User talk:Pi3832

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My own little sandbox.


WARNING!

Motorcycle modification is done at your own risk. Modification may void the manufacturer's warranty, may increase the likelyhood of an accident, and may cause damage to the motorcycle. Neither the author(s) of this article nor the maintainers of this website are responsible for any negative consequences of modifying your motorcycle. (We'll take credit for any positive stuff, however.)


Welcome

Hey welcome to the wiki. I noticed you were are a wikipedia user, if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to tell me. I've had some people question why not put this whole site into Wikipedia, some reasons I have are:

  1. I think it's more valuable as a stand alone site
  2. I can allow editorial type articles and POV style articles which are not allowed on wikipedia.
  3. Many motorcycles aren't notable and never will be in any form and therefore are subject to deletion on Wikipedia. (this has happened before with areas such as cookies, star wars, pokemon, etc on Wikipedia, and really can you blame them? If someone put an article about a bicycle here I think I'd feel inclined to delete it, unless it was highly relevant (aka the precursor to some early motorcycle))
  4. I believe a smaller more focused site can build more of a sense of community and have less arguments (especially uninformed arguments)
  5. If I can put ads up on this site I can buy more brochures to improve the site, and my knowledge. I believe if I own the brochures I can legally put them up as for sale (happens on ebay.com all the time). This would further the Fair-Use argument for these brochures. The number one argument would be that they were never made for a profit, but a manufacturer could feasibly argue that they intended to create a collection of old brochures to sell in the future (although to my knowledge this have never happened).
  6. Furthermore I believe a great deal of people are disillusioned with Wikipedia, as say if I wanted to add an article about my parent's motorcycle stores it would be considered not notable (I assume this, never tried), but then they have articles like this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pearl+necklace&btnG=Google+Search , that put crap (my own opinion) into the Google results (by accident of course, but it does happen), and take advantage of all the trust that people have put into a site like Wikipedia.

In my opinion though Wikipedia is a great site for general subjects, and I'm grateful for their development and promotion of the Mediawiki platform. To me it's like this: if people are going to making motorcycle sites, it might as well be someone who has experience with the industry, and sort of understand how it all works.

One thing I've been trying to decide on that someone familiar with Wikipedia might understand better is how to format specifications. If you simply do them as an ordered list like:

  • 4 stroke 70-degree DOHC V-Twin
  • 4 valves per cylinder
  • liquid cooled
  • 552 cm³
  • 65 hp (48 kW) @ 9500 rpm
  • 50 N·m (37 ft·lbf) @ 8500 rpm

which is a very easy to edit format, but maybe not the easiest to read, or in the complex wiki-table format, which admittedly looks better, but can be quite cumbersome to edit. I've also considered doing the boxes like on Kawasaki M10, which seem to very popular at Wikipedia, but they don't easily portray changes from year to year. I like the wiki-table format, but I think it's too complicated for the average user to make a correction or addendum to.--Budlight 11:07, 9 March 2007 (CST)


Yeah, I've been nosing around here looking for an less formal (or fascist, depending on your POV) place for documenting motorcycle stuff.
What is the policy/attitude toward attribution and such? See Talk:Brake Line Installation.
HTML tables are easier than wiki-tables in my opinion. And MediaWiki will properly display an HTML table. (See the oh-so-controversial table here.) I find that you can build an HTML table pretty easily in a spreadsheet--just add columns for the tags, then cut'n'paste into the wiki. --Pi3832 11:27, 9 March 2007 (CST)