Welcome to the MiniDisc Wiki

Hello again, MiniDisc community! It's that time again - our monthly wiki update!

What an achievement! 650 equipment pages as of the beginning of September. There are still a lot more equipment pages to add, especially PCs, professional decks, and devices from less-common manufacturers. But we're confident that we'll add these pages within the coming months.

A member of the wiki team has found information on devices from Kenwood that are otherwise unknown to the (Anglophone) web. This find is responsible for a lot of the new page adds this month. Don't overlook Kenwood when looking for MiniDisc equipment!

As mentioned in the previous wiki update, we're currently putting a lot of effort into closing holes in our database, moving to updated fields, and otherwise making it easier to sort and organize the equipment dataset we have. We also want to rewrite any page blurbs that are not original into modern, updated accounts from owners. The registration requirement for modifying equipment pages has been removed to reduce the barriers to contributing (your IP address will be shown instead of a username.)

At the request of one of our contributors, we're experimenting with different infoboxes for different types of equipment. So far we've moved all Onkyo decks to use an infobox that doesn't show fields for batteries. Any suggestions or feedback is appreciated.

According to our analytics, the wiki has had over 1500 unique visitors over the past month, and the numbers keep growing as our SEO improves and more people share the wiki with others. We can't thank you enough!

New wiki contributor fudd79 has created a page to document the battery life of modern replacement gumstick batteries. This guide should help understand what batteries to purchase and what to expect from each brand of battery.

Contributor kgallen has cleaned up our guide on replacing the belt on the Sony MDS-E12 and devices with a similar mechanism. A number of PDF technical resources have also been added to our Resources page (we may move them to the Technology section in the future.) If you have a repair guide for any MD equipment, we'd love to see it added to the wiki!

More and more people are contributing to the wiki, whether it's new equipment pages, fixing typos, fixing gaps in the databases, showing off their collections, taking photos, finding manuals, or anything else. This is fantastic and exactly what we want to see! With the additions and progress we're making, the wiki is quickly realizing our aim of being the definitive MiniDisc resource.

The contribution guide in our About section has been updated to include more sites that host MD information for us to adapt. In September we aim to update the page further to include more about the Dokuwiki syntax, tips on how to navigate the page editor, and other things that may intimidate a new wiki editor.

The Dokuwiki media manager, which we use for hosting images and manuals, has a maximum file size of 40MB. If you have something that is larger than 40MB or is in a file format not supported natively by Dokuwiki, please Contact Us and we can host it in our storage blobs.

Keep on the track we're on! At the rate we're currently adding equipment pages, we may have a record of every known piece of MD equipment by the end of the year or early 2022. At the same time we're still adding or updating guides, working on importing lists of albums released on MD, and reaching out to bring more viewers and contributors to the site.

Our Discord server is the most active MD chat room on the web! We'd love for you to join us and talk MiniDisc, other tech, share your contributions, get help and just hang out with fellow MD fanatics.

A priority to us is contributing more to our social media profiles including Twitter and Instagram. Managing multiple social accounts is time-consuming, so we'd love to hear of some ways that you'd like to see us be more active.

The MiniDisc Wiki has always been a community project rather than one person's labour of love. Although I hope to never be hit by a bus, there need to be measures in place should that happen, and I'm happy to report that we're doing this and are ensuring that multiple people can access the site's hosting and administration should the admin disappear. We're here for the long term!

Thanks again so much for your time, your wiki contributions, your support, and your feedback. We're still looking to grow even further and add more resources for the whole MD community. We wouldn't be where we are today without all of you.