[Ben P.]

I saw a lot medieval, renn, and gunpowder military articles on wiki today and then I thought about RAT's wikipedia task force.

In case you don't know they fix, improve and maintain roman related articles.

My proposal is that we form our own task force join wiki's military history task forces and then go to editing, unlike RAT however we'd be more focused on armour and weapons and like RAT we would post updates on our latest wiki updates and contribs here.


How does this sound?

[Nathan Robinson]

I'd very much like to see a group of informed people take on such wikipedia entries updating, correcting, and maintaining them. A group of like-minded people with the same focus would allow you guys to do peer review and quality control as well. I'm all for it.

Over the years I've taken time to edit many entries to remove some of the really bad information that was present. I also attempted to remove a lot of myArmoury.com copyrighted materials from the site and have created original art for such entries as the schematic diagram of a sword's parts in the "sword" entry.

[A. Spanjer]

Sounds like a great idea!

I'm all for it!

[Ben P.]

[Nathan Robinson]

[Ben P.]

[Jean Thibodeau]

Call it courtesy and respect in asking Nathan's opinion about it before doing it, rather than needing a formal permission.

[Chad Arnow]

I think Nathan's point is that myArmoury staff/administrators don't have time to organize or administer this effort, but people are welcome to undertake this as they see fit. It won't officially be a "myArmoury" effort in principle or in name, though.

[Ben P.]

[J.D. Crawford]

It's a good idea. Wikipedia is pretty user-friendly, and its easy to focus on a couple of areas in which one has particular expertise.

There's a dangerous discrepancy between the level of knowledge going into some of these sites and the amount they are used. Its scary how many university students are getting their knowledge from this source. We are even catching graduate students doing this. On the other hand, Professional academics seem disdainful or maybe just unaware how easy it is to do. I think that contributions are especially useful when one can provide references for the material provided, as in academic papers. It leaves a knowledge trail and nullifies the tendency to quibble over opinions.

I've expanded and monitored several sites related to my professional life (not historical arms). Someone might come along and mess around with it, but unless the new information is outright false I figure one has to go with the flow.

[Ed Toton]

I'd like to point out that folks are also welcome to update and expand SwordWiki as well, which I had offered to host after a discussion on SFI. It still needs a lot of work, but the basic framework is in place.