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

[Marc Verdiell]

I am relatively new here but joining this mailing list has helped me almost immediately. Thank you Jay and others for doing this and contributing a professional grade infrastructure. The wiki is an idea, but an alternative that I wish would exist is a repository for restoration logs. Something that you could follow and comment on, and that allows attachment of slightly richer media to posts (photos, docs) in the context of someone's specific restoration project. You learn so much from these. I know people already do it individually, but not in a centralized searchable place (you have to chance upon them), and often in an annoying reverse chronology "blog" format that's ill adapted for this usage. Or a museum style static website that does not relate the problem solving path (including things that fail) that a restoration is. In other "build oriented" groups I belong to, we do this very successfully by encouraging individual build log threads in a Forum format. That's in addition to a catch-all "string of consciousness" mailing list like this one. Is that anything that could be considered? 
Marc


> Message: 21
> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:42:34 -0600
> From: "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org>
> To: "'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'"
>    <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Knowledge Base (was RE: Restoration technique [Was: Re: Bay
>    Area: IBM 4341 and HP3000]
> Message-ID: <004a01d0303a$a11eefa0$e35ccee0$@classiccmp.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="us-ascii"
> 
> 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