Umbrella Wiki

[elil]

In my time at Team 1719, I've seen people re-learn a lot of lessons: everything from what to pack for a competition to the math needed to figure out a gear ratio. This summer, our team focused on building institutional knowledge and training new members - and a big part of this was creating our Wikipedia like website, the Umbrella Wiki. You can check it out here. (We haven't bought a domain name, so that's why the URL is just a number)

Our next step in building this site is to create more "robot bio" pages - descriptions of what went right and wrong during a single build season. In the past, a discussion of "lessons learned" has been instrumental in avoiding those pitfalls the next year. We hope that by writing down what we've learned, we can do an even better job incorporating these lessons into our design process.

You can find the robot bios we've done so far under the "Team History" section. We'd love it if other teams added their own robot bios - Shoot me a PM if you'd like to have permission to edit.

[BumblingBuilder]

I really like it. Our team has been planning to make a wiki of sorts of our own, but has had to postpone working on it out not having enough time to devote to it.
But I do really like these things and have pushed for our team to do things like it. Since every team is different, every team has different problems to overcome and different things on their schedule and different people they communicate with. You can't always go to another team's resource and perfectly emulate it, especially logistical things. To have solidified, written resources that are specially made for your specific team can be very beneficial to future members.

[Bkeeneykid]

It's awesome to see FIRST teams trying to spread their own knowledge that they've accumulated over the years in things like this. There's one problem, once every team has a wiki, you only have google to find what you need, and even that's not great at finding some of the more obscure FRC wikis. To solve this, we have the FIRST Wiki. Most of these pages would work fantastically as just a copy and paste job to them. You can put a link to your own wiki in the bottom of the page. If you don't care to add them there, I'd be happy to take the time to do it either. All you need is a github account. You can also add you team's page there as well.

Some stuff you shouldn't move over and makes more sense for your own wiki, like the summaries of robots and robot mechanisms, but the "lessons learned" can be include in the respective page for it.

Also, that pixy mount looks amazing. We have at least a half dozen of those sitting around, and that looks like an amazing use for them.

[aaronjeline]

If the time requirement is due to technical reasons, the one we're running has turned out to be really low maintenance. Digital Ocean has a mediawiki pre-built image you can launch, and once you set up automatic updates 99% of issues have taken care of themselves.