Saving the Legacy of RM, BT, UB et.al.

Several of our dearly departed provided a lot of great wisdom for growers on this site. Many of us benefited, myself included.

I would like to do something about preserving that great knowledge. I am looking for volunteers to comb through such great threads as 'Making it Rain,' Uncle Ben's Gardening Tweaks and Pointers' and others, digesting them down to the essentials. The idea is to develop a handful of threads where newbs and veterans alike can get to the good stuff without wading through hundreds or thousands of posts.

I hope to develop a dozen or so of these abridged threads. If you are well familiar with one of the 'great threads,' post here and signal your interest in participating in the project, indicating your thread of interest. For quality control, I recommend writing (pasting) everything out in a word processing file first, so we can circulate it amongst ourselves for edits before posting on the site.

I am hopeful that the mods will recognize this as a great way to keep the knowledge alive, and not consider it 'double posting' (Mods, you are invited to comment).

I respectfully request that this thread remain free of drama. I waited until things calmed down a bit before posting this. If things get out of hand I will personally ask the mods to close the thread and I will drop the project.

I hope that some folks will step forward. RIU has some of the best info on growing out there, and we need to keep it going.

In terms of how the articles would be written, I picture three sections: The Essentials, Details, and Q&A. 'The Essentials' would boil the thread down to its main points, 'Details' would provide a lengthier description, and 'Q&A' would provide the more compelling questions and comments that happen throughout the thread.

Each of the digests would use the words in the original thread as much as possible. I figure this would make it a lot less work, and will keep the digests true to the originals.

If folks are hesitant, I can give one of the threads a shot and post here. Any recommendations as to which thread I should start with?

why plagerize other peoples writtings ? Why not just read what they wrote ?

if the people controlling the content of this site gave two shits then there wold be more of the vets your talking about here to contribute , i agree with dadio take the time and look through the threads yourself

I hear your point about the importance of finding the info. The threads are here, but take UB's Gardening tweaks and pointers -- 95 pages or nearly 1000 posts, and much of that taken up by casual banter and argument. A lot of growers that would otherwise benefit would not bother reading through all of that-- and I couldn't blame them.

It also wouldn't be plagiarism for two reasons. First, it would be simply a digest of their own work in their own words.-- I wouldn't be crediting anyone else with their ideas. Second, RIU has ownership/control over the content. Everything you or I write here belongs to the community. Some of these threads are great resources to keep sharing.

so you're saying that you want to EDIT and CENSOR people's threads. Only reprint what YOU think is pertanent.

I see what you're getting at here Nitegazer, but the problem is going to be keeping the thread from turning into exactly what you're trying to get rid of, which is the arguments and banter as has already happened here. The idea is good, but it may be better to post to a different site where people can look for quick reference without asking questions or criticizing.

I applaud your idea, but sadly, I don't think it will work in this community. Not enough unity here...

Thanks everyone for the input. I have no intention of causing more conflict here so I won't pursue it further.