Announcing ThingsThatAreSmart.wiki

Hi everyone,

Something has been bothering me for a while, and I’ve seen others comment on it as well… There is so much amazing content from the community on these forums, but in the forum format, it can be really hard to find the info that you’re looking for, and when you do find an answer, it’s impossible to know whether it is the latest and greatest info on the topic.

To solve this problem, I’d like to announce the launch of [ThingsThatAreSmart.wiki][1], the unofficial SmartThings wiki! :smiley:
[

][1]
We’ve setup this wiki to provide a place for the community to create content in wiki article format, that can be easily linked to, updated, and maintained by everyone.

The initial set of categories includes:

  • Officially supported devices
    Details we’ve learned about these devices that may not be in the official documentation
  • Unofficially supported devices
    Info about devices that have working community developed device types
  • Published SmartApps
    Details, tips, etc. about officially released SmartApps
  • Unpublished SmartApps
    Info about unofficial SmartApps from the community
  • FAQ
    Answers to the many questions that get asked over and over again, all together in one place
  • Getting Started
    Things that can help new users that may not be covered in the official documentation
  • Tips & Tricks
    Fun, interesting, and cool tricks

I encourage you all to add anything else that you think would be useful. I hope this will prove to be a useful tool for the community.

obycode has setup the wiki and will maintain the site, but everyone can login and create and edit the content. A very special thanks goes out to @AutomateEverything for donating his expertise on the graphical design of the logo and other images.

Cheers,
Brice

[][1]
[1]: http://ThingsThatAreSmart.wiki

47 Likes

You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

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Good Job my friend !

Do you ever sleep? :smile:

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Been super eager to see this go live :slight_smile: wahoooo

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Who are “we”? :heart:

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I love it! Let me know how I can help.

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Ok where are you @JDRoberts. It’s time to upload!

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From an LL (Learning Lurker) Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

YAY, thank you, thank you, thank you!

P.S. Is your screen name, obycode, an indication that you are also involved with OBihai (as am I)?

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Awesome! Looks great, too! Rock on! :tada:

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Give me a couple of weeks to start adding stuff. (Of course anyone else who wants to link to or use content from any of my forum posts here is always welcome to, that’s one of the great things about a wiki, many hands make light work. :sunglasses:)

I’ll try to get most of my FAQ links added by January 1 if no one else has done it beforehand.

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No, no connection with OBihai. I actually had to google that to figure out what it was.

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Glad everyone else seems to think this is a good idea too! I think it will be really great. Thanks to you early contributors, there are already a few postings going up!

Question, what do you think we should do with content that is already in the forums? Should we copy the content to the wiki, or just link to the forum? My thought is that it makes sense to copy it over so it can continue to be edited. Of course, I would recommend checking with the original author before doing so. Any other thoughts on this?

EDITED TO ADD: When we do copy content over, we should still include a link back to the discussion. And maybe add a link to the wiki from the discussion.

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You know, this huge team of developers at obycode :wink:.

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I agree, the content should be moved to the wiki so it can have multiple editors.

Anybody who wants to copy any of my forum posts and put them into the wiki as content there would actually be doing me a favor. Cut-and-paste is very difficult for me. I’m not sure what happens with the screenshots, so go and copy those and stick them back in as well.

I don’t need a credit on anything that is moved over from the forum to the wiki either, in fact I’d rather not. The reason is once it’s in the wiki it’s going to be edited 1 million times, at least I hope so, so I don’t want to be seen as the source on something that may be very far removed from what I originally wrote.

Over the next few weeks, I will try to add links to my FAQ posts here, but again, anybody who wants to replace that link with the actual content, go for it! :sunglasses:

Dictating original content is pretty easy for me using text to speech. Editing, copying, combining, etc. are the hard parts.

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I also like the idea of adding a SourceLink back to the original conversation in the forum. That can be done as a standard wiki type SourceLink at the end of the wiki article. That also allows new forum conversation threads to be added as links at the bottom of the wiki article.

As someone who has done technical writing in ISO 9001 certified organizations (where documentation and single-source traceability are king) , I have a slightly different take on copying versus linking.

Copying creates two disconnected versions of the same information. In the case of Groovy code, the copy doesn’t benefit from updates made to the original, thus creating an out of sync condition, and possibly creating more user questions instead of less. Conversely, the author may decide that they like the wiki platform better, and only update there. Either way,an out of sync situation exists.

My vote is for one of the following.

  • Make it a wiki guideline to only link back to the original source.
  • Copying is okay, provided the forum OP replaces (or appends) the original text with a link back to the wiki.

Done this way, there will be only one authoritative source, which will, by definition, be the latest and greatest.

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My hope is that the wiki becomes a source of answers, while the forum is the area for questions and discussion. So whatever’s posted in the forum becomes recognized as a forum post. It’s something somebody put out there. It ages. It may in fact just be wrong from the beginning.

I don’t have the physical ability to go back in and edit all my original posts. So that’s not going to happen. Plus the fact that the forum keeps locking me out of editing because it says I do too much of it. (an artifact of relying on voice recognition software: if I didn’t do a lot of editing, you guys would never be able to follow my sentences.)

I agree that may mean we end up with two sources of information. But they are two qualitatively different sources, serving two different purposes. I think most people will figure it out, and it will be easy enough in a forum thread for somebody to say there’s more up-to-date information in the wiki and give that link at that point.

I’m happy to participate in the wiki is best I can. And again I gladly give permission for anyone to copy any of my own forum posts to use as the basis for content in the wiki. And I neither need nor want credit for that content.

But I can’t agree that I will then chase down any of those links and edit the original content in the forum. It’s just too much physical work for me.

Submitted with respect.

note that links die. All the time. MAYBE they come back and sometimes/usually not. So copies AND links are good IMO.

PS thanks again.

1 Like