WikiLEC

[GeoffSmith]

Seloc have an interesting area for collating useful information based on Wikipedia (you need to be a member to log in).

After searching, without success, for Neil's wastegate porting thread, is there any chance we could do something similar?

Geoff

Edit: Something similar is here.

[donsladek]

Geoff,

I looked at this site, and the entry "Geoff" is defined "delete"!




Don

[F1 LOTUS]

Seloc have an interesting area for collating useful information based on Wikipedia (you need to be a member to log in).

After searching, without success, for Neil's wastegate porting thread, is there any chance we could do something similar?

Geoff

Perhaps? I don't know how this works though
I was thinking along the lines of how individuals are able to edit their own posts, and that maybe there's a 'permissions' function that could allow all 'members' to edit a post (add a component weight in this case)?
One answer may be to have people PM details to the threads' owner so just one person updates the 'part weights' post???

[Enright]

After searching, without success, for Neil's wastegate porting thread, is there any chance we could do something similar?

Nice idea.
The write-up that I did was almost a case of a thread hijack - you'd have been proud of it! It was in the Stiffy thread from here onwards - hope it helps.
I meant to collate all the posts together and put them in their own dedicated thread, but with other things on my mind I just never quite got round to it.

Speaking of which, the other things have now just about all come together:
I've got lots of free headlight pod fasteners in a box for distribution at Donington,
The stickers will be ready to pick up today,
I have about 10 photocopies of gasket sets,
The cylinder head, cam cover and plenum chamber are glittering and ready for display,
The stall is nearly fully manned...
There. Has that taken us far enough off topic?

[al]

Seloc have an interesting area for collating useful information based on Wikipedia (you need to be a member to log in).

After searching, without success, for Neil's wastegate porting thread, is there any chance we could do something similar?

Geoff

I think this is a fantastic idea, I've used wikis for quite some time for this sort of thing and I reckon it'd really complement what we already have here at LEC.

Of course I'd be happy to host and help maintain it too.

[GeoffSmith]

Al,

I was beginning to give up hope on this one but well spotted - it's good to see that LEC is rich with talents.

Is there any chance you could give us a brief rundown on what is required to set something up and what is involved in submitting information etc. and maintaining/updating?

Mr. Wiki contacted me and suggested we could go on the general Lotus area but I think it would make more sense to have a dedicated LEC one. He may be able to offer help and/or advice however and it wouldn't hurt to touch base with him. LEC admin obviously need to be involved as well.

Geoff

[Liz]

If you have a suggestion for the admins and want them consider something, it may be an idea to actually contact them so they see what you want instead of trying to rally support for something they may not be interested in.

[GeoffSmith]

Liz,

I posted about this some time ago to see if there was any interest. The knowledge base could be hosted anywhere and the SELOC wiki expert suggested we could add to theirs. I consider that LEC is the most sensible place for any such data however and now we have an internal member who would be able to assist and advise. There is a profusion of very useful information on this forum but it is very difficult to find; the Wiki format would hopefully provide owners with peer reviewed information that is a lot easier to find. Wiki seems much better than the current situation where a lot of technical advice is repeated over and over.

My intention was to gauge what people thought about such a scheme and to try to find out what was involved in starting it up and maintaining it. You and Tony obviously give your time freely and it is greatly appreciated; if it is not feasable (for whatever reason) to incorporate such a database within LEC, then it could always be started as a seperate entity provided sufficient members were committed to contributing and assisting.

I think that it is more important to ensure that there is sufficient interest and commitment in setting up and maintaining the knowledge aspects first and then to decide how and where.

I apologise if I have upset you , but my intention is to try to get the best technical tools for Elan owners.

Geoff

[Liz]

Never mind. Do whatever you want...

[TStevens]

Liz and I spent a lot of time rebuilding the site, and collating information together that was stored on various other sites due to similar kinds of offers in the past, which mean that a lot of LEC information wasn't held on LEC, and as such a lot has also been lost due to sites closing down.

As Liz said contacting the site admins with ideas you have is the best way forward, theres no point feeling out interest for something the admins might have good reasons for not doing.

Myself and Liz have always said that we will convert any writeups into content pages, the forthcoming content has been very very few and far between.

[al]

Myself and Liz have always said that we will convert any writeups into content pages, the forthcoming content has been very very few and far between.

it may be that people are reluctant to ask for more effort and time than you already generously put in, even if you offer it willingly it still seems like an imposition.

With the wiki this problem goes away since rather than having to enter the same information twice it just gets typed up once and it's ready to go, no need to have someone do extra work to convert to html etc.

Netcraft says that LEC is hosted on a linux box at dreamhost, it seems that they use a wiki for customer support, so it might be that they can roll out a wiki to this box too as part of the account, otherwise it should be easy to install one on the same machine I'd have thought (mediawiki perhaps ?).

If all else fails then I have a BSD box in telehouse which could support this, and with help from LEC's admins we could easily have a vhost on this box appear as wiki.lotuselancentral.com.

Liz and I spent a lot of time rebuilding the site, and collating information together that was stored on various other sites due to similar kinds of offers in the past, which mean that a lot of LEC information wasn't held on LEC, and as such a lot has also been lost due to sites closing down.

If it's not possible for this to be hosted on the LEC server for whatever reason, we could arrange for backups to go between these two boxes, plus whatever other arrangements you already have in place for backing up LEC.com ?

Anyways, I don't want to cause any problems, I've just seen wikis work well in the past for various jobs and I can see the OP's point. The community would always be centered around this forum, and the wiki would just be a more convenient place to hold writeups and such.

just my 2p.

[TStevens]

Hi Al.

I don't think it's reluctance to ask, some write ups have been sent to us to add, and we also took the time to convert over all of the old write ups that were on the site before we undertook the task of updating and modernising.

The main aim of the LEC rebuild was to actually bring back home a lot of resources that had been outsourced, so if we were to add to LEC we would want to keep it within the LEC domain and within the control of LEC itself, offers of help and hosting are always welcome however for the hosting side of things we have it covered. You're right this site is hosted on a debain box at dreamhost and have the ability to install a Wiki. However we feel a Wiki might not be appropriate for this community.

As ever with ideas and comments we would prefer that individuals contact the admin team directly to discuss their ideas as there can be very good reasons for not wanting these, gauging interest and support for ideas is really the admin teams job as they are the ones that would invariably have to at least oversee or undertake the work.

I believe Liz is drawing up a list of Cons for the use of a Wiki so I won't double up on them. But one thing LEC aims to do is give safe and reliable help to our members. The credibility of items in a Wiki can be easily affected by a few members thinking it's fun to change things.

What works for other sites might not necessarily work for LEC. We have a small active userbase generally from the older generations most of whom will freely admit are not up on this new fangled intarweb thingymayjobby. Until recently LEC didn't actually have many photographs in the photo gallery due to lack of knowledge.

I hope that helps with understanding our angle on this one, It's not an out and out no but there are some strong reasons for not jumping at the idea, and the pros and cons are being discussed by the admin team and those that have to do the work and to oversee it. We had similar recently regarding phpbb 'mods' whilst we appreciate members enthusiasm, trawling through the mod database to find something that fits their needs, doesn't always fit in with other things we have running behind the scenes.

[Liz]

There are a few things that should be considered, I think:

1. Adding new stuff always takes time, someone would need to do it and preferably make it look to fit the rest of the site if it were to be added to LEC (that would be me, probably...).

2. Wikipedia itself is hardly ever used as recommendation for valid sources. Because anyone can basically add whatever they want. The information may well not be reliable, or at least not considered reliable by all users.

3. Write ups for things that could potentially damage your car, if not done properly etc would have to be checked over. Anyone with harmful intentions could post things that would do more harm than good to your car. If this is present in the write ups, then LEC would easily be held responsible, which is something I very much doubt the site owner(s) would appreciate. Although we have a disclaimer it would at least make us appear irresponsible and other articles would be doubted. The members' perception of how reliable the information is could easily drop.

4. In order to prevent those things, it would have to be heavily moderated. The wiki lacks the ability to discuss, and in a forum questions could be asked as well. If it were to be heavily moderated and all parts read through before made public, someone could end up spending a lot of time doing this. It is a big commitment. People could end up making amendments constantly.

5. Because LEC is open to all members (not locked as some other sites), it would be possible for people to join for the sole purpose of causing problems and know instantly where to go to start this.

6. All write ups we already have would then need to be converted to the wiki.

7. As seen on the forum, there are plenty of digressions. This would be very unfortunate for a wiki. Although it may be harmless, adding personal comments etc it may be another way of bringing the information's credibility down.

8. There may not be a whole lot of contributions, as well as a lot of people would still be asking the same questions in the forum.

[Liz]

I believe Liz is drawing up a list of Cons for the use of a Wiki

I wrote considerations... the pros and cons are for others to determine, although it is more con-related as pros have already been put forward

[al]

There are a few things that should be considered, I think:

These are some good points, and I'll throw in my take on them below.
But again, I'm just an enthusiastic supporter of the OP's suggestion, I think
that the more input from everyone else the better.

1. Adding new stuff always takes time, someone would need to do it and preferably make it look to fit the rest of the site if it were to be added to LEC (that would be me, probably...).

Right, so I think that what's important is the content, and that's where the community would contribute, making it fit the rest of the site is also important and ideally that'd come down to crafting some clever CSS which could be applied to the wiki leaving the contributers to concentrate on the content.

2. Wikipedia itself is hardly ever used as recommendation for valid sources. Because anyone can basically add whatever they want. The information may well not be reliable, or at least not considered reliable by all users.

ok, but wikipedia isn't the only example of the use of a wiki, and to be fair wikipedia does offer something of a bigger target for abuse than LEC, but I guess I wonder if it's any worse than we already have using the forum for this information; if some random person decides to pitch up and post bad info on a wiki, it can be fixed up by someone who cares and that info will not appear in future search results, whereas in a forum that post will remain including some pages of discussion about it.

3. Write ups for things that could potentially damage your car, if not done properly etc would have to be checked over. Anyone with harmful intentions could post things that would do more harm than good to your car. If this is present in the write ups, then LEC would easily be held responsible, which is something I very much doubt the site owner(s) would appreciate. Although we have a disclaimer it would at least make us appear irresponsible and other articles would be doubted. The members' perception of how reliable the information is could easily drop.

agreed, and I think the same principle from above applies; if there is some intentionally misleading, or even just poorly worded, information on a wiki it can be corrected and exists in one canonical place, the risk otherwise is that there is a long running thread on a particular topic and anyone searching must be careful to read the entire thread to have a complete picture.

4. In order to prevent those things, it would have to be heavily moderated. The wiki lacks the ability to discuss, and in a forum questions could be asked as well. If it were to be heavily moderated and all parts read through before made public, someone could end up spending a lot of time doing this. It is a big commitment. People could end up making amendments constantly.

The great thing about the wiki is that it isn't moderated, I think that the effort of having to sign up in itself will be enough to discourage casual abuse. Wikipedia is a target because it's so succesful/large, a LEC wiki is going to be a much smaller target.
I don't think that adding a wiki would detract in any way from the community and discussion that happens already on the forum, and I'd expect that long running discussions would continue to happen, it's just that there'd always be one definitive place to look for a given write-up.

5. Because LEC is open to all members (not locked as some other sites), it would be possible for people to join for the sole purpose of causing problems and know instantly where to go to start this.

this is also true for the forum; people could sign up and start posting all sorts of random messages, but other than doing it for link-spam LEC's not big enough for people to bother doing it, or at least if I'm wrong then you guys have been doing a very good job of keeping the forums clean !

6. All write ups we already have would then need to be converted to the wiki.

I'm happy to help with this.

7. As seen on the forum, there are plenty of digressions. This would be very unfortunate for a wiki. Although it may be harmless, adding personal comments etc it may be another way of bringing the information's credibility down.

I don't think that people would bother to digress on a page whose topic was clear -- that's what the forum is for , but if it did happen then it can be cleaned up quite easily rather than hanging around to be uncovered by searches later on.

8. There may not be a whole lot of contributions, as well as a lot of people would still be asking the same questions in the forum.

perhaps, I can't say what the take up would be like, but given that adding/editing wiki pages is not much more complicated than posting/emailing, and given that it works for SELOC, my guess is that it could work for us.

There are always going to be some people who ask the same questions in the forum, but having the answers in an easily locatable place might help reduce that a bit.

[Doug]

I will throw in my thoughts here:

I think it would be nice to have a more organized listing of FAQs and it seems this Wiki thing is the new fad. Since its inception this site has drawn new owners and interest that seems to bring up the same topics and questions time and again.

I have no clue or ability how to program this type of area and this site has grown out of people's kind contributions.

If you can come together and create something enough are interested in then I am for it. I will not speak for Liz or Tony and they are free to do or not do what they like. If it is too hard to do here then I am fine with an off-site-developed area, that if it goes well, it could perhaps someday be added to the site if able.

Hey, it's just another discussion topic here for now - - - there's enough people with skills these days that if it's going to happen it will.

-D

[ailwyn]

If this does happen and moderators are required then I'd be happy to volunteer.

Ailwyn

[Specky]

Just thinking out loud...

Would it be an option to carry on as we are...?

And have a sticky locked Thread for each Topic

Example... Brakes.....

How about a full concise write up about them. Spares, alternatives, acceptable replacements, urban myths...This thread is a perfect example of what can happen....

Just ask yourself, did you know the answers or did you know where to find them..

Did you think the replies were in-depth enough...

Was the answer some where in a 131 threads on brakes or some where else.. You get my drift..

There's a lot of helpful information and to collate in one thread could only be beneficial... separate the wheat from the chaff..

This is just an idea running through my mind...before Liz runs through it in that pink Élan... Top avatar..

I’m not volunteering like…

Just ideas...

TTFN

[TheBard]

Okay, I promise not to look at this in work mode...

I'm with Liz, a Wiki is great for project development in a secure intranet environment, or in a heavily administrated wider environment. LEC is neither of these, and although we're all well behaved, sensible and mature adults (okay, I've never described myself that way before) but the risk of spam postings, or other intentional or unintentional attacks will be far harder to limit via a Wiki.

I agree that a sticky FAQ post in each section would be a good alternative. If a topic expert was assigned to each forum section to review posts and create a general list for the FAQ, that could then be posted for review in a regular post. When all the kinks are ironed out, or after a 30 day review period or whatever, the additions would be fixed into the FAQ and the sticky would be created from this reviewed document. That way we cover the common stuff quickly, but retain control over content and keep it in one place.

Okay, that may or may not make sense, but it is what rolled out of my head. As an aside do we have a "contributions for hosting" collector (Geoff?) because if we had more disk space for the site we could pool the instructional photographs from our various rebuilds in one spot on the site. An alternative for this may be to create a Flickr or similar free photosharing account which members can post to, which again would collate our images in a single space.

Okay, business analyst tendencies are starting to cut in, so I'll sign off now before I start writing the requirements.

Cheers, (and keep up the awesome work Liz and the admin crew).
Ian

[ailwyn]

but the risk of spam postings, or other intentional or unintentional attacks will be far harder to limit via a Wiki.

I'm not going to wade into the debate about should we/shouldn't we, but in order to balance the view, doesn't Wikipedia use some sort of verification these days, i.e. someone posts, but before it's published someone else (a moderator?) has to ok it?

Like I said, if this goes ahead I will happily volunteer as a mod.

Ailwyn