Volunteer Wanted: Update The Laser Wiki Pages

Howdy laser folks,

I’m working on propagating relevant content from the old ATXHS Wiki to the new Asmbly wiki, and some of our valuable laser knowledge pages are looking kind of stale. If anyone is willing, able, and interested to help update our laser content, message me and I’ll set you up with a wiki login.

The new wiki engine has a visual editor, so no wiki-source wrangling is required!

Page Details:

I think Laser Cutter Supplies - Asmbly Wiki is the worst, but it’d be good if somebody knowledgable could look over Laser Cutter Materials - Asmbly Wiki too for any additions or modifications.

The Blue and Red pages could use some cleaning – maybe have a think about how all this information could be presented more clearly? Maybe a pages on material safety, suppliers, laser cutter theory of operation in general, how to do a drawing for laser cutters in general (corel, illustrator, inkscape), ULS laser controllers (direct print dialog), Ruida laser controllers (Lightburn), and then machine-specific details on each laser’s page.

The old wiki had some more general laser info that may or may not be worth propagating to Asmbly:
http://wiki.atxhs.org/wiki/Xl12000
http://wiki.atxhs.org/wiki/Laser_HOWTO
http://wiki.atxhs.org/wiki/Using_Inkscape_with_the_Laser_Cutter
http://wiki.atxhs.org/wiki/LaserCleaning

Why not use the wiki functionality in discourse ?

The short answer is that we were using MediaWiki long before we were using Discourse, and I had no idea Discourse had a wiki feature.

Looking at it briefly (What is a Wiki Post? - faq - Discourse Meta) I’m not impressed. A Discourse wiki is the same as any other thread; you just allow others to edit the posts. It obviously has categories (topics) but I don’t see any other provision for dynamic content like templates, and I’m overall not a huge fan of the UX in general.

I do like the idea of Discourse trust levels automatically managing who has access to edit the wiki. That’d be cool.

If somebody wants to start a knowledgebase on Discourse I wouldn’t say no. We can kick the tires and see how people like it.