Maybe it's time to have a frank discussion about the Wiki. It has had its troubles ever since Lud tried to morph the old FAQ into a Wiki format. I think the basic problem is that people are USERs of Wiki's all the time and generally think they're great .. but don't really ever participate in creating/updating a Wiki and they don't really know how to. So, I took on the task of re-organizing it to make things easier to find and trying to be a catalyst for getting people on board. I think people generally liked the re-org and the increased promotion of the Wiki along with the addition of the Registry .. but after some initial activity, we were never able to get many people on-board as anything other than just 'users' of the Wiki. At its core, a Wiki is an open collaborative resource that anyone can contribute to .. but if we look back at the NSX Wiki, very few people actually contributed content or worked to keep it 'current'. It needs to have more than one or two people actively engaged in enhancing it.
Initially, I thought that it was because it's much easier to just blast in a post on a forum thread than it is to organize your thoughts and write up a project that you might want to share with others.... and the Wiki does have it's own unique structure and editing tools which may have also scared a few people away. There are also a group of people who think that a good search engine is good enough .. they don't need a Wiki. But I can't count the number of times on two hands that people have posted that they can't find some post that they read that has the information they need. Or they post that the thread they found has 5 pages of posts with redundant and/or conflicting information. In my mind, that's where a Wiki beats a good search engine .. but it needs people to wade through the posts on a topic of general interest and net it out. Now that's not always possible depending on how volatile the topic is ... but most of the case it is. I remember consolidating many multi-page threads on the topic of replacing coolant hoses into a single Wiki page. Now, I'm no expert on the topic .. but it wasn't that hard to do assuming you have basic computer editing skills. But someone (me) had to invest the time in doing that for the betterment of everyone and that's the part that seems to be lacking.
As a result, I believe that Lud considered the overall NSX Wiki project to be a bit of a failure and he started looking for other ways to provide more benefits. At the time, one of my side projects was to take the contents of the ForSale Forum (back to the early days) and import the info into the Registry .. but this was taking forever and barely keeping ahead of new listings. So, with the new site, Lud added the capability to auto-import eBay NSX listings into the site. They don't go into the Registry part of the Wiki .. but the benefit is that if you Google the Vin, you'll get some of what the Registry project was trying to do. I think through other new site software functions, he was also hoping to be able to link new topic threads into a Wiki-like structure .. but I don't think that really fixes the problem of consolidating the content of multi-page threads.
I believe it to be true that when Lud moved and upgraded the website to a new web software platform awhile ago, he ran into some technical implementation details with the Wiki .. but what I'm also trying to suggest is that he isn't particularly motivated to re-invigorate something he felt wasn't really working.
So, to summarize, if collectively we think the Wiki is worthwhile to save and re-vitalize, we have to be prepared to solve the issue of how to get more people committed to its upkeep.
Look forward to your thoughts.
