Hello online riding community!
Based on the concept of Wikipedia the intention of DirtyTorque (https://dirtytorque.co.za) is to create a single, encyclopedic repository for data related to all types of motorcycles and become the first and only place that like minded people need to look for answers to their technical questions. DirtyTorque is not a forum and doesn’t aim to replace the significant value that the healthy debate a forum achieves in having so many technical minds working towards solving the same problem with a different opinion and approach. The intention of DirtyTorque is to become the final destination with the solutions to technical problems and other related useful knowledge.
Often a topic on a forum will have hundreds of responses all contributing to the final solution but can be difficult for somebody to find exactly what they’re looking for amongst all the banter and unrelated data. This is where the power of having a place to store this valuable data will become apparent. Authors of topics (or anyone for that matter) can now contribute to the community in summarizing the technical data into an article on this wiki for others to use, update and contribute to. Seeing the passion and knowledge on the various forums in South Africa, together we could become the recognized global source of reliable information on the Internet related to the sport we love.
Please can everyone review the site and let me know what you think from a concept perspective. I am hoping that this will positively contribute to the whole online riding community and possibly in time to riders all over the world! I'd welcome any suggestions, criticism or feedback. I feel that this concept could add significant value and isn't something that is in competition with any other online community/site that I am aware of. The success of this concept is going to be based on the people with the knowledge to add meaningful content and support it, I can provide the system but don't have the knowledge!
I started riding 3 months ago and since then have been thinking about how I can contribute to the sport of dirt biking. My professional skills are all in IT which doesn't leave much room to contribute much to the sport of riding dirt bikes other than through an IT based system. I am the head of the Infrastructure Solutions department as a leading IT consulting and software development company in South Africa and manage a host of IT systems for our internal infrastructure requirements as well as for our clients. I have a technical team of network and system administrators that rely heavily on technical knowledge being readily available and on hand in order to perform their jobs effectively. The system we use internally to manage knowledge within the team is a Wiki, which looks and works exactly like the famous https://www.wikipedia.org (which is the same software that DirtyTorque is built on) and this is where my idea DirtyTorque came from. Without our internal Wiki my team and I would be completely lost and over the years it has developed into containing literally thousands of critical articles that we all use and contribute to daily.
To get you started on writing your first article just read all the links on the help page here, https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Help:Contents and feel free to start contributing content! This site is live and ready to be populated with your knowledge so feel free to start writing right now!
To give you a brief idea how the site works, how pages can link to each other and how files can be uploaded and downloaded (e.g. the De Wildt GPS maps) I've contributed a small amount of information to the following pages (which can also be found just by navigating your way to them using the navigation bar):
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/KDX200
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Enduro
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/De_Wildt
I've also pre-populated most of the bike manufacturer pages with the obvious bike models I could find and put a few other little bits and pieces of information here and there which you'll find if you just work your way down the navigation links on the left hand side of the site. The pages with red links mean that they haven't been created yet but are just place holders for people to use who would like to contribute to that topic. Also fee free to create new links to pages that aren't there, that is the intention of a wiki, this is your site and you are in control of what gets published! I want to create a sense of ownership of the knowledge amongst the online community and an ethos to inspire people to contribute. Imagine that this site/concept gets known by dirt bikers worldwide that the South African community built and pioneered the first comprehensive online rider's encyclopedia with accurate, reliable information? Different opinions can quite easily and happily co-exist, if you have a completely different opinion on a particular article simply create your page right next to an existing page (as opposed to doing a drastic edit/rewrite of the original) and let the public decide which page to follow.
Specific areas that I'd welcome feedback on are (but I would welcome any feedback at all!) include:
1) Category structure in the navigation bar on the left? Have I left any obvious categories out? Does the current layout work?
2) Technically I'm worried that some people may struggle with contributing articles due to the Wiki formatting syntax. Was the help page I put together useful? Is there anything else I should add? Did you struggle to create your first article?
3) What do you think of the Wiki logo? (its supposed to look like the Wikipedia logo)
4) What do you think of the name DirtyTorque? (as in talking dirty, riding is dirty, torque sounds like talk, Ok Ok you get the figure of speech!)
5) Basically is this a good idea or not?
Please email all suggestions to [email protected] or just edit and update the Suggestions page on the wiki, https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Suggestions
If anyone would like to get more involved in this site or have any ideas that you'd like to discuss feel free to send me an email requesting my cell phone number and we can chat.
Looking forward to your valuable comment,
Cheers,
Carl Snyman (Openvisor)
Based on the concept of Wikipedia the intention of DirtyTorque (https://dirtytorque.co.za) is to create a single, encyclopedic repository for data related to all types of motorcycles and become the first and only place that like minded people need to look for answers to their technical questions. DirtyTorque is not a forum and doesn’t aim to replace the significant value that the healthy debate a forum achieves in having so many technical minds working towards solving the same problem with a different opinion and approach. The intention of DirtyTorque is to become the final destination with the solutions to technical problems and other related useful knowledge.
Often a topic on a forum will have hundreds of responses all contributing to the final solution but can be difficult for somebody to find exactly what they’re looking for amongst all the banter and unrelated data. This is where the power of having a place to store this valuable data will become apparent. Authors of topics (or anyone for that matter) can now contribute to the community in summarizing the technical data into an article on this wiki for others to use, update and contribute to. Seeing the passion and knowledge on the various forums in South Africa, together we could become the recognized global source of reliable information on the Internet related to the sport we love.
Please can everyone review the site and let me know what you think from a concept perspective. I am hoping that this will positively contribute to the whole online riding community and possibly in time to riders all over the world! I'd welcome any suggestions, criticism or feedback. I feel that this concept could add significant value and isn't something that is in competition with any other online community/site that I am aware of. The success of this concept is going to be based on the people with the knowledge to add meaningful content and support it, I can provide the system but don't have the knowledge!
I started riding 3 months ago and since then have been thinking about how I can contribute to the sport of dirt biking. My professional skills are all in IT which doesn't leave much room to contribute much to the sport of riding dirt bikes other than through an IT based system. I am the head of the Infrastructure Solutions department as a leading IT consulting and software development company in South Africa and manage a host of IT systems for our internal infrastructure requirements as well as for our clients. I have a technical team of network and system administrators that rely heavily on technical knowledge being readily available and on hand in order to perform their jobs effectively. The system we use internally to manage knowledge within the team is a Wiki, which looks and works exactly like the famous https://www.wikipedia.org (which is the same software that DirtyTorque is built on) and this is where my idea DirtyTorque came from. Without our internal Wiki my team and I would be completely lost and over the years it has developed into containing literally thousands of critical articles that we all use and contribute to daily.
To get you started on writing your first article just read all the links on the help page here, https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Help:Contents and feel free to start contributing content! This site is live and ready to be populated with your knowledge so feel free to start writing right now!
To give you a brief idea how the site works, how pages can link to each other and how files can be uploaded and downloaded (e.g. the De Wildt GPS maps) I've contributed a small amount of information to the following pages (which can also be found just by navigating your way to them using the navigation bar):
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/KDX200
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Enduro
https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/De_Wildt
I've also pre-populated most of the bike manufacturer pages with the obvious bike models I could find and put a few other little bits and pieces of information here and there which you'll find if you just work your way down the navigation links on the left hand side of the site. The pages with red links mean that they haven't been created yet but are just place holders for people to use who would like to contribute to that topic. Also fee free to create new links to pages that aren't there, that is the intention of a wiki, this is your site and you are in control of what gets published! I want to create a sense of ownership of the knowledge amongst the online community and an ethos to inspire people to contribute. Imagine that this site/concept gets known by dirt bikers worldwide that the South African community built and pioneered the first comprehensive online rider's encyclopedia with accurate, reliable information? Different opinions can quite easily and happily co-exist, if you have a completely different opinion on a particular article simply create your page right next to an existing page (as opposed to doing a drastic edit/rewrite of the original) and let the public decide which page to follow.
Specific areas that I'd welcome feedback on are (but I would welcome any feedback at all!) include:
1) Category structure in the navigation bar on the left? Have I left any obvious categories out? Does the current layout work?
2) Technically I'm worried that some people may struggle with contributing articles due to the Wiki formatting syntax. Was the help page I put together useful? Is there anything else I should add? Did you struggle to create your first article?
3) What do you think of the Wiki logo? (its supposed to look like the Wikipedia logo)
4) What do you think of the name DirtyTorque? (as in talking dirty, riding is dirty, torque sounds like talk, Ok Ok you get the figure of speech!)
5) Basically is this a good idea or not?
Please email all suggestions to [email protected] or just edit and update the Suggestions page on the wiki, https://dirtytorque.co.za/wiki/Suggestions
If anyone would like to get more involved in this site or have any ideas that you'd like to discuss feel free to send me an email requesting my cell phone number and we can chat.
Looking forward to your valuable comment,
Cheers,
Carl Snyman (Openvisor)
