Six months old, that is.
For about six years, there was a valued, non-commercial source of camera information, built entirely by volunteers: Camerapedia.org.
But this January, many of Camerapedia’s contributors were confused and shocked at the news that its domain name had been sold to Wikia, an advertising-supported, for-profit company.
Exactly six months ago, contributor Voxphoto opened an alternative Flickr group to discuss what to do next. It quickly became clear that the GFDL licensing of Camerapedia’s text gave us an opportunity to “fork” the wiki, splitting off a new project that preserved its non-commercial status. Thanks to some heroic efforts by user Steevithak, our own copy of Camerapedia was soon up and running; and this finally went public as Camera-wiki.org on February 7th, 2011.
Since that time, the Flickr group has seen tremendous growth: It now stands at 35,739 images, and has 607 members. The biggest camera-gear photo pools on Flickr are all 4 or 5 years older (the very largest has about 42,000 images); yet we’ve caught up very quickly, and are still growing fast.
We’ve now got 6,026 article pages in Camera-wiki.org. I believe that makes about 740 new articles added since the fork took place. (There are many fewer edits being made to Wikia’s copy; and since all the old admins have abandoned it, spam and noise are creeping in unchallenged.)
But Camera-wiki.org still needs your help.
Photos of unusual and obscure photo gear are always appreciated in our photo pool. If you have expert information about particular brands, please check our pages for missing or incorrect information. We’d love to have gurus in MediaWiki administration or non-profit organizing join us—even if your camera knowledge is limited. Skilled writers can help us just by smoothing out rough prose (a number of our contributors have first languages other than English).
If you have some unusual old camera right in your hands, we would definitely like you to confirm its specs, or note any unusual features. And rare original source materials (vintage catalogs, manuals, or magazines) help us nail down the facts: dates, model names, feature changes, etc.
Cheers to everybody on a great first six months!