Call for OpenGL Experts to act as OpenGL Wiki editors

[Brolingstanz]

I have to agree with Evanglizr. Cream tends to rise to the top in public endeavors, like open-source operating systems and wikis. The most knowledgeable people tend to be the ones that contribute the most and this consequently tends to squelch the noise.

Besides, I'm likely to take anything I read with a grain of salt, anyway, unless I know full well it's from a reliable source. The anonymous nature of wikis makes this virtually unknowable, so I don't see how this helps, except for the possible exception of discouraging a very few bad eggs. I can understand the vandalism argument, but even the brightest and best intentioned among us can make mistakes, and misinformation is the worst kind of vandalism, IMHO. But collectively, the community will see to it that stains of this nature never set--that's the beauty of it.

[RigidBody]

first, i think it is a good choice to let only registered users edit articles. but, in my opinion, the precondition of getting a user account should not be higher than being a frequent user on this forum.

however, i think that the discussion page associated to each article should be editable by everyone, thus making it possible to give the author a feedback ("this page helped me a lot", "the algorithm did not work" etc.).

[Rodrix]

Hi!
Almost a year has passed since the opening of this thread...


" the precondition of getting a user account should not be higher than being a frequent user on this forum.

Why not implement RigidBody's idea?
And even better make it automatic?
(if user reaches X number of posts OR/AND date registered is less than Y THEN actual user gets granted permission to edit the wiki)

This would make more people involved in the wiki, as for example I would be very interested in getting involved but I don't have time to 'officialy' edit the wiki and get an account.
Many times when I read the wiki I wish to add my experience in some of the articles, but when I reach edit... access is denied, ask for an account... This is not a barrier, but partially eliminating this with the above suggestion could lead to more activity and more useful content.

If there are some users that do not meet the established criteria (they come from other forums, or never posted) then they can send a mail (like today) and ask for an account.

I think this wiki could transform the whole community making a library of algorithms and helping developers advance more rapidly. However, I think that if we want this, then we have to enable more ability for action for the users.

This was just a suggestion!
And I think it'll solve the problem of having the same questions asked over and over again in the forums. The problem is not people asking (this is nice, and nice to be able to help) the underlying problem is the Learning Curve! OpenGl has a tought learning curve once you get to intermediatte/advanced topics and are writing your own engine. It gets really hard. Why not help users by building a great wiki with everyone's experience, not just a few ones?

Many people that know less can also collaborate on the wiki project, since it's not the same having some few wise and experienced guys writing every Y weeks than having many people writing small content every day.

I hope the OpenGl community grows fast with good tools and easy and fast resources for everyone!
Cheers!
Rod

[Simon Arbon]

As someone who only recently registered for the OpenGL forums, this would still exclude me.
A quick browse through the wiki and i found a typo thats been there for 14 months, i could have fixed it on the spot, but i'm not allowed.

As a pascal/delphi programmer for well over 2 decades i would love to be able to add a page on how to turn a Delphi form into an OpenGL window,
and general advice on using OpenGL from pascal.

The wiki is not going to be useful until it gets a LOT more content to fill all the holes, and discouraging the casual contributor is preventing that.
Any forum member should be able to add NEW content and add to the discussion, this should be more than enough to discourage vandalism.
Perhaps older pages or any page experiencing an editing war could be limited to more experienced people.
In fact there seems to have been amazingly few edits in the last 12 months and the statistics page says that only 39 pages seem to contain legitimate content.
With so little activity it would be very easy to detect any bad edits, the violator being given a warning or banned.
The lack of activity will hurt the wiki far more than any malicious activity ever could.

[Rodrix]

Thanks Simon for your comments!
I totally agree on that.

I think that the administrators are making a static web page, not a wiki, with all these reinforcements.

The power of a wiki is that even if someone does vandalism it can be easily reverted and doing harm is much more time consuming than reverting changes.

Considering that wiki is closed to all OpenGL forum members, I think that is enough security! And remember, the more people you have involved in the wiki the more they will protect the pages, and the more the content will grow!

There are many intelligent people on this forum that know many openGl techniques. Why not take benefit from this?

Even some do not know about EVERYTHING most are specialized in different topics, and many more can help with different implementations.

Come guys lets change this! Let's make our community grow by making this wiki a succesful project!
Imagine being able to implement any technique you want by just looking at our wiki?

Now a days, when I need to learn something I have to go to the internet and read more than 10 tutorials from different authors to gather the best of them, and make my own improved implementation. I also struggle learning which tutorials are old or new, as many authors present different (and outdated) implementations of different effects. It´s very difficult to get to know which are old and which are the new techniques when dwelving into intermediatte/advanced topics (realistic soft shadows and lighting, water simulation, etc).

The wiki could rapidly and effectively solve this problem. Just a comment from a user saying, "this is old, use this other technique that is faster and ..." could solve all this questions and serve a primary reference.

Today the wiki is no more good than a static and incomplete page, and I think that if we change this we can make our community grow bigger and stronger! And learn more from each other specialized knowledge!

Readers take part on this... What do you think?
And board administrators please comment, since without you no action can be taken, what can you propose?

I hope this post ends in a benefit for the community, so let`s start discussing this idea, and/or proposing new ones.

Cheers!
Rod

[Brolingstanz]

You guys (Simon and Rodrix) should go ahead and ask for an account.

[Rodrix]

Hi Modus!
I just sent the request.
However, my main interest is in changing this wiki as a group, so my suggestion still persists.

This is what I proposed them on the mail. I hope you can read this and also comment on this idea.

"I think that if this wiki registration process is replaced with an automatic user stats checking that automatically grants accounts to users with their own forum user name, then the wiki will get much more activity than it does now.

I hope you can review this idea and post the discussion on the forum to see if other users may come up too with better ideas too, and make our wiki and our community grow!.

For me, the main problem up to now for OpenGL developers, is the lack of trusted updated tutorials regarding intermediatte/advanced topics. There are thousands of scrambled techniques, most of them outdated, and the developer doesn't always know which technique to implement. I think a solution to this could be a very frequently updated wiki and for that we need many users.

Another suggestion: I think it will be a great idea to reinforce the use of References and Bibliography on the wiki articles (like wikipedia does). So that people that post information also place the links to the web tutorials/books where they read that. This way the other users can go back to the sources and Read more or find out if there are in errors or misunderstanding on the wiki article itself.

Thanks so much for everything,
and the OpenGL Forum is just great!!!,"


Cheers!
Rod

[Rodrix]

Hi there!

I have exchanged so emails with James this past weeks. In case you don't know him he is one great guys behind OpenGL and Khronos Group, our webmaster.

These are the news:
1)James is proposing now the following idea to be implemented shortly, which sounds real good to me:
In his words:
"A lot of sites these days use the forums for Tutorials too. Perhaps
it would make more sense to add a Tutorial and how-to section on the
message boards."

Guys this sounds like a wonderful idea to me. Everyone will be able to write a thread writing a tutorial and how-to on an specific topic. I think this will make the opengl learning curve easier, specially for intermediate and advanced topics. Please give him feedback to this idea on this thread.

2) The discussion on the wiki continues, and now they are "pushing on this end to
get a response on easing up on the wiki access."

Please give your feedback and what you think on this two new proposals. The more support, the faster they will probably get implemented.

Cheers!
Rod

[ZbuffeR]

Both are promising.

[pudman]

The more code that's posted in this forum the more I dislike the style that used in <code></code> blocks. Make it more readable!