Papercraft Guide

what If we do a simple downloadable starter's guide that links to the wiki if the starter needs specific info?

@vincentmrl You mean, getting rid of the Guide and creating a stripped-down version of the Wiki that can be downloaded and/or printed? Or should we base it on our Quick Tutorial?

Merging what is in the guide but isn't in the wiki, and making a newcomer friendly guide that can be downloaded and has hyperlinks to the wiki if you want detail about that specific argument (for example glue types, tools, building styles ecc). It would be nice for someone that never built a craft and it should explain how to build a cube too, so that people understands better

I like Vincent's idea. As the wiki has grown it's completely outpaced our old resources but there is a need for some sort of new-to-papercrafting guide

@vincentmrl First of all, just to clarify things : the wiki is not lacking anything.

When I started the wiki project, one of the first things I did was copy-pasting the content from the guide into the wiki. The only thing I didn't import was my introduction at the beginning and the copyrighted images.

Saying that the guide has things the wiki doesn't is misleading. The guide is the outdated document. It has had next to no change since last October, while the wiki is frequently being improved.

As for a newcomer-friendly guide, I'm not too sure of the need to make one.

I personally suggested creating the wiki since I wasn't happy with the lack of detailed information about papercraft. I thought that making a homegrown wiki would be better for us and for all than improving the article on Wikipedia, since the latter gives very little freedom on what can be written.

However, there are tons of beginner-friendly tutorials a bit everywhere around the Web and I wouldn't see the point of recreating the wheel. Some tutorials like Haywan Chiu's Beginner Tutorial are so concise and well made that I don't know why we don't simply point to that tutorial. I don't see how we could better explain how to build a cube than Haywan Chiu did in this video ;-)

However, Vincent, do you suggest we could get rid of the guide? Since it is a very vast topic, I have not yet started the decision-making period since I think we should split this into multiple decision processes. We'll have to make decisions on the wiki, on the guide and on other things if desired (beginner's guide, forums, blog, whatever)

Yeah you should get rid of it, and put "special" download buttons that format the wiki pages into an organized page for pdf/printing

And to clarify another thing, we can make multiple decisions under a same topic (as opposed to voting in the forums)

@vincentmrl I don't know how to do that... do you?

nope, it was an idea, but it's still possible to do. I'll try to make that when school finally teaches me programming seriously.

@vincentmrl Alright. The problem I see is that it is possible, but I only know that is it a feature available for MediaWiki. I decided to use DokuWiki instead of MediaWiki because of its simpler installation, of its simpler editing and of the simple theme that was available.

For your information, MediaWiki is the open source technology that's used in most wikis including Wikipedia. It is far, far more complex than DokuWiki.

I'm sure there is a 'Create PDF' plugin for DokuWiki, but it would certainly break the template.