What I would like to know is how to access all the information on the Wiki. I recently had Windows Live Mail added to my laptop but it made such a mess of everything I had it removed. The one good thing about it was all the bulb information articles downloaded on to my laptop and I was enjoying reading them. Now they have all disappeared and I would like this facility back - but how? -----Original Message----- From: pbs [mailto:pbs-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Mary Sue Ittner Sent: Sunday, 3 August 2014 8:42 AM To: Pacific Bulb Society Subject: [pbs] Contributing to the Wiki I would like to point out that in 2003 when we first learned that we could have a wiki, the thought was that this was a place for people to upload photos of the plants they were growing so others could see them. It was the time of slow Internet connections (still happening in rural parts of the US), not much storage space on web sites or people's computers, and concerns about viruses that came with attachments. As the one setting the wiki up with help from Mark McDonough and then Mark Wilcox I decided to organize it in a way that would allow people to find the photos again at a later date. I urged people to write something about their photos as well. Some people wrote more than others. None of us were paid for the time spent adding to the wiki. Some genera were well described as there were wiki contributors knowledgeable about them or willing to learn enough to add information. We had no idea at the time how the wiki would evolve. Along the way new contributors like Susan Hayek,Jay Yourch, Mike Mace, Nhu Nguyen and Gastil have added a lot of information about their favorites as well as how to grow bulbs, the media to use, etc. Even though he wasn't an administrator Angelo has added a lot of great photos of bulbs he saw or grew in Italy, Mary Gerritsen spent hours on Calochortus, and Oron Peri has added a lot of Eastern European bulbs that weren't represented on the wiki. Giorgio Pozzi gave hours of his time to set up the Arisaema pages. Alessandro Marinello added lots of photos of things we didn't have on the wiki and in the beginning Bill Dijk provided us with both photos and information. When Jane McGary added to the wiki, she provided useful text. And David Pilling has made enormous contributions because of his developer skills and great ideas. He's added videos, photos of storage organs, and gotten Lilium experts to contribute an amazing amount of information about that genus. You can't expect the administrators to have all knowledge about everything that is on the wiki. When I've added photos for others when they didn't contribute information for me to add I had to look it up and as we all know that can be dangerous although I used sources I felt were reliable. All of that took time. In adding to the wiki we always debated whether it was better to have a lot of information about just a few things or a little information about a lot of things. Over the years a huge amount of time (BD- Before David since he has figured out ways to save people working on the wiki many hours) was spent adding thumbnails a page at a time, changing the url of every photo one at a time when the website url changed, etc. It took me a whole year to make the corrections and changes when we had to change the wiki software even with help. There just hasn't been time to go back and add information to previous pages although a number of us have done it when we were adding other information to those pages. If you look at the wiki contributors page it looks like a huge number of people are involved in the process since we always have added the names of people who provided even one photo or information. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… The reality is that only a few have done most of the work. Recently David wrote the group asking for volunteers to add to the wiki. In looking over the recent changes pages I haven't seen many new names so I expect he didn't get a lot of replies. This list generates an incredible amount of really useful information that could be added to the wiki. What it doesn't have are a lot of people to add it. Editing the wiki to add information like the information suggested by Leo and Peter wouldn't be hard. You just need to know the password which David or one of the other wiki administrators can provide (listed on the contact form on the website) and then you click on edit and add the text, preview how it looks, and save. The administrators look over the changes so you don't even have to worry about making a mistake. Leo has added to the wiki and knows how to do it so could add the text he suggested. Alberto Castillo frequently gives good information and it usually is brief. It would be really easy for anyone who has the time and is willing to add for instance his description of the difference between the bulbs of Amaryllis belladonna and Lycoris squamigera. It would be wonderful if some of you who have really useful ideas about how to improve the wiki would volunteer the time to implement them. I'm sure everyone would appreciate it. Mary Sue --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com/