Knowledge Base (was RE: Restoration technique [Was: Re: Bay Area: IBM 4341 and HP3000]

[Jay West]

So.. about this "knowledgebase" of restoration techniques.

Apparently new folks don't know and some older listmembers don't remember...

We did start a "wiki" for people to post restoration tips, repair tips, etc.
This was done about 8 years ago. When I first brought up the idea there was
a lot of discussion on the list as to if it was a good idea or not. Many
people had very good thoughts as to why it would be wonderful, and many
other people had equally good thoughts as to why it would not be wonderful.

In any case, I set it up. We found that there was an initial flurry of
posting, and then virtually nothing. Statistics showed it was not used very
much at all. There were a handful of issues as I recall (not my
implementation of it, but in the general idea of a
repair/troubleshooting/restoration "wiki"). I only remember one of them at
the moment... and that was that someone would post an article without really
having detailed expertise in that given area and then someone that DID have
expertise in that area would (for lack of a better term) contramand that
article or write a separate one with conflicting info which made it hard for
a novice to really sift through the information. In short, everyone has an
opinion and at times the articles directly conflicted with another and
someone seeking knowledge wouldn't know who to believe.

That being said, if people really want to give this another try, I would be
happy to turn on the old classiccmp knowledge base (I'm 99% sure it's stored
but just not turned on), or I could easily have one of my support staff dump
a wiki installation to a folder there (under classiccmp) and we could give
it a try again. I'm all for it, but for it to be successful - it has to be
due to contribution/acceptance by the membership at large. My proclivity at
this point would be to install a new wiki and then pull articles already
posted in the old "wiki" into it.

And yes, if it's to be in the classiccmp.org domain, I'd have to host it. I
have not yet seen a scenario where we'd be willing to point an a-record
off-site (but that's not to say some future situation might get a different
response).

Best,

J