Have Wikis for important threads

[Overbom]

For threads where we depend on a slow release of information during a long period of time it is very difficult to keep track of all that info in a centralised place.

For example, in the semiconductor thread, we get plenty of news everyday, but we lack a central repository of information that we can point immediately to people so that everyone has a baseline on what we know so far about x thing (7nm tools, fabs. 14nm tools, fabs etc)

Currently, if you don't read the thread for a week or so, you could potentially miss important news. In addition, for new members it is becoming a daunting task to have to start reading from hundreds of pages back to catch up with the current understanding that older members have. Even with older members, due to how many posts there are there, we can easily forget important info if we have to mentally keep track of a hundred different things in the same time.

Another example, I recently had some questions about some J-20 details that I vaguely recalled reading on the J-20 thread but I couldn't recall the exact info. I tried googling, no results, forum's search was broken (for some reason it doesn't like the keyword "WS-10C") giving back too many unrelated results. If we had a wiki available I would have just gone there and found the answer myself without wasting everyone's time asking redundant questions

A well structured wiki could solve these issues and it would make the mods and people's life easier if for every repeated question people have, they could be pointed directly to the wiki's relevant section which would include sources as well. And if someone forgets said information they could just go to the wiki themselves. Or even better, if we had a recent updates section on the wiki to always see what was the newest update for that wiki (IMO that could be really cool to have for people who can't browse SDF daily)

Of course, said wikis should only be allowed to be made and updated by mods and well-respected members who are widely acknowledged by the forum for their expertise on the subject matter e.g for military threads we could have Blitzo and Deino, engine thread have Latenlazy and sunnymaxi, semiconductor thread have tphuang, tokenanalyst and FairAndUnbiased and so on. Apologies in advance for only naming these people, I am well aware that we have plenty of others that are also knowledgeable on the above fields, this was just a quick example

Would love to hear people's opinions about this. Thank you

 

[BoraTas]

For threads where we depend on a slow release of information during a long period it is very difficult to keep track of all that info in a centralised place.

For example, in the semiconductor thread, we get plenty of news everyday, but we lack a central repository of information that we can point immediately to people so that everyone has a baseline on what we know so far about x thing (7nm tools, fabs. 14nm tools, fabs etc)

Currently, if you don't read the thread for a week or so, you could potentially miss important news. In addition, for new members it is becoming a daunting task to have to start reading from hundreds of pages back to catch up with the current understanding that older members have. Even with older members, due to how many posts there are there, we can easily forget important info if we have to mentally keep track of a hundred different things in the same time.

Another example, I recently had some questions about some J-20 details that I vaguely recalled reading on the J-20 thread but I couldn't recall the exact info. I tried googling, no results, forum's search was broken (for some reason it doesn't like the keyword "WS-10C") giving back too many unrelated results. If we had a wiki available I would have just gone there and found the answer myself without wasting everyone's time asking redundant questions

A well structured wiki could solve these issues and it would make the mods and people's life easier if for every repeated question people have, they could be pointed directly to the wiki's relevant section which would include sources as well. And if someone forgets said information they could just go to the wiki themselves. Or even better, if we had a recent updates section on the wiki to always see what was the newest update for that wiki (IMO that could be really cool to have for people who can't browse SDF daily)

Of course, said wikis should only be allowed to be made and updated by mods and well-respected members who are widely acknowledged by the forum for their expertise on the subject matter e.g for military threads we could have Blitzo and Deino, engine thread have Latenlazy and sunnymaxi, semiconductor thread have tphuang, tokenanalyst and FairAndUnbiased and so on. Apologies in advance for only naming these people, I am well aware that we have plenty of others that are also knowledgeable on the above fields, this was just a quick example

Would love to hear people's opinions about this. Thank you

A well structured from this forum would easily be among the best PLA resources on the non-Chinese internet.

 

[Overbom]

A well structured from this forum would easily be among the best PLA resources on the non-Chinese internet.

Exactly. I mean, SDF is already IMO the gold standard for OSINT PLA watching (well, maybe except a certain person's books lol)

The only problem is that because we don't have a central repository of information, it is difficult for SDF to gain traction because when someone asks questions about, for example, J-20 stealth capabilities, you would have to link them to dozens of different posts which are in different places for someone to gain a general understanding of that topic.

Now imagine if we had a wiki about J-20, and then a Stealth subsection where we poured all the information we know about the J-20 Stealth capabilities, with all the sources included (heck, we could even categorize the sources depending on how we generally consider their reliability medium/high).

It would make things much much easier for people to understand, SDF would reach another level on its professionalism, information gathering and analysis, and how it is viewed by the general PLA watching community.

 

[pevade]

Maybe something like

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on a url like

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And you can automatically create users for the wiki by linking the two sites with LDAP/SSO
A wiki/repository would be quite useful because a lot of old pictures are lost because the links are dead.
The server storage capacity would need to increase though.

 

[T-U-P]

There used to be a website called sinodefence.com, and this forum used to be attached to that website. I believe the forum was sold (?) whereas the website was not. Based on archives it looks like the last updated post was some time in 2018, and the website went down by end of 2020.

Here's an archive version from 2010:

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archived version form 2020:

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As for having a wiki, this is probably something @Webmaster needs to make a decision on.

 

[Totoro]

Wiki doesnt need to be officially connected to this forum. Just a group of forum users are enough to give it certain legitimacy.
That being said, i have doubts about success of such projects. The amount of info to be inputted would be huge, and the process would be slow, as several (many ) people would likely continuously argue about what info should be in there.
Then, the work would never be done, as wiki would need to be updated. Who knows if enough people would stay on the project to keep it updated.
And because of disagreements , its possible there would be multiple wiki pages, with groups splintering and making their own wikis rather than arguing with colleagues.

 

[Overbom]

Wiki doesnt need to be officially connected to this forum. Just a group of forum users are enough to give it certain legitimacy.
That being said, i have doubts about success of such projects. The amount of info to be inputted would be huge, and the process would be slow, as several (many ) people would likely continuously argue about what info should be in there.
Then, the work would never be done, as wiki would need to be updated. Who knows if enough people would stay on the project to keep it updated.
And because of disagreements , its possible there would be multiple wiki pages, with groups splintering and making their own wikis rather than arguing with colleagues.

The way I see it, for premier military threads such as the J-20 thread, the biggest difficult and most time consuming job would be creating the wiki and filling it with info catching up to today's info we have. From there on, the work should be dramatically reduced as OSINT J-20 updates themselves are slow so there wouldnt be a need to maintain it daily, weekly or maybe monthly sometimes

For the matter of disagreements, the info presented should have different categorisation for showing how certain the wiki creators are about it. As for splintering and all that, that's life. The market will naturally gravitate towards the one that is most accurate. When I say market I don't mean casual users, I am talking about informed people who are genuinely interested in PLA-watching

Of course the effort for starting wikis for the important threads would be a brutal job so I wouldnt blame anyone not getting involved with it

IMO the biggest and most important aspect for the wikis to work are that they are helmed by reputable or/and expert people. That should be the bottom line