminated. You must release these contaminated versions under GFDL 1.2. (This doesn't exclude releasing it under another licence as well—but that can only happen if all of the authors give their consent.) Furthermore, it's a horrible mess, because of all the other sections and metadata that GFDL requires that you include.

I think I favour this solution. There's nothing preventing someone from paraphrasing content in the old wiki—as long as they resist the temptation to copy too closely.

Besides, I just leafed through a random sample of about thirty pages, and there didn't seem to be too much worth preserving on the main wiki. (Though I have no objections to keeping an archive readily available.) On the team pages, most of the information was just awards that can be pulled from the FIRST website. (There was some nice background information, like about accepting/declining that isn't provided by FIRST; that's worth archiving.) Also, a lot of teams took it upon themselves to write a summary of the team's goals and activities, from the team's own perspective (e.g. "our robot..."); it bears discussing whether that's a desirable style, or whether the third-person narrative is preferred. Teams also frequently listed their members...as of 2008 or so. Pages about robot components were uniformly out of date. Same with regionals. The stuff about various games could easily be rewritten.


It seems to me that the way forward involves these things (in no particular order):

• Handle the technical issues: archive old one, install 1.16.5, add all the magic.
• Decide on the scope.
• Decide on ground rules: does it need to be like Wikipedia in terms of the decision-making processes?
• Figure out some content standards (lean on Wikipedia for ideas, but make it two orders of magnitude simpler). Style, perspective, referencing standards, copyright and the like.
• Create a template for a standard team page. (And other standard pages.)
• Create a script that takes FIRST's website as background, and crawls it in a couple dimensions: year-by-year, and team-by-team. Then output the results to template parameters, and create those pages.
• Get interested people to fill in interesting details (leaning on the old wiki if necessary).
• Outreach to teams to fill in their own information—either directly to the wiki, or via an intermediary who will make editorial changes (this wouldn't replace the ability to edit the wiki; merely offer another option).
• Figure out the plan to sustain and maintain it. Who covers costs? Who administrates?

And one more thing: right now, given the use of FIRST's logo and name, it could be confused with an official FIRST website. It's worth discussing ways of convincing FIRST that there's no need to panic over the necessity of defending their trademarks. I would definitely continue to include a disclaimer on the disclaimers page that clearly identifies the site as being unaffiliated. I'm not convinced that's sufficient, but it's enough to demonstrate good faith.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'd be willing to go on and update things here and there on some of my free time. Updating the list of team numbers for FRC right now ^_^

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'd be happy to help as needed. I am still a sysop on FIRSTwiki last I checked too.
I would also like to note for those interested in contributing to PLEASE take note of the page formats and templates sections of the wiki. Many users in the past have done a good job keeping things clean and organized but on occasion someone comes along and turns their team page into a giant list or a collection of picture and nothing else. Try to keep things clean and layout reasonable. ;)


On the note of possibly creating a new wiki, I would point out that the following should be taken into consideration... much of the content currently on the wiki was added by users who are not necessarily part of their teams anymore, effectively making the wiki a sort of history book of events past as detailed by people who were actually there. Consider that starting from scratch would likely mean loosing much this history for good.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

That's part of the scoping question: is FIRSTWiki supposed to be a record written by the people who were there (e.g. team members) and infused with their perspectives, or an independent and theoretically unbiased accounting based on multiple reputable sources (like Wikipedia)? (It's not a dichotomous question: it can be a bit of each.)

The good part about encouraging team members to write freely is that they'll be encouraged to make lots of edits. The disadvantage is that those edits could easily reflect an incomplete or inaccurate perspective.

As an example, the nature of a typical FIRST competition is that often, it's not clear to the spectators why the referees made a call, or declined to make a call. After the match, people naturally speculate, and theories are developed. If someone writes down that speculation on FIRSTWiki, have they done us a favour, or not? To my mind, if they don't at least attempt to explain that their conclusion was the product of informed speculation rather than firsthand knowledge, I think that FIRSTWiki could become a disseminator of urban legends. While it's valuable to have a record of what people were thinking as these events unfolded, I think a policy of careful framing is in order: without resorting to cumbersome disclaimers, a FIRSTWiki author should make it clear when they're speculating (so that anything else can be interpreted as a reporting the of facts based on the best available evidence).

In that previous example, I'm assuming the best intentions. Unfortunately, there are also malevolent actors. Some will be blatant about it, but the subtle ones are the real trouble. If someone sneaks in a statement that is plausible enough to be true, but which is false, will there be any safeguards? On Wikipedia, such statements are often defeated by the famous ^{[citation needed]} tag—which is basically an exhortation to prove it by pointing to a reputable journalist, academic or other professional who has expressed that opinion. If we don't attempt to incorporate similar safeguards on FIRSTWiki, five years down the road, there will be real questions about whether things really happened as they are documented on the wiki.

Now obviously, we can't point to a journalist or academic for the majority of FIRST-related minutiae: we have only ourselves. So given that limitation, perhaps it would be worthwhile to put more weight in the contributions of trusted authors. It's not as nice as Wikipedia's (theoretical) bright-line rule, but considering the user base and the pool of potential authors, I think it might be a reasonable compromise. Anyone can write content, but when contradicted by a more valued author, the rules of etiquette would dictate that the less valued author's perspective be subordinate or supplanted entirely.

While not without flaws and exceptions, I think articles authored under that framework will tend to be of significantly higher quality than the ones that generally populate the site at present. (In other words, that history would be self-contained and maintaned in a read-only form—but it would be isolated because it's very hard to assume anything about the motivations of any particular author, given the lack of content and scope specifications. Recent stuff—which wouldn't be encumbered by the GFDL licence contamination issues—could be controlled more finely by vigilant users.)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I agree with Ryan - I think it's a great place to find lots of information on all the FIRST teams. It doesn't take much effort, and the more teams that update their pages, the more useful the wiki can be. I've been working on my team page for about 2 days now, mostly just reorganizing and rewriting, but I hope we can get other teams to do the same! :)

Also, I think the articles should be encyclopedia-style, offering a factual summary, history, and awards/achievements and whatever else written in the third person.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Forgive me for playing fast-and-loose with the licensing issues, but let me put my business hat on:

- I don't think too many contributors care that their original submissions to FIRSTWiki were under GFDL, or care about the ramifications of moving the wiki to a new/updated wiki operating under CC-BY-SA

I propose that:

- If you update the wiki, update the license to CC-BY-SA moving forward, and keep all the existing content, even though it was originally created under GFDL

- If you start a new wiki, use a CC-BY-SA license, and copy all the old wiki content over, even though it was originally created under GFDL

I know that:

- What I propose above isn't a perfect solution
- Most original contributors will be fine with the license change
- Any original contributors can request to have their content removed if they aren't fine with it

The current content on FIRSTWiki is valuable, and I'd estimate the vast majority of original contributors would give consent to a license change if asked. Is it worth it to track them all down and ask for consent? No. Is it worth re-developing all the original content to work around the license change? No. FIRSTWiki is already pressed for resources, and we want this fresh effort concentrating on improving content.

Let FIRSTwikiers focus their efforts on that, and we can deal with the *very* few expected licensing issues by simply removing the content after the fact.

...business hat off...