Crossbow Building Wiki - Published!!!

Hey Guys,


It is a Crossbow building resource to which any one of us can contribute our knowledge. Being in a Wiki-encyclopedia hierarchy format it will be much better organized than a discussion forum and thus will be more user friendly for beginners and more static for the contributing/experienced members. It's very plain right now, but I know we all have something to contribute, so come and check it out!

Hi all,

I tried moving over content from my pages to the Wiki, and it ended up being relatively easy with html2wiki and the MultipleUpload Special Wiki page. Anyways, one of my pages is now Wikified:

• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Forging_boltheads,_method_2
  

I think I'll move the rest over in time. Speaking of tags, I'm thinking of using categorization similar to this:

• Time-based / historical: ancient medieval, 16th cent, 17th cent, modern...
  
• Location-based: european, roman, german, chinese, russian...
  
• Technique-based: woodworking, forging, welding
  
• Component-based: bow/prod, bowstring, bolt/arrow, stock/tiller, lock
  
• Material-based: glassfibre, wood, steel, horn, sinew, linen
  
• Language-based: english, russian, german
  
• Technology-based: compound, recurve, straightbow
  
• Other: backup (for backing up pages tagged with this)
  

The example page (above) is tagged with some of these. If you click on any of the tags after "Category:", you'll see a page where all pages in the same category are listed. Those per-category pages will become very useful as the amount of (tagged) wiki articles grows. What do you think? Is something essential missing?

Ivo: is it possible to tag/categorize forum threads, too? That would help find content here, too.

Samuli

Hi everyone,

I added hierarchy to the wiki categories. For example, the "Woodworking" category page now belong to the "Techniques" category, as do "Welding" and "Forging". Similarly, the "English" category page belongs to "Language" category. This allows grouping categories logically, so that it's obvious what each category title means. It also helps finding information and correct categories from the Wiki. For example, to find out which languages have (so far) been used in the Wiki articles:

• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Language
  

If we click on the "English" link, we get a list of English-language pages:

• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Category:English
  

To view all categories that have been added, we can use

• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Special:AllPages/Category:
  

If you're unsure which categories to use, feel free not to add them. Others can easily add categories to your pages. The most important thing is to add more content there.

I also added a few new categories, Practical and Theoretical.

Added a category hierarchy page which lists all categories (and articles that belong to them) hierarchically using the CategoryTree extension. The list itself is here.

Cool developments basileus!

basileus wrote:

Ivo: is it possible to tag/categorize forum threads, too? That would help find content here, too.

Samuli

I tried something similar once on here. It was a built-in feature that
works terribly...in a sense that it categorizes everything automatically
and not only from our forum, but from all other forums ON THE
NET...which is crazy, so I turned it off.

The only way I can think of is manually adding topics to categories and
organizing them in a format similar to Wiki...inside a separate topic which is how I initially pictured it.

So...I don't exactly have an idea how to tag topics other than they are automatically tagged by being placed into an appropriate forum with a proper title. People occasionally fail to keep in mind that other people may be searching for the same exact thing, but will not find it because of the vague "new guy needs help" or similar topic titles given.

I may have misunderstood your question, so let me know. Also I can offer you access to the admin panel, so you can have a look yourself if you're interested.

---

I've written to the Russian guys, but it seems there is much work to do before they can write to the wiki. As I understand the language categories(say Russian, English, French) can all have copies of an existing article only some in translated form with a link to the original. Like on an English article we would have a link "View article in Russian" or something along the lines.

Ivo wrote:
I tried something similar once on here. It was a built-in feature that
works terribly...in a sense that it categorizes everything automatically
and not only from our forum, but from all other forums ON THE
NET...which is crazy, so I turned it off.

Hmm, interesting . It's probably best to keep tagging turned off.

So...I don't exactly have an idea how to tag topics other than they are automatically tagged by being placed into an appropriate forum with a proper title. People occasionally fail to keep in mind that other people may be searching for the same exact thing, but will not find it because of the vague "new guy needs help" or similar topic titles given.

Yeah, that's exactly the problem I was thinking about. There's lots of useful stuff here, but it's difficult to find it. The Wiki will be much better in this regard, especially if we maintain a useful set of categories/tags.

I've written to the Russian guys, but it seems there is much work to do before they can write to the wiki. As I understand the language categories(say Russian, English, French) can all have copies of an existing article only some in translated form with a link to the original. Like on an English article we would have a link "View article in Russian" or something along the lines.

I'll look into the Wiki page language issues. It seems possible to have multilingual pages - or more correctly translations of existing pages. See the "Translations by language" menu on top of that page.

Btw. I migrated some of my pages to the Wiki today. I'll have to look into redirecting traffic (and google bots) from my pages to the Wiki when I'm finished. My pages are visible on Google searches. For example, if you google for "making crossbows", you'll find my article as 10th link. If you try "designing crossbows", it's on first place. Same with "making bow irons". In any case, that traffic redirection should forward lots of people to the Wiki, and from there to these forums.

Moved more of my stuff to the Wiki. I also added 301 ("Moved permanently") HTTP redirects to my migrated pages. You can try the redirect yourself by clicking on the links on my pages. This automatic redirecting means Google searches should very soon start showing Wiki links instead of links to my pages. I also added a "Plans" category for those articles which contain crossbow/crossbow component plans (e.g. CAD-drawings). Some of the categories may be redundant; for example, "Material" and it's subcategories, given that there's already "Technique" category, which contains things like "Woodworking", "Forging", "Welding", etc.

Hey Basileus,

I've been trying to add some material to the Wiki, but the layout is like a meat grinder - very nicely designed, but I would think twice about sticking my head in there.

If it's ever to be user friendly, it needs to be redesigned dramatically.

Lets talk about it.

Ivo

Hi Ivo,

Ok, I see what's the issue. It seems that "Crossbow Trigger Design" page which you(?) added is a
s.c. category page although a normal page should suffice. The category pages
should (in general) only contain an explanation of the category, not any
real content. I can move your page to non-category page and add
it to appropriate categories.

I think categories are best thought of as tags.
They make finding relevant pages very easy, compared to static links to
individual articles. This becomes increasingly important as number of
pages on the Wiki increases. I've tried to keep the main page free of
links to individual articles to keep things tidy. At the moment, the
best way to browse the Wiki is to use one of these:

• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Special:AllPages
  
• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Special:AllPages/Category:
  
• http://crossbow.wikia.com/wiki/Category_hierarchy
  

These
could be renamed if they're confusing (e.g. to "View pages by
category"). This said, direct links to the most important Wiki articles
may make sense. Using categories gives a couple of main benefits:

• All page listings are updated without human intervention
  
• It's very easy to find relevant information (e.g. all articles on crossbow triggers, modern crossbow or fiberglass)
  

When
you add a new page, you don't (normally) need to add any new category
pages to the Wiki. You can just click on "Add new page", add the textual
content and then add the page to (existing) categories from the right
hand side of the editor.

The list of categories each page is
attached to is shown at the bottom of the page
below "Read more" links. In practice, most pages are only attached to a
few (2-3) categories (e.g. "English", "Practical", "Bow"). Pages can be
attached to categories afterwards, too, without opening the page
editor. If any categories are needed, they can be added fairly easily.
Combinations of even fairly generic categories are surprisingly
powerful.

Please bug me if you have further issues
using the Wiki... I'm so marinated in these things I don't see the
usability issues at all.

And thanks for the article, Ivo!

Basileus