Hello there, if you haven’t seen my previous video on this topic you should really go
back and watch it to understand what my goals here are. I’m creating a website called caps
wiki for people to share information on how to repair electronic devices.
This video is all about how the website works and how you can use it to document devices. First off,
some technical information about the site. I built this using MediaWiki which is the software behind
Wikipedia, so if you have contributed there before you are likely familiar with what using this site
will be like. I had not done that though so I was going into this double blind and both learning
how to use a site like this as well as host one which is a much less complete experience than I
expected. So a lot of my time has been spent on setting up templates and frameworks for making
contributing and organizing information as easy as possible. I have written some documentation
on the site itself as well on how you can make new pages. But if you want to get a walk through
of the process and hear some more background thoughts you can sit back and see it all here.
At the high level every device page should be put into at least
2 or 3 categories by the time it is finished. One that describes what kind of device it is,
one for what decade it is from, and an optional one if there is a relevant specialty category
for it. Devices can be searched for by these categories making it easier to find information
on something and research information about related devices. And specialty categories may
add some additional information to the page, like the CRT category adding a link to the CRT
repair guide to the bottom of the infobox. When working on a device page you can add it to any
category through a menu. If you have a device that doesn’t have a category on the site yet,
feel free to add a new one. This won’t fully create the category as it will link to a page that
hasn’t been set up. But you can either leave it like that for someone in the future to finish up
or go ahead and create the new page for it as well. There are also 3 special “work needed”
categories as well that devices should have added depending on what information they are missing.
These allow device pages to be marked as missing original part information, replacement part
information, or general information and when someone views the page it notifies them that
the page is incomplete. Pages in these categories can also be found more easily by others who would
like to clean up or complete information in them through an editors toolbox I setup.
Next when it comes to creating a page for a new device I have had to set up a bit of a workaround.
Normally wiki pages are created by entering a URL that doesn’t exist and editing it which starts a
new blank page. But that makes it a lot harder to document specific technical information like this.
So instead you should use the new page box available from either the home page or the
new page guide which will create a new page using a preload template that adds most of the features
to the page you are likely going to need. This preload template can be viewed by clicking the
link to it left of the input box for the page title. When you are creating a page feel free
to delete anything you don’t have information for like known issues, or replacement parts.
These can all be brought back by simply copy/paste’ing them from the template page
if they are needed later and removing empty sections will make the page easier to read.
If you would like a deeper explanation of the different sections of the template page
there is an example page with comments for each section you can read through as well.
When you are working on any page in the wiki you will likely encounter template objects.
These are like widgets that make it easier to structure and present information without
needing to manually repeat a lot of work. There is a page that goes over the common templates
I have made for the site if you want to look into them more. You can delete these where they aren’t
needed as they can be brought back very easily but you should leave the DeviceAlerts and InfoBox
templates on the device pages as they are critical to how those pages are presented. Frustratingly,
there seems to be no way of making templates for tables on a MediaWiki website. So I have
had to create a separate page with common tables that you may want to copy and paste into a page.
This means you are free to delete them if you have nothing to put in them and can get
them back later if needed. If you are putting information into a default table and need to
add a new measurement type or change the captions or headers, feel free to. The tables included in
the preloaded page are just meant to cover more common cases and won’t be right for all devices.
Next I want to mention file uploads and information sources. Pictures will likely
be the largest cause of cost increases for the site and also has the most potential to run into
legal issues. Now I want all the pictures you can provide that will help users, locations of blown
caps, full circuit boards, screw locations, and oscilloscope waveforms are all examples of great
things that could help people. The only real restriction I’m going to enforce for uploads
is when it comes to the legal right to use them. Manuals, schematics, advertisements, EEPROM dumps,
drivers, and anything else that was made by manufacturers cannot be legally used here because
each of those has their own copyright the caps wiki would not have authorization to reproduce.
So do not upload them here. This also goes for screenshotting other people’s videos without
permission. That won’t be acceptable and to be very clear it would not fall under fair use. If
you run a youtube channel it would make moderation easier if you put a note about that on your user
page if you use screenshots from your videos. If you want to reference material in other videos
or documents like that you can link to youtube or a manufacturer's page on where to download them.
If the files aren’t available from the manufacturers you can link to copies
hosted on archive.org if available because that is what they specialize in. Now when it comes
to the actual information about a device you have a lot more flexibility because factual information
cannot be covered by copyright. This means if you reference a schematic or other sources to see what
parts are in a device, you are clear to put that information here. Please just remember that it
is most helpful when there is enough information about them to be able to order them confidently.
I think that’s everything I wanted to cover. I’ve put so much time and thought into this and I feel
like I’m forgetting a million little things. I do have a few final disjointed thoughts that
might be helpful. I’ve currently set up the site so you have to make an account to edit but
you don’t have to give it an email address. It’s mostly just to prevent spam. Feel free to add more
general educational pages and link them to the home page or create categories for them as needed.
The same is true for specialty pages, right now there still needs to be some created for
dallas clocks and rifa capacitors that I can think of for sure.
Keep in mind that this is a wiki and not a personal blog or project log site and that
someone else may edit a page you make even for small reasons like grammar. It’s not a slight on
you or your writing, it's just the nature of this type of site. Also it would be preferred to not
write pages in the first person to make everything more generalized, but even I have messed that
up in some places. Just something to keep in mind. At the bottom of device pages there is a
section to add links, if you made a youtube video about repairing something you can link it there
since watching the process can be very helpful to people. Just keep in mind that this isn’t a
place for self promotion so please don’t make low effort or shell pages with nothing but a
video link, I will remove them. On that note, you can link to websites that sell parts kits, though
there is an irony in that since this site will likely cut into their business, but there must
be some information on the parts on the wiki page or I will consider it advertising and remove it.
I think that’s everything I wanted to let you know about when it comes to working on the website.
I encourage anyone to start documenting repairs they do on there. And if you have any questions
or feedback after using the site I would be more than happy to hear them and try to improve it.
Caps wiki is only getting started and I am very open changing the site as it
evolves to match what the users need. I’ve just done my best to set it up so we can
hit the ground running. That is it for now though and I’ll see you next time.