----[Please read http://ercoupers.com/disclaimer.htm before following any advice in this forum.]----
Friends. I found the following small article about Wikis that sums it up for me. http://www.scripting.com/2007/01/24.html#stateOfWikipedia One can read there: "To me, in areas outside my expertise, it seems that Wikipedia is an excellent source of information. But that's the problem. In areas that I know better, I can see its flaws." I might add, I sometimes read about subjects written in English also in German, comparing what German editors are having to say. That's a nifty feature of the WIKI setup. My experience though is that the articles differ as much as do the cultures. One can tell that the English versions are usually more trustworthy due to the fact that more people were collaborating on it. This leaves room for hope, because the following statement does not work for us: "These things should be written by qualified mechanics who have specific experience in the subject." There are no mechanics with that desired experience. I always had to educate my mechanic when it came to the Ercoupe oddities. To share the insights, we are using the e-mail forum, it would be good to have a few pages up there that summarize certain areas. Nose wheel shimmy, fuel tanks, rigging of the plane being some. I used to have a collection of e-mails compiled on such recurring topics. http://www.ercoupers.com/service/nose_wheel_shimmy.html ( you navigate to the topics on the top graphic). This was not very successful I guess. By the way, the type of WIKI Tom was putting in place on the Ercoupers site is an example of how a WIKI or any kind of software should NOT work. This is not only hard to figure out, this is a bug in itself. I can live with the editor option. Ed is doing a great job in publishing anything he can find about Ercoupes. It does not guarantee that the information is the culprit of Ercoupe wisdom, but it avoids me getting pissed off by someone that thinks he knows better. I say only two words: Snubber Cable. Hartmut ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Burkhead To: 'AJ DeMarzo' ; 'Ctech' Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:19 AM Subject: RE: [COUPERS-TECH] Coupe Maintenance Hints and Tips ----[Please read http://ercoupers.com/disclaimer.htm before following any advice in this forum.]---- Al, You make a good point that totally unedited mechanical advice is not necessarily a benefit and can be a danger. Yet, we also have the problem - if a mechanic publishes mechanical advice *as a mechanic*, then that can increase his liability risk. If we, as a group of people, try to help each other in our spare time to provide information on the gotchas and references then we have status as an educational, mutual help group for what that's worth. If you have a subject matter expert who wants to take the lead, great! I cheat - I put together what looks right from the best sources I can get, then I run it by real experts for validation. That's how I "wrote" the Annual Inspection Checklist, the Pre-Purchase Inspection and the Coupe FAQ. Those were all vetted and contributed to by experts. The result generally comes out to pretty trustworthy information. Though still not perfect, it's a pretty useful starting point for mechanics. I can see convenience in a Wiki format. For right now I'd propose we try out this methodology. I'll try to provide fairly quick turn around, decent regular web page formatting and some vetting of content. Other editorial volunteers are welcome and encouraged! Content producers are the real heros! Ed Burkhead http://edburkhead.com ed -at- edburkhead???.com (change -at- to @ and remove "???") ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm
