Saturday, April 28, 2007

Karate and the Wiki Community

If you're both a karate practitioner and a netizen, you've probably tried to use wikipedia to learn more about your martial art. As far as it goes, wikipedia is pretty good. As far as it goes.

What WP lacks, is depth of subject and proper orientation. WP is about karate not in support of learning karate. What the net needs is a community supported site. A site where we work to gether to capture and even develop new knowledge about learning and practicing karate.

That need is why we, members of the Palmer Lake Shotokan Karate dojo, created a wiki site for collaboratively building up the knowledge we'd like to see about martial arts, and karate in particular. That site is KarateForge - the place where karate can be hammered to our needs.

We're just getting started, but we already have articles on techniques that wikipedia doesn't have. And we cover those subjects from the I-want-to-learn-how perspective. Sure we throw in a little encyclopedic knowledge, but it's mostly about how.

We're also humble. We don't believe we know it all. Come join with us to create the Martial Arts Book of Knowledge (MABOK). Membership is easy and you will never have your email shared with commercial interests.

We're also frugal. We don't think it takes a lot of money to learn karate. We won't charge you a thing for membership.

We're also lonely. If you run a dojo and don't have a web page, come join us. Put your page next to ours and make this the place to go on the web.

If friends are not enough to convince you, think how easy it is to run a school where you can make announcements, refer to articles that you've written, and have lively discussion of the art vs. application of karate.

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