The new APMcopter Wiki is up and running!
As you probably know, some of us have been hard at work trying to bring up a new Wiki for the copters, planes and rovers.
I have recently completed installing the vast majority of the pages from the Old ArduCopter Wiki into the new APMcopter Wiki/Manual.
And I have produced a Drop Down Menu as well as a Hyperlinked Table Of Contents (that is accessible from the top of each Wiki page).
Please look over the new APMcopter wiki here: http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/arducopter/
And provide feedback.
There is still some work to do repairing broken hyperlinks (they do not import correctly from WordPress and the images all need to be moved to the WordPress repository), but I am slogging through all 109 Wiki pages fixing them and performing minor reformatting.
There is an issue that I would really like you all to look at carefully.
Right now, I have constructed a Drop Down menu and Table of Contents that completely mirror each other and I think they work effectively together.
However, it is 3DR's intention to minimize or eliminate the Wikis Drop Down Menu at the very least removing the vast majority of links so that it will work better with tablets and to support their own vision of what is in the best interests of themselves and the community.
They envision a very short set of quick starts designed to get uninitiated users up and running as quickly as possible.
And while I think that is a very worthwhile pursuit, I do not think that it is appropriate to do it by applying the scarce drop down menu resource to that endeavor and removing it from the full Wiki.
I think that the current full Drop Down Menu and Table Of Contents work very well together and are an asset to our community.
Please look this over with special regard to the Drop Down Menu and the Table of Contents and Weigh in here, it may be your best chance to influence the final form of our Wiki/Manuals.
Of course, I invite 3DR to respond here as well.
This is an open community that has benefited greatly and grown considerably in no small part due to massive support from Chris and 3DR.
I'm not trying to cause a problem here, but this is a time where our feedback is really important.
Comments
Roger that.
Thanks for the clarification.
Marooned,
The wiki part of the manual is meant to be edited by anybody who is willing to join the Doc Ed. Group. and work with the other members to add and edit content with some consensus of the group. It's important that the best practices are reflected in the documentation. One of the criticisms of the old wiki is that there were many different suggestions on how to set things up ( e.g. power supply) and no clear path on the "right" way to do things.
Hi Marooned, it isn't fully open at the moment, but I believe it is 3DR's intention to make it so after the bulk of the transfer and updating has been done.
There may still need to be a sign up process, but I think more to keep the unaware from accidentally messing it up rather than to serve as censure.
I don't know for sure, but from what they have said, that is the interpretation I make at this point.
In the end it will probably be called a manual, but it will definitely be a publicly supported batch of documentation.
So pretty much Wiki-ish.
Hey Gary!
Thanks for all your work. I've been working for a few years to the biggest wiki company and know how hard is to maintain a good content.
BTW, this manual should not be called wiki as it's not available to edit by anyone. This is a bit hurting to the "wiki" world to call any manual "a wiki". Similar, not every RC plane is a drone ;-)
Just a hint.
Peace
Hi all,
The new APMcopter Wiki (Reference Manual) has now got all primary pages installed here http://copter.ardupilot.com/
There is a "Reference Manual Table of Contents" Hyperlink in the top right of every page that will take you to the completely hyperlinked table of contents.
But the Drop Down Menu has been removed by 3DR and I had a lot of time arranging, trimming and organizing plus even more time reconstructing the Table of Contents to match, so I will not be putting it back.
It would be a good idea for other people to undertake some of the editing for these wikis, which I at least think are a vital resource for the open community.
I have been enthusiastically trying to support this move for several weeks, but I am running out of energy and enthusiasm.
This job is massive, since every page not only needs to be copied form the old wiki to the new one, but also extensively reedited, all old wiki pictures imported to the new wiki image repository and all internal inks remade to reference the new wiki instead of the old one.
Also once it is finished being faithfully imported, then we really need to go through it and rebuild much of it to be current, easier to read, better illustrated and more concise.
I had hoped to be able to complete the APMcopter wiki both importing the old one and upgrading the new one as an example of what could be done.
But I am running out of steam, I have spent a lot of hours working on this, written a lot of new pages - PX4 - Safety - Copter construction, The Table of Contents and LOTs more time transferring and editing wiki pages.
And, at least on the APMcopter wiki Ive pretty much been working alone.
I hope there are some capable and interested people out there willing to pick up the gauntlet, because I have other things I need and want to do.
I will still contribute, but at a much lower level than I have been.
Ning forum has one major advantage comparing to others (or I just don't know it how to do it elsewhere). You can subscribe to a forum to get e-mail about new thread in that forum. Then you can decide to follow that thread or not.
On regular forum engines for my knowledge you can subscribe only to existing threads.
As for the table of context - I did not read all 4 pages of comments but I don't have such TOC as presented in the main post (recent Firefox).
For me in Wikis I would like to see some paths I can take to gain some knowledge. Example: I have a flying craft and would like to add an FPV ability - would be nice to have some kind of areas that will narrow down in a few steps leading to an article with gathered knowledge.
This could be done by good tagging plus some custom scripts.
Hi all and especially Robert,
I have just gone through all of the Traditional Helicopter pages on the Old Wiki and uploaded all newer ones and newer information to the new Wiki and loaded them to the "Reference Manual Table of Contents" and updated them to work properly.
I guess these must have been updated in the old wiki after they were already transported to the new wiki.
Some of the links in them still connect to old wiki sites, but they all work.
By the way you have 2 choices for copying information from the old wiki to the new wiki, both of them bad.
You can go into text edit mode in both wikis and block copy from the old to the new one.
This strips all formatting and requires you to reformat ALL links of every kind as well as to specify new text formatting.
And you need to copy each image into the image repository for the new wiki
Alternatively you can go into Edit visual mode in the new wiki and go into normal page view in the old wiki.
Now when you block copy a page from the old wiki, the links and images are preserved but of course as calls to the old wiki locations for all references including images.
And text formatting for ALL header text is completely screwed up putting an illegal sequence between every header designator. Reguiring extensive HTML editing.
Just thought you might like to know; every page requires a minimum of 30 or 40 minutes to redo and that's for the short ones.
The "Reference Manual Table of Contents" now has a link on the APMcopter home page as well.
At this point, aside from a lot of tedious internal link editing to do, the only big install left to do is a good portion of the Appendix.
Hugues,
+1 from me on the ugliness of the phpBB forum. We are looking at at a WordPress forum plugin. Lot's of people seem to really like phpBB however.
What do think could be done to remedy your confusion in navigating between the sites? The menues are under construction, please let me know if you have a suggestion for improving the navigation scheme.
I have put the troubleshooting section into the New Wiki, it is in the bottom of the Table Of Contents.
It does not have the top of page internal links.
And the many internal links link to the old Wiki, but they do work.
All illustrations have been copied to the new image repository and are correctly linked and displayed in the Troubleshooting guide.
There were 2 videos which have not been inserted yet.
In the New Web Site you now have to open the "Quick Start Guide" and then open the "Table of Contents" link that pops up in the upper right of that page in order to be able to get to and navigate within in the new Manual.
Well, they deleted the drop down menu without copying it or saving it, so be it !
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