Poll: What aspects of the wiki have you found to be the most useful?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I'm allowing up to six options per user since there's no "winner", only an overall indication of what the wiki is actually valued the most for.

This can be both what you use the wiki for now, and what you've used it for in the past. It's whatever you've found to be the most useful and the most relevant to you personally.

Hopefully I've covered most things somehow or other.

[Findecanor]

I would have used the term "vintage keyboard" instead of "obsolete keyboard". That is what I assume that you meant.
Now that there are more ways to use older keyboards, with adapters, converters and mods, fewer and fewer vintage keyboards are obsolete.

BTW, I have to admit that I sometimes use the Wiki also as a way to quickly find links to other resources on the web, that I remember are linked from the Wiki, that I really should have bookmarked instead ...

[Daniel Beardsmore]

"Vintage" is a meaningless term by itself — a keyboard can be "1980 vintage" but not "vintage". I avoid "vintage" now because nobody's defined any cut-off point, and of course keyboards that seem old can turn out to have remained in production a lot longer than you'd imagine.

I'm trying to distinguish between people who hope or expect that the wiki has details on products on sale right now, very recently made products (e.g. short community production runs) and upcoming products, versus products that are definitely out of production. It's a vague and hard-to-convey notion.

What's curious is how many votes there are for keyboard identification, something I do think it needs to be better at, somehow.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

(I also notice that the results are publicly visible when logged out. They're not meant to be secret and I hope that everyone can see the results! I didn't get a secret setting that I recall.)

[002]

What's curious is how many votes there are for keyboard identification, something I do think it needs to be better at, somehow.

I think even though there may not be a dedicated page for identifying keyboards (that I am aware of), the wiki is still useful for it. Most times I am thinking *that looks a bit like a <insert make / model here>*, then go to the wiki to confirm. The switch identification page is excellent.

[Findecanor]

I avoid "vintage" now because nobody's defined any cut-off point, and of course keyboards that seem old can turn out to have remained in production a lot longer than you'd imagine.

Good points. I was influenced by the use of "vintage" for action figures - it usually means something made in the 1980's.

For me at least, a "vintage keyboard" is (yes) a keyboard with an obsolete interface or a PC keyboard before Windows 95.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I think even though there may not be a dedicated page for identifying keyboards (that I am aware of), the wiki is still useful for it. Most times I am thinking *that looks a bit like a <insert make / model here>*, then go to the wiki to confirm.

That is true. There is identification as in "I'm pretty sure this is a …" and there is identification as in "I have no idea what this is". The latter is a more curious problem. You could dump all the photos on a single page, but that might not be a good idea …

In either case, it affirms my belief in the importance of getting as many keyboard entries with photos as possible.

[Edit: Un-bodged the quotation]

[seebart]

Voted! Switch identification and detailed specifications of keyboards and switches.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Need moar votes … (it's stagnated on 75 votes, which is likely a lot fewer than 75 people)

[kbdfr]

Voted days ago.

[snuci]

One thing to note here is that this poll is for those who have logins so it's skewed more towards people who are interested enough to sign up for a forum and participate. It doesn't capture those who do Google searches and find the Wiki to get specific information for one keyboard or the switches that are in that keyboard that they may want to buy. I would guess this is a good portion of usage so these people will not see or vote on this survey. If you look at bottom of the Wiki Stats page, you can see the heavily used pages. wiki/Special:Statistics Metrics might be a better indication of usage and interest.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I'm glad that one person two people voted for the introductory pages. Maybe they got low votes because they're rubbish and confusing (I mean, I wrote them! ;-) but realistically most people here won't have read them as they're quite recent, and therefore too late for most people.

And even two votes for pointing devices. (Although there's not much about them yet!)

The page hits don't indicate whether people found the pages useful, only that people visited them. It's not the same thing at all. Also, of the mere ten pages we can see, one is the main page (not useful)! The scope of the wiki is not covered by that tiny list of pages.

I'm not pretending that this poll is hugely useful, but I just felt like getting some idea of what the wiki is proving useful for. It may be of some indication as to where future effort should be focused, either to correct for apparent inadequacies, or to boost the most useful parts of it. For example, since switch identification is important, it may be wise to improve it, as the switch recognition pages are very inadequate.

I've just noticed, the graph bars are up the creek. 1 and 2 are the same length, and 3, 4 and 5 are all disproportionate. Above that the lengths seem to be proportionate, but the low vote numbers for many options are overrepresented by the graphs.

[Halvar]

I have to say that six options were too few for me though, I would have needed 8-10. Low numbers don't automatically mean that very few people care, it just means that people care about other things more. Things like introductory pages are read once per person, while people come back often for keyboard and switch identification.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

OK, I've increased the number of options to 10.

[emdude]

BTW, I have to admit that I sometimes use the Wiki also as a way to quickly find links to other resources on the web, that I remember are linked from the Wiki, that I really should have bookmarked instead ...

Yes, I agree the wiki is great for this, especially with pages pertaining to detailed specifications on keyboards/keyswitches. Having links to relevant, but hard-to-find, patents, documents, or prior teardowns is very useful.

I think the wiki is weakest on keyboard maintenance/repair. That sort of information is scattered across the various communities and it would probably be difficult to settle on the best way(s) to skin a particular cat. And the Workshop Threads of Interest page hasn't been updated in a very long time.