User:Blades/HardwareWiki

I am trying to find a place for hardware wiki. Copy [1]of my proposition and reasons follows:

I'm not sure if this would be a good place, but it's closest I got so far. What I have been thinking about is the ever-repeated question of "will <device> work or be worth anything" that nags especially non-windos people. It would be nice to have a large-ish wiki that has a net of descriptions of manufacturers, devices, drivers and standards & interfaces and descriptions and relations where possible.

Particularly sought-after is information like "Is the Foocorp Idlemaster 2000 an usb storage device that will work everywhere or a proprietary protocol doorstop whose support will be buried in half-a year when the company goes under and/or I update my OS?" or "Will this phone eat Hayes/AT over IR or EIA-[24]32? OBEX?" etc. Likewise for things that appear as serial devices, support changer commands etc.

Manufacturers are obscenely bad at producing this information and with the customer base they have, they don't have to. There is also little incentive for them to support aging hardware.

As for the wiki, for example under usb-storage, you would have a list of devices that appear as usb storage devices. It might have a link to Linux usb-storage.o and equivalent drivers on other systems. Each would have a list of devices that have been confirmed to work.

This could also contain parts lists for "special" manufacturers, eg Sun or IBM part numbers, what they are, what they fit in and what drivers or os versions they work with etc. Many user groups (like TUHS) might also be interested in getting something more than scattered personal repositories for their objects of interest.

The wiki could be as coherent or fragmented, as large or focused as people manage to make it. Databases are just too heavy and often specialized.

--Blades 22:00, 10 May 2004 (UTC)