The Forum Biki Page

Rovi

Excellent stuff, it should make a big difference to the shooting board, both as a convenient source of frequently sought information and as a means of reducing the number of 'stickys'.

I've sorted the Manufacturers/Firearms list alphabetically, and added a bunch more entries.
Perhaps someone'd check them for accuracy?


Also, I'm just wondering what's to stop anyone and everyone from going in and modifying/deleting anything and everything on the site???
I know that I added stuff to the Manufacturers list before I actually registered, so the changes show up having been done by an anonymous IP address.


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Hobbes

Its nice, however you have to understand that you are sharing the biki with others. Not everyone will come to your pages via the shooting forum link.

So please rename the topics so they make more sense.

Eg.

manufacturers - Biki rountinely gets spammed by external sources with page full of links. I mistook this page for spam. I removed it, did some checking and putit back. It should be renamed to "gun manufacturers" and possibly put a link in top back to the shooting forums main topic so people wonder why the post is there.

clubs - Should be renamed to "gun clubs" as on its own people might think they are known clubs in dublin.

You could probably do it with other links as well.

Sparks

Excellent stuff, it should make a big difference to the shooting board, both as a convenient source of frequently sought information and as a means of reducing the number of 'stickys'.

I hope so. It's not an original idea - there's at least one out there already - but none addressing the general topic of shooting in Ireland. And since wiki content is by definition not copyrighted, we can "steal" good bits from other places if we want

Incidentally, for those who've never seen a Wiki before, and have no idea on how to use one, there's a pretty decent introduction here that walks through it from introduction, through authoring your first page through to more advanced stuff.

Also, I'm just wondering what's to stop anyone and everyone from going in and modifying/deleting anything and everything on the site???

Well, basicly, nothing. That's by design. As that introduction put it:

The concept of a Wiki Wiki (or 'Wiki' for short) is that the quality of content improves when everyone is allowed, even encouraged, to author and refactor any page.

Wikis don't work if people aren't bold . You've got to get out there and make those changes, correct that grammar, add those facts, and make that language precise. It's okay - it's what everyone expects. So you should never ask, "Why aren't these pages copyedited?" - you should just fix it. It does require some amount of politeness, but amazingly it works.

Let's be absolutely clear: if someone writes an inferior article, don't worry about their feelings. Correct it, add to it, and if it's a total waste of time, outright replace it with something better. That's the whole point of a Wiki! And nothing's lost anyway - it's all kept in the page's version history, so can be recovered if need be. And of course, others will boldly and mercilessly edit what you write. Don't take it personally. They, like all of us, just want to make the content of the Wiki the best it can be.

The problem of people vandalising pages is apparently not as big as you'd imagine - there's an entire encyclopaedia done through wiki, the Wikipedia, and though they have occasional scraps over one or two pages, most of it is trouble-free (and there are arbitration mechanisms for the scraps). The idea that you have to register before contributing is one that sounds like a decent idea, but carries with it the problem that someone idly browsing through it who notices one small inaccuracy (even something as trivial as a spelling mistake) can't just click a single button and fix it, they have to go through a whole registration process, which tends to put them off. I know exactly what you mean though, and we'll keep an eye on it for obvious vandalism. Hopefully it won't be a big problem though.

There are a few pages which are outside the wiki and that'll let us keep any pages we really don't want edited to stay static, but those should hopefully be the exception rather than the rule.

Its nice, however you have to understand that you are sharing the biki with others. Not everyone will come to your pages via the shooting forum link.

So please rename the topics so they make more sense.

Whoops. Right, I've moved a lot of pages (users don't worry, the wiki system handles all this transparently so links should update automatically) to add prefixes to them, so for example, Manufacturers is now ShootingLinks:Manufacturers.

By the way, if anyone's thinking of doing a lot of wiki work, you might want to think about getting the wiki editor plug-in for Firefox if you're using Firefox as your browser.

Rovi

Looks like everything's happy in the camp now.

Interesting note in the 'history' of the page though (old version, now deleted it would appear)-

11:41, 14 Apr 2005 194.46.78.96 (Firearms are illegal in Ireland and this has nothing to do with boards.ie)

The Firearms Acts must have been amended, and no-one told us


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Hobbes

Rovi wrote:

The Firearms Acts must have been amended, and no-one told us


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Well excuse my noobish comment.

Rovi

Hobbes wrote:

Well excuse my noobish comment.

No offence meant, and I apologise if it came across that way

We Irish shooters (the legal ones, anyhow) are a pretty small part of the population, engaged in a sport/hobby/pastime that is very sensitive to the prevailing political climate. We're only now emerging from a 30 year 'dark ages' in the shooting community, and things are still poised on a bit of a knife edge with amendments to the Firearms Acts currently wending their way through the Dail. This has led to us having a fairly paranoid mindset whenever firearms are mentioned by the body politic or in the media, with every reference scrutinised for nuanced clues to the direction of the winds of political and public opinion.

I'm sure you'll have gathered by now that firearms aren't illegal here (though they are heavily regulated), so I hope you'll understand why the 'Firearms are illegal in Ireland' quote was seized upon as a source of wry amusement, and not a little concern that this misconception might be much more prevalent than we would like.
Shooters are very concerned that the general public not mix them up with the criminal/terrorist element of our population, witness the furore over the Firearms Acts amendments being lumped in with a major revision of the Criminal Justice Act.
We don't want people thinking we're criminals just because we happen to have a gun!
I'd venture to say that firearms licence holders probably have much more contact with and scrutiny from the Guards than most other (law abiding!) sectors of the community. As your local Superintendent has to satisfy themselves that you're a law abiding upstanding member of the community before you'll be issued a licence, I'd suggest that firearms licence holders are in fact a carefully selected subset of the population who are about as diametrically the opposite of the criminal element as it'd be possible to get.


Anyhow, welcome to the Shooting forum,and apologies again if my comment caused offence.


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