community wiki

General Discussion
1

do you want a community wiki?

  • yes, i’m willing to contribute
  • yes, but i dont want to contribute
  • no, there are too many places for informations already
  • no, it would mean to much work to maintain

0 voters

i would like to suggest that a community wiki should be added to the panda website. i am often encountering moments i’d like to share something, but there is no place i can place it and others can contribute/fix. the manual has a specific topic and should be more “static” then what i suggest.

what could the wiki be used for:

samples/howto’s/tutorials:
a lot of very good samples get “lost” in the forums, because there is no way sorting them by importance or topic. additionally a wiki would make it possible to collaboratively work on samples, once they are good they could be taken over into the manual or official samples.

faq:
lots of questions are asked over and over again, few ppl edit the manual, but a community wiki could/should be more dynamic.

model database:
i’ve got some models i could share, that other’s may find useful, having a central place where the models could be stored might be useful.

i’d like to hear about your opinions, what is missing in my suggestion? what software (wiki) would you use? are the website maintainers ok with this suggestion? concerning a model database, is there enougth space to host that?

2

I agree with you very much on this. There are some amazing tutorials and code samples, on the board, which have taken me ages to find through the current search. If they were listed on a wiki in categories it would be easyer for users to find samples of code realating to there problem.

If theer was a wiki, I would uploade content to it, once I have some, to help users which have helped me get this far ^_^.

3

what about the wiki we have?

4

Which wiki is that? The manual is technically a wiki, but it’s not intended for the same purposes that a wiki is normally intended for, which is what Hypnos is advocating. Do we have another wiki somewhere?

I suppose we could set aside some part of the manual for general wikiness. We’d have to be careful that the print, chm-compile, and table-of-contents scripts avoid this area, though.

David

5

i dont think making part of the manual to a community wiki is a good idea. a community wiki is supposed to be edited and doesnt require to be correct (of course it should, but it’s ok if someone just writes of his experience, which may be incorrect), it’s a wip information storage.

if the manual get’s this touch it’s a really bad development. it must be visually separated, also to encourage ppl to edit it, without too much fear of writing something “partially correct”.

could somebody who voted, “no, there are too many places for informations already” comment why they voted it? (because i think this is a partial positive answer to a wiki, because i have the hope that a wiki could concentrate informations that are in the forums a lot and thus getting informations easier)

6

a wiki built with the pinciple users for users is a nice idea. we could use it to collect all the scripts that lie around here on the forums (and get forgotten by time) or to present some simple, non-technical examples.

Though I’m not sure how long such a wiki would live - most probably many would read it and only a few would contribute.

7

Joining in discussion here, I think :

ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-Is prob. a great example of a wiki looking nice, and I would add that if we are to go to a wiki style format as this, that we consider a few things such as:

A. I would remove the ‘images’ on right side of page in manual and replace them with links to wiki content ; use available space wisely.

B. A wiki is a great idea in that it hopefully encourages commuity participation, while maintaining decorum through:
1. Showing last edit and who did it, because maybe then can be sought out for further edits for their speicific knowledge base
2. Verify edits ( we do this in Manual ) to make sure they are both valid and no spam or something, which is certainly reasonable .

So sure a wiki works < so does alliteration, but I digress , and as most here I’d be happy to contib :wink:

cheers
nl

8

Ok, i created an example wiki page at wikidot

iqpanda.wikidot.com/test1234

that template looks pretty neat, and i would go for it.
I believe colors could be changed easily.

Thing is, i dont know when i will and will not be available so i am not good choice for maintainer of wiki.

wikidot is nice, because it does not have much banners, one slim at top, it does not bother me much, especially because there are edit and history link there too.
anyone could create wiki at wikidot to see its functionality.
please dont use panda3d subdomain if you dont intend to maintain it
Code coloring supports major languages, as far as i could grasp it, there is unlimited number of changes history.
snippets.wikidot.com/

I also applied for ourproject.org, i will check out that one when/if admins decide to accept submission.

So maybe if we show that wiki can work, it will be linked from panda3d main site