Build, create, hack, invent, craft, and learn. Discover, share, and connect with makers.
Make: Projects is a living library for makers, a how-to community hosted by MAKE magazine! Here you can build something from our growing cookbook of projects, tweak existing projects to improve them, share your own step-by-step instructions, discover new ideas and techniques, and learn how to make just about anything. And it’s a wiki, so everything is hackable. Connect with the collective smarts of the maker community!
Just like in the pages of MAKE magazine, on Make: Projects, you’ll find all kinds of cool DIY projects, great and small. These projects are not only fun to build, but they also impart the skills and knowledge of making things, based on the experience of many people. By sharing this content online, more people of all ages and backgrounds can learn to enjoy making.
Make: Projects is a structured wiki for DIY projects. A wiki, as in Wikipedia, enables collaboration around the creation of useful information. Make: Projects is a collaborative resource for people who make things. It’s enhanced for creating projects that are visually rich and organized as step-by-step procedures with listings for tools and materials. Anyone can create a project that demonstrates how to make something. (Or, like any wiki, you can create unstructured wiki pages as well.)
Most importantly, anyone can edit any project in Make: Projects. While anyone can edit, only approved edits become public. That approval process depends upon the person’s reputation in the system, which is gained over time. Soon, your participation in Make: Projects will be recognized by earning badges.
Make: Projects is curated because we want to provide the best DIY content. We want to avoid having numerous projects that duplicate other people’s work. That’s why we will encourage the community to collaborate on revisions to improve existing projects instead of creating many versions of the same project with minor variations.
The beauty of how-to projects is that they’re evergreen. Their value lasts a long time. We’re excited to re-introduce projects from the earliest issue of MAKE and know they can be as relevant as projects from the current issue. We also know that already published projects can be improved by new insights or by new techniques. In other words, even the instructions for projects can be revised, tweaked, and hacked.
The Make: Projects platform is open to reflect the energy and expertise of the maker community. We hope you will take part by sharing your own ideas, knowledge, and passion. Contribute your own techniques or projects so that others can learn from you, as you no doubt have learned from others. By hosting this resource, we hope to grow the community of people who make things.
The Make: Projects Platform
The Make: Projects platform was developed by iFixit.com. iFixit uses a structured wiki for interactive DIY repair manuals. We partnered with them to create a platform for interactive DIY project guides. Thanks to Kyle and Luke and the rest of iFixit team for their vision and their development expertise.
This platform is still under development. We’d love to hear your ideas on how to tweak it. We plan to build a parts database that’s shared by Make: Projects as well as iFixit, and perhaps other sites. Stay tuned as there’s more to come.
Note that all content contributed to Make: Projects will be made available under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license.
Check out how to build a Solar Xylophone, a $30 Micro Forge or a Solarroller BEAM Race Car.
12 thoughts on “Welcome to Make: Projects”
Comments are closed.
This is a truly wonderful idea; I hope it is a great success.
One thin I don’t see right away, though, is a place to ask questions about each project.
Big Blue Saw,
There is a Notes box at the end of each project that you can use to ask questions. Also, each step in a project has an “thought bubble” icon and clicking on it allows you to enter a note associated with that step. Feel free to use it for questions. The same icon at the top of the project takes you to the Notes box at the end.
The iFixit platform also has a Q&A facility that we hope to offer some day.
Nice job on the site. There are a few things I would like to see.
Embedded videos would be nice. Looks like right now the only way to include a video in a project is to link to it. Would be nice to offer the option to embed videos from popular video sharing sites, and maybe even offer a simple Make hosted video platform.
It would also be nice to have selectable licensing options. by-nc-sa is what I always use anyway, but I could also see others wanting different options.
@clide
Video is definitely on the to-do list. We understand the importance of having this built in. We love the idea of a future in which Make: Projects would be used like a cookbook/how-to manual. There are already a bunch of actual cooking projects on it, so you could have your tablet computer in the kitchen, on a cookbook stand, using it to follow a recipe. Then you could move into the workshop and have it on a stand or laptop to follow along while you work on your robot or some chemistry experiment or whatever. We know that video will be a valuable part of that experience.
And as you DO increasingly use Make: Projects as your how-to guide, let us know what you discover as things we can do to improve its usefulness “in the field.”
So much cleaner than instructables, but one issue I see.
See this article: http://makeprojects.com/Project/The-Most-Useless-Machine/91/1 – the grey-ish italic text after the name of the item is too hard to see, and contains a lot of important technical detail, especially for the Gearmotor.
Thanks, fischju! The gray should be a bit darker now. We’re still fine-tuning the materials and tools sections, and eventually materials and tools will each link to their own wiki pages!