What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[gblake]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

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An interesting aspect to point out about the community is that FIRST doesn't have a decent wikia (which I find hilarious). With a community this large you think someone would have thrown together a wikia for FIRST. Most video game communities come together and get a solid reference point and factual database done for a video game in like a year. Yet somehow nobody has spearheaded a top level FIRST wikia where we centralize useful information taking some of the burden off of FIRST to distribute said information...

LOLz about game communities doing the game developers' work for them.

Folks my age find it hilarious that game vendors have trained their players to document how to play their games instead of those vendors paying their own staffs to write and distribute decent manuals with the games.

I know the typical wikia can contain discussions, strategies, hints, and other info that might not go into a vendor's game manual, but what current players let vendors get away with is sometimes just absurd.

Maybe writing the wikia info is part of the fun???

Regardless, back to FIRST, two thoughts come to mind.

1) You said communities create/write wikias. So, shouldn't the part of the community that wants one (you?) (I don't think I need one, so don't look at me) be beavering away at developing one? Does HQ maybe need to kick things off by renting a server computer and moderating what gets put into it?

2) What info do you want to see in this wikia, that isn't already in the annual game manual, or in CD, or in the TBA site, or in ...? Will all of those voluntarily merge into the wikia, or will large sections of the wikia mostly contain lots of links to outside sources?

Remember that FIRST's games and other activities are messy real-world things with unpredictable, chaotic influences, evolution, and outcomes. That is very different from the closed, highly-constrained worlds of computer games. Beyond the game manual info, and a limited amount of info about standard parts, and red tape, you move from facts to highly-subjective opinions very fast in FRC, FVC, and the FLLs.