Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?

[Hallry]

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.

[ATH1RSTYM00SE]

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

[safetycap'n111]

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.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by safetycap'n111

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.

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

[StevenB]

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 It was an excellent source of information when I was a high school student, but it's fallen out of date rather rapidly.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.

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by StevenB

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 It was an excellent source of information when I was a high school student, but it's fallen out of date rather rapidly.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.

I am up for contributing.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by StevenB

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.

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

[Chris is me]

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.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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.

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?

[Arefin Bari]

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.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

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.

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

[akoscielski3]

I'm Updating our page right now during clas

[Tristan Lall]

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!)

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

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!)

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.

[KeatonM]

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.