# Interest in making a cubing wiki portal?



## badmephisto (Jun 18, 2008)

One of the biggest problems with the cubing world right now is that there is no central portal for all cubing-related articles.

I thought it would be a great idea to harness the power of community-created content through a Wiki page, and create a webpage like that. The idea is that anyone can quickly register and right away start contributing links, descriptions, and everything related to cubing. We could have pages for everything in the cubing world - tips/tricks on F2L, list of all programs, list of all cubes and their descriptions, articles on world records, the people that hold them, just... everything! 
And the beauty of it is that whenever something new comes up, there isn't just one person that needs to update his page, but anyone can go to the corresponding page on the wiki, and just edit an entry right away to reflect some news.

This way we could have many people collaborate and together we could achieve something bigger than any one person could with conventional methods by just creating a webpage. (of course, they still can, and we can link to it through the wiki)

Would there be any interest into something like this? Would people volunteer to be editors for cubing-related topics? Does this sound like something people would want to get into?


Here is a wiki that I set up very quickly:
http://badmephisto.mine.nu/gripperwiki/index.php/Main_Page

If anyone would like to work on this project, you can register and start contributing right away. (In fact you need not even register) I think the first best thing would be to compile a good skeleton of all topics that will need to be filled with descriptions and outside links. If there is enough interest I will get .com domain for it, make it all much nicer and neater, and even advertise it through my YouTube channel and so on.

(oh and for those who don't know how to edit wiki pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page )


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## ShadenSmith (Jun 18, 2008)

I think that's a great idea. I've been thinking about something like that for a while, ever since I bought the domain 2guys1cube.com. I think someday I might start a page that's a sort of all-in-one cubing site. There will be a timer, a database of algorithms, a huge collection of tutorials, tournament listings, records, etc.

But I'm way too lazy to do that right now, so I'm all for the wiki! Great idea!


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## Johannes91 (Jun 18, 2008)

One wiki was created 2.5 years ago already, see http://twistypuzzles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4219. Is it still online somewhere?

And Ryan Heise made this: http://oosan.ryanheise.com/Main_Page.

But sadly, there wasn't much interest. If that has changed, it might make more sense to use that instead of starting from scratch.


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## badmephisto (Jun 18, 2008)

That twistypuzzles thing, even if it exists, is way out of date. A lot of things would change in 2.5 years 

Ryan Heise is not as active as I am. If we needed to do very quick maintenance or something similar, I can take care of it right away. I went through "random pages" on his wiki, and there are below 10 pages on that wiki. This would hardly count as starting from scratch compared to that.

There is already a lot of material out there. This wiki would be mainly about linking all of it together than having original content of its own. I imagine it more as a giant index of all things first, and original content as second, filling in the gaps. Why re-invent the wheel?


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## JBCM627 (Jun 18, 2008)

Cool... I'll try and put a few things on there


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## badmephisto (Jun 18, 2008)

wow i dont know who did the entire software section, but job well done!


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## JBCM627 (Jun 18, 2008)

thx 

Actually I just copied most of it from wikipedia and added/moded a couple things...

Notation for cubes is there now too.


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## hawkmp4 (Jun 18, 2008)

I'd be interested in doing some work on it... I can't say I'm an expert on cubing but I do have a lot of web design experience so should we decide we want to do a portal of sorts I could probably help out.


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## Dene (Jun 18, 2008)

Well done, this will be very useful. It'd be a race to edit every time someone set a new WR


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## Johannes91 (Jun 19, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> I went through "random pages" on his wiki, and there are below 10 pages on that wiki.


Yeah, there seems to be less content than I remembered. But there are more than 10 pages at least, look at Special:Allpages.



JBCM627 said:


> Notation for cubes is there now too.


Does anyone use [[noparse]U[/noparse]], [R], and [F]?


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## Jai (Jun 19, 2008)

Haha, if we make this wiki and it becomes popular, we could possibly lose a lot of traffic in our beginner's section.


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## JBCM627 (Jun 19, 2008)

Johannes91 said:


> JBCM627 said:
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> > Notation for cubes is there now too.
> ...



Not really, but it is ok as notation. I had a couple people do it on fewest moves at Cornell.


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## Lotsofsloths (Jun 19, 2008)

JBCM627 said:


> Johannes91 said:
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Its makes stuff a lot neater so people don't get jumbled.


@Badmephisto:
I would be glad to help write some of the article!

EDIT: I already wrote a review for the type E.


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## JBCM627 (Jun 19, 2008)

I moved the cubes over to a page under beginners to describe all puzzle types... perhaps I should have made a seperate page? There are probably a lot of ways this could be done. It seemed redundant not to put all hardware types under a general type of hardware page though... opinions?


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## Johannes91 (Jun 20, 2008)

JBCM627 said:


> Johannes91 said:
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> > Does anyone use [[noparse]U[/noparse]], [R], and [F]?
> ...


I think the wiki should explain the notations that are used instead of coming up with new ones.



JBCM627 said:


> I had a couple people do it on fewest moves at Cornell.


In that case, they were violating the regulations. Article 12 is ambiguous at many places, but the alternative notation for rotations uses lower-case letters.


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## badmephisto (Jun 20, 2008)

Just use the mainstream notation. We don't need people inventing new types of notation and then supporting that and perpetuating the (useless) knowledge


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## JBCM627 (Jun 20, 2008)

Johannes91 said:


> JBCM627 said:
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Ok... it is a slight nuance. I changed them to lower case letters, so now it is [r]  and [f].




badmephisto said:


> Just use the mainstream notation. We don't need people inventing new types of notation and then supporting that and perpetuating the (useless) knowledge



I suppose the bracket notation isn't necessarily mainstream, but it is more obvious how the cube should be rotated, and imho therefore a better system (and worth mentioning) as you don't need to memorize which axes are which.


Feel free to change anything I write, too...


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## badmephisto (Jun 24, 2008)

alright thank you JBCM for contributing but it seems like there is not enough interest in continuing the project. Its very hard to find people that go out of their way to help out others. I will probably be taking down the website in a week or so


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## JBCM627 (Jun 24, 2008)

:/ Maybe in the future. I wouldn't think it should be too hard to publicize... this forum just might not be the best place. If you emailed Ron and had him post a link on speedcubing.com or the WCA site, or the Rubiks.com forum, yahoo groups, etc, it may draw more attention... this forum isn't _too_ active yet. Otherwise, alright, if you ever set it up again I'll be glad to contribute.

edit: rubetimer.com has possibly had many of its hits due to it being on the rubiks.com forum... lots of newbs there. Although unfortunately also noobs, but, hey...


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## tim (Jun 25, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> alright thank you JBCM for contributing but it seems like there is not enough interest in continuing the project. Its very hard to find people that go out of their way to help out others. I will probably be taking down the website in a week or so



You give up so fast? It's very unlikely, that your wiki is crowded within a few days. And you also need a proper url, which people can easily remember without bookmarking it.


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## JBCM627 (Jun 25, 2008)

like speedsolving.com/wiki


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## hawkmp4 (Jun 25, 2008)

I'd do more but...to be honest I have no idea how to edit pages or create new ones >.>


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## badmephisto (Jun 25, 2008)

tim said:


> badmephisto said:
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> > alright thank you JBCM for contributing but it seems like there is not enough interest in continuing the project. Its very hard to find people that go out of their way to help out others. I will probably be taking down the website in a week or so
> ...



First of all its not "my wiki", i thought of it strictly as a community project from the beginning. I didn't expect any visitors or anything, but I was hoping that more than one person would add at least a sentence, or a single link, and that didn't happen. I also said I would get a decent domain name for it if it picked up a little. 

Although the idea of having it as www.speedsolving.com/wiki seems like a very interesting one  I wonder what pjk would say to that


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## JBCM627 (Jun 25, 2008)

hawkmp4 said:


> I'd do more but...to be honest I have no idea how to edit pages or create new ones >.>



I hadn't really done much either before now... only a very rare thing here or there on wikipedia. The syntax is really really self-explanatory... just look at what other people have done, and it should follow very easily. To actually edit, just click the "edit" tab at the top of a page, or the 'edit' link for any sections of a page.


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## pjk (Jun 25, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> tim said:
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I think it is a great idea. I have plans for expanding the site (which I won't mention right now). I know several wiki pages for speedcubing have been tried, but none of them seemed to be serious. I may talk to Ryan to see what he thinks about combining into 1 wiki page. In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to start developing one on another site. It won't be hard to move when the time comes. A lot of the information for the wiki can be found simply by searching these forums.


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## badmephisto (Jun 25, 2008)

pjk said:


> I think it is a great idea. I have plans for expanding the site (which I won't mention right now). I know several wiki pages for speedcubing have been tried, but none of them seemed to be serious. I may talk to Ryan to see what he thinks about combining into 1 wiki page. In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to start developing one on another site. It won't be hard to move when the time comes. A lot of the information for the wiki can be found simply by searching these forums.



ok great! well in that case I will leave the wiki online so that it is available should someone want to add more stuff. Once you get it all sorted out we can migrate all content as necessary.


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## JBCM627 (Jun 26, 2008)

Ok, I posted something on the rubiks.com forum about this... hopefully there will be some more (useful!) contributions on the way...


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## pjk (Aug 1, 2008)

I've looked into this quite a bit, and definitely plan on making it happen. However, I want to get the site up on its new server before doing this, which will most likely be done in mid-August. I will post updates when the time comes.


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## JBCM627 (Aug 1, 2008)

Speaking of this, I don't know if you saw this pjk, but Ron mentioned something about a competitions wiki on the wca forums: http://www.worldcubeassociation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=457


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