Camerapedia and Leica wiki

[rebollo_fr]

Hello,

I recently discovered your Leica wiki project. I am an administrator of Camerapedia, which was created because there seemed a need for a wiki dedicated to cameras, going into a level of detail which would not be tolerated at Wikipedia. Camerapedia accepts articles about single cameras and single lenses, and has no limitation on the tolerated level of detail: there are even serial number listing in some articles. The category structure at Camerapedia is already set up, you can browse it from Category:Root category - Camerapedia.org and you will see that it is quite similar to the proposed structure of the Leica wiki. (The A-Z index that some of you have visited is a weaker search tool, in fact it relies on manual insertion of the individual articles.)

Currently at Camerapedia there is very little meaningful information about Leica products, which is a shame. Other domains have much better coverage in Camerapedia (for example midcentury Japanese cameras), because the most active contributors were interested in these other domains and thought they were poorly represented on the web. Moreover, none of the regular authors of Camerapedia seems to have sufficient knowledge of Leica.

In order not to duplicate information or reinventing the wheel, I warmly invite you to come to Camerapedia and provide a pool of expertise, and benefit from the previously existing structure. This might look like ruthless advertising of "my" website, but I see it as the most logical solution, as it will spare you the hassle of recreating a category structure, help pages, spamming protection, image management, index pages, etc. (Furthermore, it's not my site, and indeed I have never met its owner.)

Looking into the history of articles in Camerapedia, or in "recent changes", will show that the rows, rivalries and grudges common in some other wikis are largely absent. Camerapedia is also largely free from spammers, as permission to edit is not immediate. I think you will find it a pleasant work environment.

Other forms of cooperation are possible: you are free to copy part of Camerapedia's structure in your own project, as well as the current Leica content, and use it as a seed. In the future, we could move all the Leica-related content at Camerapedia to the Leica wiki, and to redirect all the Camerapedia visitors there by interwiki links.

A. Rebollo