MD Wiki part 1 : "The Good"

Hi MD friends, I'm SpecialK and I founded the MiniDisc Wiki and act as its "primary" administrator. This is my first in a series of posts about founding, building, and eventually stepping back from daily involvement of the site's community. Here I can speak candidly about my own experiences rather than "officially" on behalf of the project. Let's begin with the good.

In late 2019 I had a few drinks and went on eBay. A few days and a few more dollars later I had a Sony MZ-N510 MiniDisc recorder and a handful of discs. It wasn't the same machine I had as a teenager but it was a similar NetMD one with USB support and used AA batteries.

I had seen a few Techmoan videos about MD, and the MiniDisc.org website he referenced. It was an amazing resource, but very of its time. A lot of web searches linked to the Sony Insider Forums, but they were down with a MySQL error.

So I started an Azure account and decided to deploy Dokuwiki. It doesn't rely on MySQL, so it can't fail the same way! Learning Azure services was also a benefit for my day job. This was the very beginning of 2020, a month or so before the first pandemic lockdowns in Western countries.

The task was much larger than I had anticipated. It was about a year before the software and community involvement reached a level where what we were trying to accomplish was becoming viable. It was thanks to the suggestions, contributions, and support of a growing number of believers in the project that we found how to grow the site into hundreds and later thousands of pages. Even with databases and automated page templates, each entry took human time and the resource available today is the result of thousands of hours of effort.

One of the primary aims of the wiki project was to make it "open source" - dimensions and battery data for decades-old equipment isn't mine to own. That information is not a proprietary trade secret to myself or to the brands that released this to the general public in the 90s and 00s. But it does provide a lot of benefit to those who care about it. That's why we maintain public backups of the site's data to download and why I have always been willing to share access to the servers, account passwords, and social media accounts to trusted leaders who share my passion for MD.

The MD community is spread across venues like Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, GitHub, YouTube, Facebook, and more. All of these social media services have the flaw of being controlled by companies rather than by the users. The wiki, on the other hand, is run by us: the community. It's an old fashioned webserver on a VM that that we control. This comes with a few inconveniences: the server is in Seattle, close to where I live but far away from visitors in Europe, Asia, or beyond which may cause more latency; there isn't a full time team to respond to outages; and if I get hit by a bus, only a handful of people have access to the infrastructure to take over administration. But the pros are fantastic: we don't have to worry about a social media site turning on its most dedicated users (looking at you, Reddit); overzealous moderation; rigid site layout templates; and can export whatever we like for backups.

Once early champion Ender and I discovered that Dokuwiki had support for structured data via a plugin, it was clear that this was how the site's primary content, equipment information, should be handled. It allows for configurable data fields that are associated with a page and can be presented as aggregations we can configure and filter. This is how each equipment page has an infobox with core specs and how we can list devices based on manufacturer, form factor, or anything else stored in the database.

It isn't without some downsides. Rendering pages from dynamic databases is quite computationally expensive and this slows down page loads. The architecture of Dokuwiki and its Struct database ties data to a particular page, so translated pages can't refer to the same data without changes to the plugin (which we are testing...) and the whole structure can be intimidating to the inexperienced.

But this status quo works very well and I'm proud of what we've created. We've also been recognized by some very popular people in the scene, like Techmoan, This Does not Compute, and Hackaday.