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RV Builder WIKI Page

I'm planning to start building an RV10, and have been sifting through materials in all places. I have spent days going through posts in this forum and learned incredible amount of stuff, spending countless hours going through builder blogs, watching builder Youtube videos, etc. They are good, but at the same time, they are incredibly hard to organize from a builder's point of view --- say for future reference. Taking good notes for something you will run into in 2 years is difficult, and it is common to stop constantly updating these notes. Every builder repeats the same exercise with different coverage.

So, would it be great if there is a Wiki page ? Where all the experience/stories from the community, including VANs, are presented in a structured and organized and searchable way. Maybe with pointers to the origins of information, such as VANSairforce.net threads, Youtube links, URLs to documents, vendor web pages, etc.

I'd imagine there will be enough volunteers to contribute and maintain the content, and keep it sane. Maybe VANS can be interested in chime in from time to time too.

If this has been tried before, what is the reason it didn't survive ?

What does it take to start one ?
Any legal hurdle ?
Money ?

[Gets brought up every few years, Lee - imagine it would be an enormous time commitment. I see this is your first post. Just off the top of my head I could envision 'influencers' and commercial enties flooding it with their products and videos for clicks. My guess (having done this website for nearly 15 years full time) is you'll spend 90% of your time doing things in the background on things you haven't fleshed out. At least that was/is my case.

And to be honest, I view it as competing with what I'm trying to do here....so I'm conflicted.

v/r,dr]
 
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This is awesome, Martin. Thanks! I'll sure join your effort when I get things started.

I understand the extra overhead this brings. However, considering I have saved so much time and effort by learning from other builders, contributing to this wiki would be a way to "pay forward".

I also think the wiki would be complimentary to the VansAirforce forum. A wiki page is not a place to do discussions. This forum is probably the only place to ask questions and have world-wide/community wide discussions about issues. As solutions emerge, they can be summarized into a wiki page contribution.

For a builder, the existence of both systems will be immensely useful.
 
This is awesome, Martin. Thanks! I'll sure join your effort when I get things started.

I understand the extra overhead this brings. However, considering I have saved so much time and effort by learning from other builders, contributing to this wiki would be a way to "pay forward".

I also think the wiki would be complimentary to the VansAirforce forum. A wiki page is not a place to do discussions. This forum is probably the only place to ask questions and have world-wide/community wide discussions about issues. As solutions emerge, they can be summarized into a wiki page contribution.

For a builder, the existence of both systems will be immensely useful.

Just to be clear I did not start the wiki RV-10 page and not involved in anyway at this point. I have a RV-14. I just remembered seeing the post a few days earlier and thought I would pass it on.
 
FWIW, there's been an RV Wiki for close to 20 years, ever since the Matronics mailing list days. It was started by a fellow RV builder and amassed a large amount of information from the local RV building community. Initially it was on vansairforce.org, but when my friend decided to give up that domain, Matronics offered to host it on their server. Sadly the domain was snapped up by some bot before it could be offered to DR... I still sometimes enter that by accident when i'm trying to get here.

The Wiki is at h t t p://www.matronics.com/wiki/index.php/RV

(I recognize that this kind of competes with VAF so i've removed the "link" from the URL... If you want to go there, you'll know what to do)

We never had an issue with spammers, you could only create content with an account and accounts had to be approved. It wasn't a problem, but it was 20 years ago. Unfortunately, just like content here on VAF, a lot of links go to places that don't exist anymore because people didn't move content to the Wiki, they just linked to it. That's changed a bit here now that we can upload photos, so content going forward should be stable if people chose to post it all here. Same would be true on the Wiki.

One plus for the Wiki, you can search and find links that have "picasaweb" in them, for example, if you want to chase down old links and redirect them to their new sites. Still haven't found a way to do that here on VAF...
 
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