This is just a general notice about the plan I'm intending to carry out, after months of gathering of notes, reading professional texts on technical writing, reviewing other motorcycle service manuals, and finally a very generous invitation to Zero headquarters to sit with the service team and go over the bike and its systems.
The unofficial manual's structure is a long and complex topic that's not really fit for a forum; I basically have to undertake an effort to keep it manageable, and unfortunately, I can't do this by committee, although I really want to make sure you can contribute. I intended to put out some polling about the ideas, but really the best feedback I can take will only happen once this effort is mostly complete, when people complain about how to find things, hopefully.
ProblemsI intend to address the problems presented by having a new platform for the SR/F, which happen to reflect issues the manual has had covering the FX model's platform and the pre-2013 models.
So, the main problem with content around all of these motorcycle models is that they’re all different and yet share a lot. Some are different in small ways (FX vs FXS - same platform), and some are really big (SRF buswork and cabling are just hugely different from everything we’ve seen, mostly improved with some tradeoffs).
So far, I’ve just made a single-article service manual that is just gargantuan (700kb of HTML alone when I save it to disk). If I try making a PDF with my browser, about 60 pages are guaranteed (probably 80 pages with book-oriented formatting), and I’m sure it’d be a lot higher if I weren’t trying to keep that article from overloading my mobile phone browser when I need to look something up.
We have the same issue with the big aftermarket page, where some entries are for some platforms but not others, and you have to know the outline to figure out where to look.
And I’ll admit very easily that it’s hard to find things on the site. I’ve done my best to make the search bar work, but most people probably don’t realize it’s there or if they do, don’t trust it to work well. And I can never guess how someone’s going to think to themselves before looking.
Anyway, if I continue my current strategy and just jam in the SRF, it’s going to get totally out of control and confusing, and any further model just compounds that.
SolutionsFirst, I'm committing at least for now to not moving any of the current content around. This is difficult, but it means all the S/DS and X owners don’t have to follow the new content pattern until Google indexes it right and all of the front page gets sorted.
What I will do is to silently pull all the parts of the service manual into separate articles, and silently compose the service manual from those pages. I’ve been doing this for over a year, partly so I can load a single procedure onto my phone and use it in my garage. Here’s a directory of those procedure pages:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Category:ProcedureIf you look at a procedure, sometimes you’ll get a variant of 2013-2014 bikes in there, or X vs SDS written out in different steps. Inserting SRF information in there is where this turns into trouble.
If I put the battery into a separate article, I’d have a similar problem.
So, there’s a technical part of this plan where I break out articles into separate composed articles that each might be specific to a platform or a series of years or such. I’ll probably have to use a lot of prefixes like “2013-2014â€, “SDSâ€, or “XMXâ€. I settled in on "Gen1", "Gen2", and "Gen3" where something was shared between platforms.
So, here are some component pages to give an idea of how it will split out the manual:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Category:ComponentFinally, there will be multiple service manuals, as required. Probably one for SDS, one for XMX, and one for FST, (or Gen1, Gen2, and Gen3!) and each will have areas of variation, but this is a practical decision to make these reasonable to read and not too large.
I’ll pull out the FST manual first, since that requires the least amount of work, and then I’ll cross-tie it with the existing content as necessary, and make articles that tie everything together across models as required. But eventually the FX and FXS will have their own manual, more or less. It won't be perfect, but it'll be easier to find things hopefully.
I think one big challenge will be making sure that owners know where to go from the front page. This is really difficult no matter how you slice it, and I'm not exactly clear on what I'll do, but it's definitely on my mind. I want users to use the search function, but right now this doesn't seem very common, for probably good reasons around the huge articles.
I'm not even sure what I want to ask from forum members. The wiki is designed so that you can contribute, which means adding pages, text, photos, etc., but I can't figure out how to share in the architecture planning, so I'll keep guiding it myself until someone steps up to collaborate at that level.
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Topic: Unofficial Manual changes and roadmap (Read 1647 times)