Plant Services - June 2008 - (Page 51)

wikia.com is all you need to do to make the nearly 2,200 articles about Mr. Potter and friends and foes appear from out of thin air. Let’s get serious We really should be talking about industrial maintenance, though. Not many hard-hitting, maintenance-related wikis turned up during research for this column. Many of those that claimed some connection to industrial maintenance were nothing but thinly disguised sales brochures, although they were arranged in the traditional wiki manner, with edit options and everything. So, who out there in the real world is going to spend time editing some vendor’s promo piece? It might be the case that if you want a true maintenance wiki, you’ll need to build your own. in your footsteps. This is better than having a printed dictionary because Wiktionary can include jargon, slang and other evolving terminology that proves English is still a living language. So, think for a moment of some obscure word and see if the folks at Wiktionary include it. If not, enter it, define it and the world will thank you. Practice makes perfect Just do it By now you might even be thinking that you can use a corporate intranet-based wiki to gather plant-specific best practices for your industrial maintenance activities. Such wikis could serve as a knowledge repository to help combat the maintenance crisis we hear about so often and as a training tool for maintenance technicians who might not be familiar with some of your equipment or procedures. These wikis also could be useful for bringing outside contractors up to speed before and during an outage. Well, your plan can be accomplished and, as an example, you could model your homebrew wiki after what you’ll find at www.wikihow. com, the home of Palo Alto-based wikiHow – The How-to Manual That You Can Edit. The site claims to have more than 37,000 articles, but those I examined appeared to be standalone pieces, with an absolute minimum of hyperlinked text one would expect to see. This suggests that there might be quite a bit of informational redundancy in the 37,000 entries. But I digress. The point is that it’s possible. Think of the implications. Collaboration implies active participation. Many people, however, are reluctant to start messing around with someone’s Web page when changes are immediately visible to any subsequent user of that wiki. Some might find that being able to exert such instantaneous worldwide influence over a Web site is a scary thought. It’s for those perhaps unnecessarily timid folks that I present access to a wiki that can’t be damaged by anything you can do to it. It gets reset to its original content once a day. Collaboration implies active participation. I’m talking about the wiki sandbox, where you can edit content freely and you won’t permanently wreck anyone’s hard work. This site comes to you through the efforts of Janne Jalkanen, the lead developer of the open-source JSPWiki, which is based in Espoo, Finland. Jalkanen’s site, www.jspwiki.org, has a lot of content. When you go there, I recommend that you start with three items. First is the sandbox, accessed on the left side. The second is the piece titled “WikiEtiquette,” also on the left. Third, you could take advantage of the free download, including source code, which will give you your very own wiki platform. Self-referential to the max First Noah Webster, now this Just for fun, you might want to read the Wikipedia entry for wiki, which you’ll see at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki. E-mail Executive Editor Russ Kratowicz, P.E., CMRP, at russk@ putman.net. It’s obvious why using an online encyclopedia is more convenient than toting around all 20 volumes of the print version. But, a dictionary is a different case. Everyone should have one at his or her disposal – at least everyone here at magazine central has a copy of that two-inch-thick book of words. If you run into terminology that needs a definition and find the thought of keeping an additional reference book on your desk revolting, then http://en.wiktionary. org is the place for you. This is where you’re going to find Wiktionary, the dictionary counterpart to Wikipedia’s encyclopedia approach. As is characteristic of all wikis, you can edit the entries to improve them for the seeker following June 2008 More resources at www.PlantServices.com RCM - “Reliability-centered maintenance” Data management - “Relational databases” Best practices - “Good, better, best” Predictive maintenance - “Hot, slick and shaky” For more, search www.PlantServices.com using the keywords collaboration, maintenance and wiki. www.PLANTSERVICES.com 51 http://harrypotterwikia.com http://www.wikihow.com http://www.jspwiki.org http://www.wikihow.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://en.wiktionary.org http://en.wiktionary.org http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

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Plant Services - June 2008 Contents From the Editor Letters The PS Files Up and Running Crisis Corner What Works Asset Manager Technology Toolbox Cover Story HVAC Coatings Motors Web Hunter In the Trenches Product Picks Classifieds Energy Expert

Plant Services - June 2008

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