So… how do I sign up to edit the RepRap wiki? Can’t find a link to create an account anywhere.
Not gonna lie, it’s so monumentally out of date and full of technical inaccuracies that I’m not sure it’s worth the time to improve. Feels more like a historical archive than a knowledge resource. Anybody have any thoughts on that?
I think it’s the first place newbies go to and we should try to get it correct. Frankly, I don’t even know what is wrong there.
are we better off starting fresh ? the core idea of REPRAP is kinda gone anyway.
@william_foster Eh, there are many dozens of resources now, from dead-tree books to blogs to online newbie guides. I don’t know that “start fresh” is required, but you’d need people to throw their weight behind something, for sure.
The RepRap concept is still actively pursued by some people (eg see the RepRap Snappy) so it’s not completely gone. Just not the mainstream dev focus for the 3DP community at large. Now it’s all about print quality and UI/UX.
Fragmentation. It’s easy to get collaboration behind code like marlin and smoothie, but quite difficult to collaborate on hardware.
The technical knowledge required to design a 3d printer is actually very small, you could make one out of scraps of wood and Legos. But the technical knowledge required to design a GOOD 3d printer is high, with strong knowledge of physics, acute attention to detail, electronics, mechanics, harmonics, thermodynamics, etc. That wide gap means that you will see hundreds of me too 3d printer designs that are poor to mediocre, and only a few that are good to exceptional. This fragmentation means that a design will be built, uploaded, and abandoned faster than you can manage it.
@Stephanie_A As a builder/designer of mediocre shit I can only confirm this.
I’ll second what @Stephanie_A said, and add that it (unfortunately) takes almost as much knowledge of such things to distinguish between good and bad machines designed by someone else.
To answer the original question, the signup page is at http://reprap.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup, but it has been restricted to administrators (presumably because they were getting mostly spammers signing up). You’ll need to contact an administrator (listed here: http://reprap.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&group=sysop) to create an account. The only ones I know G+ IDs for are @Adrian_Bowyer and @Neil_Underwood .
@Whosa_whatsis Thanks, it looks like they locked out new accounts earlier this month. The new user creation log is 99% spammers, I don’t blame them. Really need a way to let actual new users in though… The admins have been manually adding a few people but I don’t know how to get in touch with them.
Looking through the wiki logs, it’s pretty clear that the site is in serious decline. Most of the admins are inactive, with only 3 new admins in the past 3 years. Most non-spam contributions lately are adding pet project pages and commercial supplier links. Both of those are perfectly reasonable content, but they’re not improving the low quality technical content, which is what I personally think the wiki needs most to be a useful resource.
Does it show which admins have been adding new users? I haven’t seen most of them around in a while, but I should have email addresses for most of them in my archive…
@Whosa_whatsis http://reprap.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=newusers&user=&page=&year=&month=-1
Shows self-creation and admin creation.
@Ryan_Carlyle I emailed info to you.
@Whosa_whatsis Thanks much
The other way to get in contact with someone (which I’d guess is what most of the other recent additions did) would be to look for any of the admins hanging out in the reprap IRC channel.
Followup: successfully got in touch via email. Which is good, because I haven’t used IRC in ten years.