Plainwire / Start here / Corrections and drafts
Corrections and drafts
Corrections
If a page here is wrong, we would rather know than not. There is no account system and no comment box, both by choice; corrections reach the editors through the mailing list, which is linked from the footer of the wiki source repository.
A useful correction has three parts: which page, which sentence, and what you observed instead. “The kettle page is wrong” is hard to act on. “The kettle page says the disc trips at 98 °C; the unit in mine is stamped 100 °C, photo attached” gets fixed the same week.
We record corrections in the page history with the reporter credited unless they ask otherwise. Fourteen of the current revision numbers came from readers rather than editors.
Submitting a guide
New guides are welcome and are slower to land than corrections, because each one is reviewed by somebody who has not done that repair. That review is the whole value of the wiki, and it is why we would rather publish five guides a year than fifty.
What a guide needs
- A repair you have actually completed. Not a repair you have read about, and not a repair you are midway through. The reviewer will ask what went wrong, and every real repair has an answer to that.
- A diagnosis section before the procedure. Most of the value in a repair guide is in not doing the repair when the fault is elsewhere.
- The specification, not the product. Torx T8, not the brand of the driver. Where a part must be matched, say which numbers on it are the ones that matter.
- Honest failure modes. What breaks if you get this wrong, and at which step. Guides that read as though nothing can go wrong get sent back.
- A stated stopping point. The condition under which the reader should put it down and stop, if there is one.
What gets declined
- Anything requiring a live mains circuit to be probed as part of the procedure.
- Gas appliances, in any form.
- Guides that route around a safety interlock, however inconvenient the interlock is.
- Guides whose real content is a recommendation to buy a particular product.
- Text produced by a language model. We have had four submissions that were, and all four contained a procedure that could not physically be performed. Write it yourself.
Photographs and diagrams
Photographs help enormously and are the thing we are shortest of. Shoot in daylight, against a plain background, with the part in focus rather than the whole bench. Tell us whether you are happy for the image to carry the same share-alike terms as the text; if not, we will describe the step instead rather than argue about it.
Style
Short sentences. Imperative mood in procedures. Metric first, with imperial in brackets where a part is sold in imperial. Numbers as digits from ten upward. No second-person enthusiasm — the reader is holding a screwdriver and does not need encouragement, they need the next instruction.
Plainwire is written and maintained by volunteers. Text on this site may be reused and adapted with attribution under a share-alike licence; photographs and diagrams belong to whoever made them and are marked accordingly. No advertising, no trackers, no accounts.