Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Yesterday, me and my co-CEO for the 2011-2012 school year spent some time cleaning up and updating our team's page on the unofficial FIRST wiki (found here: http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/1676). In doing so, I realized that it has been long since the website itself has been last updated, and it is rarely used by many teams anymore. I was thinking, why don't we revive the dieing wiki? It is very convenient and easy to search for teams on the wiki and find information about them, and I think that if more effort is put into it, then it can become a thriving source of knowledge. ::rtm::

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

If you want a summer project ryan, you could find every teams website, do some research and fill it in yourself :)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

getting One person to do all of the work should not be the way to do it. It would Probably be better to nominate one person from each team to update the page. It would probably take 2-3 hours per tEam.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

That's what I was thinking of, but would many teams be interested in doing such?

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I would love to see FIRSTWiki revived. It was an excellent source of information when I was a high school student, but it's fallen out of date rather rapidly. I have some experience with MediaWiki and would be happy to help upgrade it or do other administrative stuff if that's necessary.

Here was my idea - each week we have a new "page of the week" or "topic of the week" where everyone contributes to a specific group of pages. This might cause editing conflicts if too many people edit the page at once, but I think it would help focus our energy and efforts on creating a small (but growing) set of high-quality pages which would be useful to the community.
For team pages, we need a couple of good samples or templates for everyone to follow.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I am up for contributing.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

That sounds like a great idea, I think that could definitely happen.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

This train of thought comes up every once in awhile. I think the real beat way for it to take off would be for some leadership to step up and outline some articles that need to be created or rewritten. a lot would be willing to help but might not know where to start.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'm pretty experienced with wiki code; I'd step up to start writing/fixing up a few articles. But yeah, I think that a lot of people wouldn't know where to begin, maybe an outline should be created for what has to be done in order?

And also, would anyone else from other teams want to help as well?

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I just went onto FIRSTwiki and checked our team page. I updated some stuff in the beginning of the season but there are a lot of things that needs to be updated. I will do my best at updating team 108's page in the next few weeks.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Okay, thank you very much! I am currently going through the wiki's page logs and adding the template for deletion to spam pages. ;)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'm Updating our page right now during clas :P

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I think there are a few structural changes that ought to be made to FIRSTWiki, in order to make it more comfortable to manage:

1. Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.16.5 (currently at 1.6.5).
2. Install some of the interesting MediaWiki extensions, like the publish-to-PDF-book tool.
3. Figure out the copyright and licencing policy. There's no need to be as complicated as Wikimedia's wikis, but there might be advantages to encouraging users to upload the majority of things to Wikimedia Commons, while copyrighted emblems and insignia stay hosted locally, where they can be marked not for re-use. (On one hand, it reduces the control that the uploader and FIRSTWiki exert over the images—but on the other hand, it encourages broad-based exposure of the content, which is probably a net plus.)
4. The wiki is licenced under GFDL 1.2. That's a big pain, because it forces redistributors to provide a copy of the licence with the derivative work—not so bad for a licence dedicated to books, but inconvenient for short excerpts. Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 is a better alternative. (Unfortunately, FIRSTWiki missed the deadline to convert from GFDL 1.2 to CC-BY-SA 3.0; for complicated reasons, that option is no longer available, without the consent of all past authors whose work would be built upon.) Consider requiring all new content to be dual-licenced like Wikipedia does: both GFDL and CC-BY-SA.
5. Borrow the better parts of Wikipedia's style guides, and some useful templates. (They really are the best resource for wiki-based formatting, despite all the internal squabbling that goes on there.)
6. Since the fundamental unit of this site is a team's page, establish specific stylistic guidelines for that, to allow a clean, consistent appearance.
7. Have enough administrators active so that the wiki doesn't go dormant.
8. Allow admins to run scripts that chew up and destroy spam pages. (Back it up with a policy allowing deletion on sight of such pages. Right now, the deletion tag probably won't do anything, because nobody/nothing is looking for it!)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I would volunteer to be an admin (I would love to be), I spent my lunch today putting delete templates on all of the spam pages, just look at the recent changes! ;). I could also help with formatting and guidelines, I have experience with wikis from Wikipedia and Bulbapedia. I'm not that familiar with all the different license, however, but I can research and read up on them.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I would be happy to help

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

FIRSTWiki would be a useful resource, however, as was stated, it hasn't been updated!

I'd love to help volunteer with FIRSTWiki, especially if I'm not the only one, haha.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Exactly why I created this thread. :D. Thanks for offering your help!

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

This is a pain in the $@#$@#$@#, so I'd think honestly at this point it would be easier to start a new wiki (keep the old content for reference), with all contributions under CC-BY-SA. Articles can't be copied over from the old wiki but they could be used as reference when writing new ones.

Internal squabbling? In a large project? Perish the thought!

Wikipedia (and Meta-Wiki) have very useful guides, templates, and tools.

A large custom template substituted into all team pages as the page is created would be helpful.

Hey, I have some experience! I could do that.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

461 has kept up with their page pretty well. We essentially took everything on our website, and copied and pasted nicely with some wiki formatting, of course. If you click edit, you can see the code for it. This should serve as a decent template for making a page.
Hope this helps,
-Duke461

P.S. To the OP (or any whom it may concern), i am willing to help make other teams pages better, be an admin, or do whatever you need. PM me if you do.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I have already emailed Max (who runs the site) asking for his help and seeing if he would give a few people (including myself) admin powers to further update and clean out the wiki. ;)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Well I'm on board to help out.

I've only dabbled in wiki editing, so although I could conquer a page or two, I am in no way qualified to be an admin or organize it (and it seems the OP has that under control).

Let me know where you need work-force and I am glad to go help out.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Aha! This makes me excited. Last year, I believe, some of us (myself and Tanner from 1261) here on CD tried to get revive it, but it was short lived.

I will be more then willing to help out clearing spam, and doing general admin work. Although, the type of knowledge I can contribute to actual articles is limited since I've been out of FIRST long enough to where my concrete knowledge has become more like sand.

EDIT: thread from last year if anyone is interested: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ight=firstwiki

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I try to keep my team's page semi-updated. I could help get some info on team down south in our region.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Sounds great! I'd love to help! This could be a fun summer project! As previously stated, maybe a new wiki entirely could be made. The way the current one is set up, it seems to just have a team name, team logo, some robots, and team results in different years. Maybe we could have the option to link pages to team websites. That would be way easier if a team had a lot on their team website, and not enough time to copy it over. As for the rest of the site, there should be pages with tutorials, sponsors, an area where teams discuss good/bad ideas, and what worked/didn't work. Pages with lists of "most valuable tool", "best drivetrain design", etc. Like resource pages that teams could learn from, written by other teams.

Just my ideas.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

After thinking about updating my team's wiki page, I decided to start doing so. (It hasn't been updated since our rookie year)

While I was adding links to the awards' wiki pages, I noticed how outdated some of the awards/regional pages were.

Sounds like a lot of work, but I'll be willing to help update the wiki. :)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Some team pages on the wiki do of links to their official websites, if they use a certain template (which we could make uniform), look at my team's for example: http://firstwiki.net/index.php/1676.
And in that second part, you basically just described Chief Delphi ;). I think all the discussion and stuff like that should stay here, this is a forum after all. I feel like the wiki should be just info about teams and FIRST and such, not discussion. (Also, just me $0.02, but I feel like we should just revive this wiki instead of starting a whole entire new one, why reinvent the wheel?)

I noticed that too, it's going to take some real time and effort to revise those pages and create some new ones, but still, isn't that easier than forming a completely brand new wiki?

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I would love to help with this! But even more than having it as a simple database of teams, it would be nice to have interesting things like motor information (and even qualitiative stuff, like when to use which motor), as well as things like "how to wire a robot" style.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Yes, definitely. There's like a million things on the wiki already, starting over would take up a lot of time and work. I've already started editing simple things I know

By the way, does anyone have the power or know-how to change something in the Regional Index? The St. Louis Regional (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/St._Louis_Regional) is definitely not in the Southeast. I already edited the Index of Regionals (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/Index_of_Regionals) and moved the St. Louis Regional to the midwest where it should be.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

You have to first go to the index of regionals page, and then edit it.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I did, that's why I'm confused.

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...

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I would be very happy to help. I have 6 years of experience editing Wikipedia and I know how to run MediaWiki.

If you are an admin of FIRSTWiki, it would be awesome if you could PM me and give me a task to do! FIRSTWIki can be a strong resource to the community and I want contribute to that.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Also, to any admins out there, could you possibly get in touch with Max to see if he would make any other users admins? I think it would be useful for some people (such as me and others who volunteered to be) to become admins to help clean up the site, such as deleting pages and the like.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I think to make this easier on all involved I suggest that people who want to become admins (and can seriously take on the active role of an admin, and dedicate the time to it) go the Nominations for Adminship page and put your name down.

Also, I think we will need at least one other person to become a bureaucrat, since it appears (from my perpective at least) that Max isn't involved much anymore.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I have nominated myself to become a bureaucrat since I seem to be the one 'leading the charge' here, and am also very familiar with using wiki's, and have much leadership experience. ::safety::

(Also, I again attempted at contacting Max, this time to see if he could promote users to administrators, and in my case, bureaucrats)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Update: I have been in contact with Max, and for the moment he has made myself and another user, Boydean, sysops. He is up for updating the wiki, but stated that one large task which needs to be done is to update the software behind the MediaWiki installation to an up to date version (the current version installed is 5 years old) Is anyone with experience in Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL wanting to help us update the software?

In the mean time, let's get editing! When I have free time this weekend, I will make an outline of what needs to be done, in chronological order.

Also, a big thanks to everyone offering their support! :D

Sincerely,
Ryan Hall.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

What are the potential consequences of disregarding the license policy? I can't think of a way that this license policy could protect anyone from harm. Right now I don't see any reason to lose sleep over this, but I am willing to be enlightened.

If the license issue is a real issue, then I would advocate starting a new wiki.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

As noted above, there's no practical likelihood of legal action. (Yes, it's probably civil copyright infringement—but who would sue?) However, because the content would be GFDL-contaminated, you wouldn't be able to adapt or re-use it on sites like Wikipedia where copyright is rigourously enforced.

The whole Wikipedia thing revolves around the idea that FIRSTWiki's better articles could serve as the basis for a Wikipedia treatment of the subject—but since Wikipedia won't let you cite another wiki, only adapt or import its content under licence, it's worth paying attention to the licence terms. Ignoring the licence basically closes that door for future use of all existing articles.

In terms of harm, the harm is merely material (in that someone is being deprived of a copyright that they did not assign), however it isn't exactly a best practice or a good example to set. Though my feelings on the matter are complicated, I would say that it's one thing to break the law out of expediency on your own behalf or out of principle (those can be relatively easy to justify, under some circumstances), it's a different matter to subject all future editors to the ramifications of your choice. (Once they find out, they're confronted with the choice: become complicit in the infringement, or curtail their contributions.)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

By the way: a few other Wikipedia-related thoughts.

Wikipedia normally prefers that article editors be somewhat distant from their subjects (to avoid bias). That's why incubating articles in FIRSTWiki is ideal. Using the FIRSTWiki history, it can be demonstrated that multiple independent users (i.e. people from other teams) contributed—so there's no concern that it's a mere promotional piece written by a team member. At that point, it's basically analogous to a subject matter expert writing about another researcher's published work—fair game on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia (and Wikimedia Commons) greatly prefer that images not be (exclusively) GFDL-licenced. Why? Because the GFDL makes you attach a copy of the licence—which is a ridiculous imposition for most ordinary illustrative uses. Right now, FIRSTWiki's images appear to be GFDL-contaminated. Irrespective of any decision on whether to ignore GFDL, FIRSTWiki should take steps to suggest that users licence any new images under CC-BY-SA or CC0 (public domain). In fact, an even better solution would be to have them upload to Wikimedia Commons under one of those licences—that will greatly facilitate re-use. (Only images ineligible for Wikimedia Commons would be uploaded locally.)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I think we might be seriously over-thinking this licensing "issue". I can just about guarantee that more than 90% of the editors of FIRSTwiki don't (or didn't) even know there IS a license, let alone care about it changing. I also have yet to see any of the content uploaded to FIRSTwiki put on ANY sort of license. Why? Probably because the people taking the pictures, or making the logos don't care if they're licensed or not.

I don't mean to come off as a bit harsh, but it seems like a big deal is being made about an issue that has never in the history of FIRSTwiki been and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't need to be, a big deal. I understand why having a license on the site is a good thing, but lets not get stuck lawyering about the topic and forget what the important thing is here - the content.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

A few people already noticed this and volunteered (unionylibertad and myself) ;)
Tristan has articulated this point particularly well: if we do a good job other groups or projects may want to use the content - the most prominent and likely example being Wikipedia. The problem is that all content imported into Wikipedia must be under CC-BY-SA, not GFDL.

The problem isn't about whether the contributors care what happens with their work; the problem is how the work can be used by others. I don't want to care about the GFDL or CC-BY-SA, or any other legal shenanigans. As long as I can read about teams and write about motors, I'm happy. But other people do care, and for good reason. Wikipedia is trying very hard to become a respectable source and not violate copyright law, and they have to pay careful attention to where content comes from. As much as I'd like to, I don't think we should just fake or fudge the license; that will only cause problems down the road.

WikiTravel's discussion of the topic is useful to get a simple overview of the issue and its implications: Why Wikitravel isn't GFDL.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

My friend and I have researched how to do it and will hopefully be able to update the site's software this weekend.

I will also talk to Max about the licensing issue.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

im hoping the site will become a huge resource ...the concept is great, esp since FIRST has such a large and open community :)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I am trying to add new competitions to FIRST wiki, but I have no idea how to create a new page. Could anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

To create a new page, simply enter the desired name of the page into the search bar. If there is no page with said name currently, you will be brought to a page showing that there are no matches, which will also have a link to create the new page. Simply click that link, and follow the formatting used for other competition pages, such as for the New York City Regional in 2011.

If you have any further questions, feel free to PM me. :)

Sincerely,
Ryan Hall

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

I'm willing to write articles or do some copying editing if there is a specific articles needing writing to help with the overhaul.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

It would be useful if we could use the parts where you can hide a list of things and then expand it, that way people don't have to scroll down a page for a whole hour if they don't want to

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

^mediawiki needs to be updated before collapsible tables and navframes can work. that'll probably come shortly, so hang in there! :)

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

We're working on getting everything organized! It'll be done soon, i promise! :D

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

If you ever need a hand pm me, i would be glad to help!
I'm usually on at least twice a week.

Re: Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?
 

Please keep all discussion regarding this on the new thread about it.