Camera-wiki.org:About

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The mission of Camera-wiki.org

Welcome to Camera-wiki.org, your reference guide to all the world's cameras!

As we grow, we hope to document all the cameras ever made—particularly older models, from before the era when reviews, specifications, and manuals were routinely available online.

A wiki website is one in which any user can contribute or edit content. If something is missing you can add it, and if you find a mistake you can change it. A wiki website makes content a two-way street: You are no longer a passive reader, and the more you participate the better the content gets. If you'd like to learn more, visit the article about wikis at Wikipedia.org.

This website builds upon the earlier work of Camerapedia.org, which was founded in October 2004 by Brandon Stone. In January 2011, the former Camerapedia.org contents were transferred to new hosting at camerapedia.wikia.com. A number of earlier contributors were uncomfortable with their content being hosted on a for-profit, ad-supported service, Wikia (today rebranded Fandom.com). To address this concern, users Steevithak and Voxphoto invited the community to begin an alternative non-commercial wiki; and Camera-wiki.org launched on 7 February 2011. Camera-wiki.org has grown by more than 4,400 article pages since this "fork" took place. You can find out more on our History page.

The textual content of Camerapedia was licensed under the GFDL 1.2[1]; which permits republication and reuse such as this. (Camera-wiki.org now uses the current GNU Free Documentation license v1.3; please read the page about copyrights for the full details.) Camera-wiki.org has been founded to preserve and expand on the hard work of the earlier wiki contributors—but in an environment which we pledge to remain entirely non-commercial, for as long as community support makes this possible. Our goal is to establish nonprofit status for the project in the near future, and that status will be updated here.

Join!

We need your help! Are you a specialist in a particular brand or era of cameras? Please take a look at the relevant pages, to see if you find gaps or errors. We'd love to set up a Camera-wiki username for you, so you can edit the wiki pages and share your knowledge. Contact one of the admins (see the list below) through the CW Flickr group to ask for an account (we have limited account creation to admins to prevent spam).

Do you have some unusual gems in your camera collection? If you're able to contribute clear photos of them, we'd love that too. Most useful is for you to add your images (preferably with a plain, light background) to our Flickr pool. Note that when you add your photos to this pool, we'll assume this gives us permission to display them in Camera-wiki articles, even if their license shows "all rights reserved" (but you are not relinquishing your copyright). Using some form of Creative Commons licensing allows us even more flexibility, and is greatly appreciated.

Take a look at some of our pages to get an idea of the format we like to see in contributions; you can examine the syntax behind these pages if you click "edit" (please, look through our Help pages first, before making any changes).

Sources

When writing for Camera-wiki.org, we ask you to confirm factual statements about company history, release dates, pricing and so forth by citing (and where possible, linking to) independent sources. These might include collector websites, price guides, specialist books, company records, or historical publications.

But one difference between Camera-wiki.org and Wikipedia is that we actively appreciate "original research" where appropriate (Wikipedia prohibits it[2]). Simply having a particular camera model in your hands is sufficient if you'd like to describe its features and specifications. Even somewhat subjective assessments are acceptable ("the build quality is flimsy"), when not excessively controversial. This encyclopedia is also a conversation among people who enjoy cameras, so we don't always need some dry, omniscient style. But do remember that the wiki is not a personal blog or a venue to discuss your or your friends' photography.

Active admins

Users with sysop accounts who have been active in the last 12 months. These users can make administrative changes to the camera wiki.


Camera-wiki.org on the net

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References