FIRSTwiki: Why haven't you helped out?

FIRST General Forum
1

I’m interested to get a feeling of what the general CD community thinks of FIRSTwiki . A promising project – or a no good fringe movement? The idea is so that the wiki can improve, and hopefully come to be a place of reference for things that CD isn’t appropriate for.

If you have any insightful comments, by all means reply! Tell the world what you think of the wiki, whether you’ve been there and what your first impressions were. Your help is most appreciated.

2
  1. That’s me. (aka the right answer)
  2. Contribute and make it less ameurish (and correct my misspellings :wink: )
  3. ok, this works this week, w/ finals wrapping up.
  4. Go post a Dave sighting.
    1. Find article needing revision. 2. hit the edit link. 3. revise. 4. save.
  6. What more is there? :confused:

In short: there isn’t really a good excuse. Go post something!

3

Been there, looks good, couldn’t figure out how to update our team info. I am not the best at some of these things though so it may just be me. It would be good to have topics and stuff sorted for easier reference. I think this could be a big asset.

4

I love the FIRSTwiki. Granted, I’m just learning various things, but “I have contributed, you insensitive clod!” :slight_smile:

I hope others can answer that soon… :slight_smile:

5

/me calls mtrawls an insensitive clod.

/me hopes that he doesn’t give me negative reps for saying that, since he DID ask for it! :smiley:

6

Updating team info:

  1. Register/login/do both :slight_smile: (Do that by visiting here.)
  2. Go to your team page (Main Page - FIRSTwiki*
    , where xxxx is your team number.)
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page
  4. Click the little button that says “Edit this page”
  5. Edit away. You might want to learn some basic wiki formating commands, but for now you could just put it in there. :slight_smile:
7

I chose “other”. I’m not up on the commands needed to post. I did add to my teams page a little but I looked at other pages to see how they did the commands.
Sooner or later I’ll learn. :slight_smile:

8

There are 2 big ones. [This]] Links to another article. [http://www.chiefdelphi.com This] links to your favorite website on the face of this earth.

9

I have never heard of FIRSTwiki… Sounds interesting though… What’s it all about?

10

FIRSTwiki is a collaborative project, recently started, designed to be a source for all things related to FIRST (well, most of them, anyway). Visit the site and glance around to get the idea. A wiki, if you haven’t heard of one before, basically just means that it’s open content – you or anybody else can go to the site and start adding content to your heart’s content. Like Chiefdelphi, the FIRSTwiki depends upon the donation of time by the FIRST community to make it a valuable resource. If you go to the site and can’t figure it out, please tell us (currently our help infrastructure isn’t so hot, so we’re trying to revamp the whole thing … so input is definately good).

11

Expect me to start off on that as soon as I get done with stupid exams:p

12

Brandon moved our link to #2, right after the one to the FIRST site. On the main page, the first box is the one for newbies. It has links to Wikipedia’s site (What is a wiki and the skeptics’ article), as well as a link to the FIRSTwiki help pages (horrible as they are).

13

Well now that the poll has a couple of votes, I see two important points.

  1. Votes for “other” are probably people who haven’t even heard of it or don’t know what it is.
  2. Though not as big as I expected, there is still a significant amount of people say it is “too confusing”. We are obviously working on keeping it simple and making the help pages helpful, but I think one of the most important things we can do is keep deeplinking directly to edit commands or pages themselves wherever possible. I imagine after someone has made his or her first or edit, it is unlikely that they will quit.
14

i have a question for the people incharge of this wiki…i have a bunch of articals/papers that have been written over the years by tons of different people. some are whitepapers, some come from other sources. first how would i post these as articals to the wiki and would you want me to. there are alot of things out there in other locations and i am wondering if you want to combine all of these resources on the wiki or just leave them in their original place on the web

15

Wherever possible, we want content to be stored in FIRSTwiki. This means anything that someone is willing to put on FIRSTwiki and have it be edited freely should be added. If you really have no idea at all how to incorporate them into FIRSTwiki, I suggest posting some URLs on FIRSTwiki, probably in http://www.firstwiki.org/index.php/FIRSTwiki:Village_pump and let more experienced people decide how it should be incorporated. But, I recommend you try to do whatever you can yourself. Pages can always be moved or deleted. Remeber, we want all content possible stored in FIRSTwiki, so use http://www.firstwiki.org/index.php/special:upload to upload media (images or sounds).

16

And for those unfamiliar with what possible means in this context … all content which you have the authority to release under the GFDL. If this seems a bit strange, check out wikipedia:Copyrights. /end helpful lawyer-type advice.

17

Basically, if you don’t mind the work being changed and you don’t mind it being freely posted elsewhere with a notice that it was copied from FIRSTwiki, then put it on FIRSTwiki.

18

can i put papers and such corisponding to the subjuect of the links on there? i’m just trying to get a feel for waht to post, i would like to help get this thing going though, it seems like the ideal archive for information.

19

Yes. If I understand you. If you see a link that is red, it means that page does not yet exist, but that we would like someone to create it. If you have some information corresponding to another link that does exist, you are free to edit that page and add any additional information you would like.

If you don’t know if you should post the content, it doesn’t hurt to put it up there (within reason, of course), and on the talk page ask everyone there if they think it is appropriate. Remember, be bold in updating pages.

So far as topics, we would like to cover the spectrum of FIRST related material. We want pages on programming the FRC, creating interrupts and other howto guides … all the way to what it means to fundraise and possible ideas, to spirit and all sorts of other goodness. Or if you have some insight on Dean Kamen, or some other FIRST celebrity, put it there. Most anything FIRST related is appropriate …

20

I’m a bit worried about about the fact that the GFDL is being used, although I don’t think it will be a big issue in the long run.

The main issue is invariant sections. I could write a 2 sentance page about programming and include an invariant section in which I claim that all I learned about programming was from my dog. I could then go on for 3 screens about my dog.

Because it is marked as an invariant section, it couldn’t be removed or edited, even if my contribution to the page was later deleted.