The CPF Wiki is Officially Up and Running!

I am most pleased to be able to present to you the CPF Wiki!

It is very easy to edit the pages on the wiki - you don't even need to log in. You may add pages, as well as edit existng ones. I highly encourage you to contribute your flashaholic knowledge to the wiki, so that it might become a resource for all of us.

Special thanks goes to our own logicnerd4110 for getting the barebones site on its feet, and for hosting it. Also, to Sasha, for her approval of the idea. Drizzle also helped me out with a preliminary Wiki, which was a great test site.

Once logicnerd4110 got the site on its feet, I added a bit of what I had been writing for a FAQ, to try and jump-start the wiki. Hopefully though, it will change dramatically, as I am sure you all have better ideas and more helpful information than I do. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

I am going to request that you direct all questions about the Wiki to me, rather than Sasha or the CPF administration. You can contact me via PM, or at my e-mail (TennBikeBerk(at)cox.net) if you wish.

I kindly request that when you add things to CPFW, that you keep things appropriate for all ages, and stay to flashlight-related topics only.

Thank you very much, and enjoy! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

P.S. If you are unfamiliar with wiki's I recommend that you check out the user's guide first.

nice work. good luck with it!

This is great, CPF has needed a wiki for a long time.

I hope the wiki will put some policies in place soon about re-use of the material. I propose using the GNU Free Documentation License which is also used by Wikipedia.

Right now, in order to re-use a CPF post (say there's an informative post in the archive about LED phosphors and you want to paste some paragraphs from it into the wiki's article about LED technology), you need permission from the author, which can be a nuisance if you have to go and ask for it (i.e. if the author hasn't already given it).

With wiki posts, it's even worse, since there's no "the author" to ask for permission. Every wiki article is collaboratively edited by potentially dozens or hundreds of people and you might conceivably have to go around asking ALL of them (if you can even find them). So it's best to declare a re-use policy at the very beginning, and ask people to agree to the policy in order to post.

I hereby grant blanket permission to all CPF'ers to incorporate any material from any of my CPF posts into the CPF wiki. If you want to use stuff from my CPF posts in the wiki, don't ask me for further approval--just do it.

I hope other CPFers will grant similar blanket permission. There's lots of stuff in the CPF archive that would be great as reference material and simply migrating stuff to the wiki can keep people busy for quite a long time even separately from writing substantial new stuff.

I've set up an account and made a small contribution.

I hope the CPF Wiki is well-accepted - it certainly is promising.

Thanks!

I'm not familiar with the concept "wiki", but it can only help. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Added a pic posting guide, hope it helps... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

The web's latest info. incarnation after blogs==-->>WikiPedia, the free floating encyclopedia?? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[ QUOTE ]
paulr said:
I hope other CPFers will grant similar blanket permission. There's lots of stuff in the CPF archive that would be great as reference material and simply migrating stuff to the wiki can keep people busy for quite a long time even separately from writing substantial new stuff.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Wiki project has my blessing as well. After all, I wouldn't be able to talk about much of the stuff I do here if nobody had shared their knowledge with me in the first place, so it is only right that I should give back.

Entries in the MicroFAQ can be replicated over there as well. The Wiki has an advantage in that it leverages the power of the community whereas the MicroFAQ depends on whether I have time, hence it has remained quite "micro" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif I did think about a wiki but never did figure out how to set one up.

What the heck is a WiKi????

Essentially, Roy, it is a webpage that anybody can edit. Our wiki is geared towards flashlights. You should check it out, and if you want to change a page that you see, just click the "edit" button at the top of that page, and you can change it however you like.

many thanks for putting this together!!!

I hereby grant blanket permission to all CPF'ers to incorporate any material from any of my CPF posts into the CPF wiki. I only ask that you don't hotlink my pics.

Here's a look at the flashlight link on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashlight

Right now, wikipedia is huge!!

I just added to the CPF Wiki. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[ QUOTE ]
PhotonBoy said:
Here's a look at the flashlight link on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashlight

Right now, wikipedia is huge!!

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow, they have a pic of my long-lost cousin "green flashlight" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Fantastic idea. I just added "Sources - High End Lights and Parts" to the main page. Not much there yet but it'll grow.

I've expanded a few sections (batteries, LED manufacturers, light units, flashlight manufacturers). Perhaps I should create an account and improve my grasp of the formatting...

Cool idea man!!!! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif

A user note: one of the main features of wikis is that it's easy to link between wiki pages. In MediaWiki (the software behind the Wikipedia and the CPF wiki) you do that by putting the page name in double square brackets: [[...]]. So instead of saying [ QUOTE ]
The Nuwai Q3 uses a 3-watt Luxeon LED

[/ QUOTE ] you could say [ QUOTE ]
The [[Nuwai Q3]] uses a 3-watt [[Luxeon]] [[LED]]

[/ QUOTE ].

Each of the phrases in brackets would then become clickable in the wiki and go to the wiki page for that phrase. If the linked page actually exists, the link is shown in blue, otherwise in red. If you click a red link, you'll get a page saying the article you clicked doesn't exist, please click here to add it. It's perfectly fine to leave pointers around to unwritten pages like that, in the hope that someone else will get around to writing them; similarly it's great to add pages that other people have added links to. That way the wiki becomes highly interlinked and also grows very rapidly.

Wikipedia started a few years ago and now has more articles than just about any printed encyclopedia. While some of its articles are about contentious subjects and get messed up a lot, for the most part it works very well, and it will be great if the CPF wiki can also grow as a reference.

That's an awsome start(!) IlluminatingBikr! I had never heard of WIKI until your offer, and bookmarked it. Talk about potential! Awsome!

Larry

I have - not so modestly - submitted a proposed outline for some subjects under the main page discussion.

The main page is starting to get cluttered, and will only get worse as time goes on...