I created the
APU article a few years ago because there was no summary of APU registers etc. and I wanted one central place to find that information, and branch out from there to articles about individual APU units where the "nitty gritty" details should appear. It was using the best information I had available to me at the time.
The individual APU unit articles are all older than this page, written by various people at various times, not in any consistent style, and some may still contain dubious information. All of them are in need of a cleanup.
Sometimes people add "nitty gritty" stuff to the APU summary article instead of the APU unit pages, and this does lead to divergence in some cases. It's really hard to arbitrate which stuff is too "fine" a detail to go on the summary page, but also I think people might be tempted to add there instead of some of the unit pages because of how inconsistent and disorganized they are.
Rahsennor wrote:
IMHO the wiki's APU pages are garbage. You're better off looking at test ROMs and emulator source code. I'd offer to help improve them, but I don't have the time, and I'd want to ensure I have verified test ROMs for everything, which would take even more time.
If you want the wiki to improve, you have to contribute to it. If you find something wrong with it, or are dissatisfied with something about it, fix it.
Everybody has time they could spend on the wiki, but only a few people decide it's a worthwhile use of their time. Most people don't go back and try to improve the knowledge there
after they've learned what they wanted to know. They just take from it and move on.
If you made use of knowledge from the wiki, it's because
somebody decided to spend time on it. If you want it to be a good reference, make it one. When you add something to the wiki, the time you spent gets paid back to many, many people as they use it. There's a big multiplier on the value of these contributions that I don't think a lot of people really consider. If you gained something from the wiki, think about how a hundred people might do the same.
Also, when you forget things months or years later and need to remember it again, if you left behind a shitty mess that's exactly what you can look forward to using a second time-- in the long run it's even worth organizing this information just for your own selfish benefit.
Zepper wrote:
I had an easy assumption that any new info should pass under the supervision of someone "in high degree", meaning people with hardware knowledgement for proper testing.
I don't think the problem is due to the "degree" of the editors. A lot of people who do good hardware research here aren't interested in editing the wiki, and just because you know the truth of something doesn't mean you're good at teaching it to others.
Anybody with correct knowledge and an ability to communicate or organize that information should contribute. Our real problem is that there are
so few contributors.
The best standard for adding information is the same in pretty much all academic situations, including wikipedia, and it's basically just:
cite your sources.
If you add some note about the hardware because someone did some research and mentioned it in a forum thread,
link to that thread. The wiki has a convenient <ref> tag to create footnotes, and they're perfect for showing people where the information comes from. This is very important to document, don't just add information you think is correct, leave a trail showing why you know this, so that in the future whenever someone needs to verify it can go to the source.
Imagine the OP's situation with good citations. The "3/4 cycles" would have a footnote linking to a thread, and the "2/3 cycles" would also have a footnote; the person who is confused by this divergence of information could click on each footnote and see where the information comes from, and it would be clear which one is better quality information (e.g. you might find one is several years out of date, or was based on an old emulator, etc.) and easy to update.
It doesn't matter if you personally did hardware tests, what matters is that we can check up on it. If you only know something because you found it buried in Nestopia's source code, and you can't find any other source, explain that in a footnote! If someone comes along to do the better research later, we can update it, and with a proper citation it'll be easy to understand at that point which knowledge is the old and out of date version.
And once again, when you find there is something wrong or inconsistent, like this information about $4017, once you've learned the truth,
go back and fix it. Don't just complain about it!!!