The wiki thread

webwit · 07 Jul 2011, 00:57

I hope one day to add my share to the wiki, but so far my free time for this forum has been spend on the software and such.

JBert · 07 Jul 2011, 01:21

I've slightly decreased the thumbnail size though, the images would introduce a horizontal scrollbar on my 1280x1024 screen. The difference is negligible as one can still spot the M15's features.

daedalus · 07 Jul 2011, 01:38

Yeah, someone else who I linked the page to had the same issue. Thanks for fixing it, I'll keep it in mind for future articles.

daedalus · 11 Jul 2011, 00:18

An idea - some sort of recently modified page list on the front page of the wiki so people can see what has been done recently.

webwit · 11 Jul 2011, 00:30

What about this?

You can change the appearance in Preferences -> Recent changes

JBert · 11 Jul 2011, 22:33

Wait, did you just include the recent changes page into the main page? I for one preferred the clean front page.

There's a nice and fine link on the left, the 3rd one from the top... which is probably where 98% of all Mediawiki installs have it. Therefore I'd guess that people who actually want to know what recent changes there were will actually find it if they just look for it.

webwit · 11 Jul 2011, 22:35

Yeah I agree, it's too big and bulky and cryptic.

daedalus · 11 Jul 2011, 23:10

Whoops, seems I need to RTFM

yench · 14 Jul 2011, 18:30

Could anyone make a wiki entry about key sizes? Like: What's 1 unit, how is it measured. How is key size determined/calculated (e.g. why is 118mm space bar 6.25 units while 1 unit alpha key is 18mm wide) etc. I stumbled upon this and could not find a good source.

ripster · 14 Jul 2011, 19:01

It becomes clearer when you think in Imperial Units.

3/4" is the magic number. See the wiki that must not be named for details.

7bit · 14 Jul 2011, 19:18

yench wrote:Could anyone make a wiki entry about key sizes? Like: What's 1 unit, how is it measured. How is key size determined/calculated (e.g. why is 118mm space bar 6.25 units while 1 unit alpha key is 18mm wide) etc. I stumbled upon this and could not find a good source.

The Cherry keys are usually placed on a 19mm grid. So 19mm is 1 unit or roughly 3/4".

The 118mm space bar is in reality 6.21 units long (19*6.21 == 117.99).

ripster · 14 Jul 2011, 19:19

Actually they are on .75" grid.

yench · 14 Jul 2011, 20:21

The grid thing makes sense. Thanks a lot.

ripster · 14 Jul 2011, 20:47

Then think typewriters.

That's the weird part.

7bit · 17 Jul 2011, 18:04

Where should I put the wiki-entry about the RollerMouse?

We've got
Getting Started | Keyboard Switches | Companies

Popular Keyboards | Keyboard Categories | Key Caps

It would not make sense to have a 3rd line.

What about renameing 'Key Caps' to 'Other Input Devices'

Contour Design can still be listed under 'Companies'

Also, I've seen that underneahth switches there are a lot of $COMPANY switches may I throw these redundant 'switches' out?

Same for $COMPANY keyboards in the Popular Keyboards section, etc.

webwit · 17 Jul 2011, 21:33

Looks good! We have promoted daedalus to involuntary wikiarch, so as long as he doesn't complain I think we're fine.

JBert · 18 Jul 2011, 22:17

7bit wrote:What about renameing 'Key Caps' to 'Other Input Devices'

Not bad, but I've changed it once again to "Other topics" - Keycaps aren't devices. [nitpick mode off]

webwit · 18 Jul 2011, 22:29

Oooh, the collective mind!

7bit · 18 Jul 2011, 22:59

JBert wrote:
7bit wrote:What about renameing 'Key Caps' to 'Other Input Devices'
Not bad, but I've changed it once again to "Other topics" - Keycaps aren't devices. [nitpick mode off]

perfect. Just did not know which term to use.

Crazy9000 · 19 Jul 2011, 02:09

Accessories would work also, and wouldn't leave the subject quite as widely open.

daedalus · 20 Jul 2011, 23:44

webwit wrote:Looks good! We have promoted daedalus to involuntary wikiarch, so as long as he doesn't complain I think we're fine.

Sounds good to me. I will be a bit busy for the coming while, and the apparent death of my laptop isn't helping.

webwit · 21 Jul 2011, 01:24

Finally managed to fix the rss reader. Had to install another one with supported atom, and had to hack it to support the phpbb feed. It's not perfect yet (the text parsing leaves to be desired).

Also changed the frontpage design, among others the table with 6 blocks are now 6 floating boxes which fill up your screen space.

xbb · 21 Jul 2011, 01:29

webwit wrote: Also changed the frontpage design, among others the table with 6 blocks are now 6 floating boxes which fill up your screen space.

very nice

hope to find some time soon to help filling it up.

Spharx · 21 Jul 2011, 14:48

everyone has keyboards ... even if its just a filthy rubberdome

Post you Keyboards in the wiki

Make a big database full of keyboard information of nearly every keyboard in this world

, this would help people to identify keyboards at for example ebay
Also please include keyboard like devices to show if keycaps could be harvested.

Here is my contribution click

We should decide on a general layout so if you have some ideas how to improve my article please post here.

lal · 21 Jul 2011, 16:57

A note from the ones in charge about their financing plan and dedication to keep this site up would improve my personal motivation to contribute. What about copyright resp. license of the published material? Would it be possible to routinely dump the wiki content to a personal backup?

webwit · 21 Jul 2011, 17:38

Ah, a volunteer for our copyright section!

But to answer your questions:

There is no financing plan. This is a hobby of the administrators, and there's no money in it, unless we would be commercial sellers, which we are not. We don't run ads, we don't make money on group buys or other items (unlike *cough* elsewhere). We're dedicated though, out of love. At the moment I'm hosting it on my dedicated server, if I'd stop doing that for whatever reason, the administrators will get hosting elsewhere and share costs. Our aim is to have a dynamic, open admin consisting of the most dedicated people at a certain time frame. If someone loses interest and the love is gone, someone else steps in. There is no single person running this thing. This is our guarantee for continuity.

About copyrights and such, not much has been developed yet regarding this subject matter. I imagine we should have something similar as wikipedia, they use this open license for texts, and contributors can chose from a number of open licenses for media. Personally I prefer public domain, but that won't be everybody's preference.

We run daily backups of code and data, we could make those available for download so you can for instance mirror it elsewhere. The code is mediawiki which is open source anyway from the wikipedia organisation.

So let's say you contribute lots to the wiki, and then some crazy Japanese millionaire comes to us and offers 1M EUR for the deskthority wiki. Just to close it and start a porn wiki instead. We wouldn't be able to resist and what would happen? Hmmm. Well he would be buying the title, not the content. Admin would probably share the proceedings. I'd probably need to get rid of some of them to increase my cut. Ownership is sketchy so far because we didn't care yet. Whatever infighting though, in this scenario the data is still free. So the worst that can happen is that the deskthority title is lost, and the content is continued elsewhere with the same tech.

Please add to this if you have any suggestions.

7bit · 21 Jul 2011, 18:03

webwit wrote:...
So let's say you contribute lots to the wiki, and then some crazy Japanese millionaire comes to us and offers 1M EUR for the deskthority wiki. Just to close it and start a porn wiki instead. ....

But, but, ... I thought this where a porn[1] site already!

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[1] I mean keyboard porn.

webwit · 21 Jul 2011, 20:26

Spharx wrote:everyone has keyboards ... even if its just a filthy rubberdome

Post you Keyboards in the wiki

Make a big database full of keyboard information of nearly every keyboard in this world , this would help people to identify keyboards at for example ebay
Also please include keyboard like devices to show if keycaps could be harvested.

Here is my contribution click

We should decide on a general layout so if you have some ideas how to improve my article please post here.

Like this:
http://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_JX_Keyboards

lal · 21 Jul 2011, 20:39

webwit wrote:[...]
But to answer your questions:
[...]

Sounds good, thanks for the explanation. I'm most worried about the content vanishing some day, so some way to mirror it would be appreciated.

agor · 21 Jul 2011, 23:56

Well, just started my first wiki entry about Noppoo. Will try to add further things tomorrow, hope its okay like this. Never contributed to a wiki before

edit:

Few questions.
Where can I see all available Templates?
And how can we add all availablle Layouts to the Keyboard Template, I just tried how it would look at the Realforce page and the force linebreak seems awful.