I am considerating ways to improve the Form 2 page on the asmbly wiki. Right now there are three sections titled “Maintenance” due to use of the “Hosted” and “Owned” templates on the same page. It would also be nice if there was a checklist and perhaps a few sections copied out of the manual that are referenced a lot.
Here are a few things that might improve the page:
Create “Skitty Dinosaur” and “Calm Llama” pages that include the “Hosted” and “Owned” templates and other machine-specific details. These link to and from the Form 2 page which contains details that apply to both machines.
Add a small section on the Preform software, where to get it and perhaps a few other details.
Add a pre-print checklist.
Add a section on what to do after a failed print.
Add a list of amazon lists for equipment commonly used with the machine.
Does anyone have any other suggestions? Any feedback on what I’m proposing above? I’m happy to put together a proposed changeset that we could use as a starting point for further discussion.
I’ve been thinking about the Amazon list of common things for other shop areas as well (particularly after taking the CNC class and wishing I had a reference like that for myself). I wonder if that’s something worth templatizing in there. @Jon is our resident wiki expert and collaboration is this realm is greatly appreciated! Thanks for thinking on this, discussing ideas, and helping to implement @jstarr.
I’m ambivalent about machine-specific pages, but we do have a fairly rich suite of mediawiki transclusion plugins installed so we could do something maintainable with common base content and machine-specific details.
The “lasers” category also has some general-knowledge pages lumped in with the machine pages. The old ATXHS wiki did some template tricks to create area-knowledge “sidebars” that machines could include so machine users could find relevant knowedge-base pages easily. Those were cool, but they fell into disuse as they became obsolete and folks couldn’t figure out how to maintain them.
So I’m all in favor of information architecture improvements, but not at the expense of maintainability.