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PinWiki: 13 Years On - Pinball Expo 2024 - Casey Gardner & Chuck Gardner

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·24m 41s·analyzed·Oct 18, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

PinWiki celebrates 13 years as the community's central pinball knowledge repository with 486 pages and plans 2025 forums launch.

Summary

Casey Gardner presents a 13-year retrospective of PinWiki, a community-maintained pinball knowledge repository launched in April 2011 to preserve repair information and pinball history. The site has grown to 486 pages, ~5,000 uploads, 664 registered users, and serves 200-300 GB of bandwidth monthly. Key contributors include Steve Culpa, Jim Paulson (recently deceased), William Firepower, and Chris Hibbler. Future plans include server migration, launch of heavily moderated repair forums (early 2025), and expanded documentation of modern games and pinball history.

Key Claims

  • PinWiki launched on April 21, 2011, within two days of Clay Harrell's guides disappearing

    high confidence · Casey Gardner stating founding timeline in response to community negativity around Harrell's site removal

  • PinWiki now hosts 486 pages, ~5,000 uploads, and serves 200-300 GB of bandwidth monthly

    high confidence · Casey Gardner providing current site statistics

  • Jim Paulson secured unprecedented licensing with Gottlieb roughly 4-5 months after launch

    high confidence · Casey Gardner crediting Paulson for negotiating Gottlieb rights that remain active

  • PinWiki plans to launch moderated repair forums by early 2025 integrated with the wiki

    high confidence · Casey Gardner describing beta testing and rollout timeline for new forum platform

  • Some modern manufacturers hesitate to provide detailed documentation due to competitive concerns about trade secrets

    medium confidence · Casey Gardner responding to question about manufacturer synergy, noting competitive documentation reluctance

  • Ken Layton documented Bally home model pinball machines and their crossover compatibility with commercial parts

    high confidence · Casey Gardner highlighting Layton's contribution to lesser-known game documentation before his passing

  • Chris Hibbler has retired from his day job and still does pinball repair, actively contributing photos to PinWiki

    high confidence · Casey Gardner describing Hibbler's current role and contribution frequency

  • Wikipedia has rejected multiple pinball person biography entries as subjects not significant enough

    high confidence · Audience member directly addressing Casey about Wikipedia's documented rejection of pinball figure entries

Notable Quotes

  • “There's so much pinball knowledge out there we need to gather in one place and document it all for historical purposes and to keep get all the information to be findable.”

    Casey Gardner@ 0:43 — Core mission statement for PinWiki's founding vision

  • “Within two days of finding that out, we had Pinwiki launched on April 21st, 2011. So we kind of tried to refocus the energy and kind of point it in a much better direction.”

    Casey Gardner@ 1:18 — Documents rapid response to community need following Harrell's guides removal

  • “The links die. The internet lasts forever, but it also doesn't last forever. Things change. And we've been trying to document everything in one spot so it doesn't disappear.”

    Casey Gardner@ 11:28 — Explains archival philosophy behind hosting all content instead of external links

  • “Jim Paulson was able to set up some unprecedented licensing with Gottlieb. The Gottlieb rights are still protected and owned and actively maintained to this day.”

    Casey Gardner@ 3:28 — Key licensing achievement that enabled documentation of protected schematics within legal bounds

  • “He would not be here today where we're at without him [Jim Paulson]. So I just want to give a little in memoriam for him.”

    Casey Gardner@ 16:18 — Tribute to deceased early contributor whose contributions were foundational to PinWiki's success

  • “Wikipedia seems to be uninterested in documenting the history of people in pinball. They have told me directly that some of the entries that I tried to make, the person is not significant enough to be included on their site.”

Entities

PinWikiorganizationCasey GardnerpersonJim PaulsonpersonChris HibblerpersonSteve CulpapersonWilliam FirepowerpersonKen LaytonpersonClay HarrellpersonChuck Gardner

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: PinWiki continues to grow in usage (200-300 GB/month bandwidth) despite reduced public discussion, indicating sustained value to pinball community but declining visibility as 'brand new' project.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'We definitely are not talked about as much anymore because we're not the brand new pin wiki developing. But the traffic has never stopped. We are a very heavily used resource.'

  • ?

    community_signal: PinWiki's heavily moderated forums launching early 2025 represent intentional pivot toward organized discussion focused on repair information rather than open community debate, contrasting with Pinside's less-moderated approach.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'The goal is to be very heavily moderated. It's not going to be the Wild West. We don't need 1,700 opinions. It's about getting repair information.'

  • ?

    event_signal: Memorial recognition of deceased contributors Jim Paulson and Ken Layton indicates PinWiki's commitment to documenting and honoring pinball community figures; audience member highlights gap in Wikipedia coverage of pinball people.

    high · Casey Gardner's in-memoriam tribute to Paulson and Layton; audience member noting Wikipedia's rejection of pinball figure entries.

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Positive resolution of historical tension: Clay Harrell's guides removal sparked negativity in 2011, but Harrell has since returned guides online and reconciled with PinWiki community; Casey met with Harrell multiple times at Expo with 'no hate' present.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'Clay was tickled to death to see that a 16-year-old kid had that much interest in it. We did meet with him here at Expo a couple times. It was a positive thing.'

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.074

0:00
Yeah, I'm going to, I created PinWiki. We're going to talk about it. So I'll give you a little brief rundown of kind of where we began.
0:18
13 years ago now. I was 16, very, grew up in a tech background. My dad did and still does web hosting. so I kind of already had played around a lot with web technology and stuff like that when I was six years old I had you know created my first website and stuff like that so already I kind of had the technical background of it and I'd already been kind of beating around an idea of how can we gather there's so much pinball knowledge out there we need to gather in one place and document it all for for the historical purposes of it and to keep get all the information to be findable. So some of you were aware of Clay Harrell's guides at the time had disappeared recently. And there was a lot of negative hate going on on that. And I'm not going to touch on that side of it, but there was a lot of negative hate going on at that time. And I kind of wanted to refocus that energy into something more positive. So I kind of looked at it as a great opportune time. And within two days of finding that out, we had Pinwiki launched on April 21st, 2011.
1:26
So we kind of tried to refocus the energy and kind of point it in a much better direction. So we started hitting the ground running. A lot of people jumped in early. We had a lot of early contributors gathering info and documenting even some of the basics. As we've matured, we've definitely gotten a lot more of the intricate and kind of loose edge cases documented. but early on we were just trying to get base repair information. Our two really main sections that kind of developed well are probably some of the most built games ever, the classic Ballystern games and our System 3 through 7 Williams documentation.

Audience member@ 18:58 — Highlights gap in mainstream documentation of pinball history and community figures

  • “We're not trying to replace Pinside or anything like that. I think that also has its place. But we want to provide a more calm organized type location for pinball discussion.”

    Casey Gardner@ 15:38 — Clarifies PinWiki's positioning relative to Pinside community forum

  • “It takes a village. Yeah, yeah. So we do have a little some limited sections of that we need to kind of develop that more.”

    Casey Gardner @ ~19:30 — Acknowledges need to expand documentation of pinball people/designers while emphasizing community effort

    • person
    Chuck Hessperson
    Martin Leastperson
    Forceflowperson
    Leon Boerperson
    Lloyd Olsonperson
    Kerry Hemmingperson
    Gottliebcompany
    Spooky Pinballcompany
    Wikipediaorganization
    Pinsideorganization
    Pinball Expo 2024event

    community_signal: Chris Hibbler's transition from day job to full-time pinball repair while actively contributing documentation represents significant volunteer commitment to preservation of pinball knowledge.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'Chris has retired from his day job and his last I know is still doing pinball repair so he gets a lot of oddball stuff and with the great part of that is when a board comes on his bench...this man whips out his camera and immediately takes a high-res photo.'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Gottlieb's unprecedented licensing agreement with PinWiki allows schematic documentation of specific circuit sections while protecting full manual copyright, establishing template for manufacturer cooperation with community documentation efforts.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'The Gottlieb rights are still protected and owned and actively maintained to this day...if we're talking about a certain section of a circuit, we can put up the schematics of that specific area and explain it.'

  • $

    market_signal: Modern pinball manufacturers increasingly hesitant to share detailed technical documentation with community wikis due to competitive concerns about trade secrets, despite some (Spooky) maintaining cooperative relationships.

    medium · Casey Gardner: 'Some of the manufacturers...some of the holdback seems to be there's a lot of competition now and the documenting current systems no one kind of wants their trade secrets out there.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: PinWiki upcoming server migration and forum integration with single sign-on reflects technical maturation and effort to reduce friction for contributors and users.

    high · Casey Gardner: 'We're about to do another server migration. Again, as I said, we've constantly grown. We're upgrading our service to be even stronger. And with that, once that is done, we are in the process of beta testing, launching some forums.'

    • 2:09
    The Ballystern stuff was put together mainly by Steve Culpa and Jim Paulson. They put a lot of effort in. They took some of the resources they already had documented on their own websites to get images contributed, not just descriptions and wording and things like that, and kind of really put it together. And then our William stuff for System 3 through 7, I don't know his full actual name. He goes by William Firepower.
    2:33
    He documented a ton of stuff, and with that, he also loves the game Firepower. So he's redrawn a lot of the documentation that was hard to read for William stuff and, again, freely put it up on PinWiki to share with everyone. So our community kind of came together and focused in and started putting things together.
    2:56
    With that, trying to get some of our early trust, we actually put up two mirrors of the site because everyone was afraid PinWiki would do the same thing that Clay Harrell's guides did, which was disappear. And we wanted to prove that we were here for the long stay, which obviously we are again, 13 years on.
    3:12
    Chuck Hess and Martin Least both hosted mirrors of the wiki. We would download the data about once a week and put it up. Now that we've proven we don't need that anymore, we haven't continued to do that. But at the time, that was to help build the trust of the community.
    3:28
    And not long after that, about four or five months in, Jim Paulson was able to set up some unprecedented licensing with Gottlieb. The Gottlieb rights are still protected and owned and actively maintained to this day. So some of the things we can't host are full-on manuals. But we were able to get some exclusions and licensing to be able to, if we're talking about a certain section of a circuit, we can put up the schematics of that specific area and explain it. And we set up a really great relationship with them. They've always been well for us, never had an issue with anything we've put up. And that kind of helped document stuff that others hadn't always been able to document. And again, kind of helped with, you know, was not a single person and not do all of this on my own. Jim Paulson was able to set that up, talk to them, and get that going for us and get that relationship built. Again, community effort. It's a huge, huge contribution from a lot of people to get to where we did.
    4:25
    So a little less than a year in, we started having traffic problems. We've grown too popular. Our hosting couldn't hold it. We were getting suspended for using too many resources. I was originally actually on his servers and had to move to separate servers because we had outgrown his capabilities.
    4:47
    Again, about a year in, we were doing about 30 gigabytes a month of bandwidth. And most of our site is text, not images. I mean, there's some diagrams with it, but a lot of it is text. We were getting tons and tons of views looking for, again, this repair information.
    5:02
    So we've steady upgraded a couple times now. But we upgraded, got things locked back in. lots of upgrades to the underpinning software. Our software is just the MediaWiki software. It's the same thing that runs Wikipedia, which is great for us. It gives us a lot of support for issues, feature upgrades. It obviously can be very big.
    5:24
    Another minor issue we had in there was some security issues with spamming and attempts to hijack the site. We got them under control and taken care of, And now we actually have some non-pinball people but IT background people, including myself and some other people who daily – not daily, sorry, weekly review anything that's been uploaded, which is usually a lot of Chris Hibbler's contributions. Anything that's been uploaded, all the site code, and make sure there's no updates and stuff like that to keep things running smooth. So after we got a lot of our basis of repair documented we kind of started moving on beyond just the repair site the side of things We are the place for everything pinball not just the place for everything pinball repair So one of the great contributions of I don actually know his real name either Forceflow, as most people know from Pinside. He maintains a lot of our non-repair information, such as the pinball show schedule. He is on top of it as soon as the show changes, date gets posted, anything. it gets put up there we have a whole page and every year we update it for the next year to get dates on it um another great community contribution has been the will it fit section everyone wants to know if their car will fit whatever pinball machine in it so there's a ton of documentation of not only yes this you know my ford flex will fit a pinball machine in it but okay it'll fit you know a wpc but not a you know jersey jack whatever you know some games a little bigger than others and a lot of people have contributed to document that we started a history section that needs a lot more work to it to really fill it in but we'd like to document the historical side again not just the technical side great information like leg and glass measurements you know a lot of you know 70s got leaves took 31 inch legs but they don't belong on you know your 90s williams game so you kind of see what era legs came from glass sizes you know if you're translate glass is broken. It's easy enough to look up on PinWiki. It's in our general section of information.
    7:35
    And then there's a ton of guides now. Anything from dying plastic parts to some basic repair information and things of that nature that have been documented. And we've had people want to document specific projects and stuff like that too. So we have some of that too. so where we are now today 13 years on um most of our popular games are very well documented wpc uh your and your classic valley sterns your system three through sevens um we've been steady working on getting a lot of our more current games uh you know there's a lot more manufacturers now than when we started um so anything from american to chicago and you know jersey jack we're trying to document the modern games to stay with the times um everyone's bringing them home or when we're operating on the location and games are more complicated than ever these days so trying to get that information documented is kind of where a lot of our focus is heading and also worked on um as well um we have sections for some of the more rare games uh zacharia games for example it's hard to find repair information on because there's not that many of them out there so we started documenting a lot of that one of the interesting sections Ken Layton before he passed was able to put together a lot with the Bally home model pinball machines from the 80s everyone thought they were built like junk but they play well they're basically a 1976 hocus pocus without the center spinner and they play well but you would find them working for a hundred bucks because no one knew how to keep them running Ken did a great job documenting crossovers from the home model part numbers to the standard commercial ballet coils.
    9:16
    There's two different series boards in those games, and he was able to document both of them pretty extensively too. And again, providing information that wasn't available anywhere else.
    9:28
    Oh, and I forgot to touch. Some of the things we're now also looking at standardizing. Every section was kind of written by someone who had an expertise in their background of that specific area. we're looking now to try and kind of standardize the format a little bit more on where that information is so when you're used to reading the wpc section and now you need to work on a game you kind of know oh this information's in this section and things of that nature and kind of working to to standardize some of that um some of our special thanks again i named a few of our early and continuing supporters uh chris hibbler who's here is our my number one right man on keeping the site running documenting new things he's our evangelist who speaks to everyone positively if there's an issue i don't get a lot of time on the forums to to be able to see when someone mentions something about poonwiki chris chris brings up any concerns to my attention and i really greatly appreciate that um jim paulson uh chuck hess chuck my dad uh martin Well, we used Steve Culpa, Richard Firepower, Leon Boer before he passed, who actually gave, again, through Jim Paulson, helped us out a lot. All of his repair information, we were able to mirror it before it all disappeared with his passing. And he also contributed some test information even before he gave us his site to keep and hold on to. So that was very phenomenally helpful. If you've ever used his test ROMs, they're a great help in troubleshooting. Ken Layton, Lloyd Olson, Kerry Hemming, and I'm sure I'm missing some more names, but those guys really early on helped us start, hit the ground running and get going, advocated for us, helped with adminning everything.
    11:12
    And we're now, as you can see, up to 486 different pages of information on a ton of uploads. There's almost 5,000 uploads now of various pictures, manuals, things like that. We've done our best to document everything within the site instead of just URL links to other websites because links die. The internet lasts forever, but it also doesn't last forever. Things change. And we've been trying to document everything in one spot so it doesn't disappear. And we are now up to 664 registered users. Most of them have signed up, contributed one or two things and are disappeared from. And that's okay.
    11:52
    We love if you can constantly contribute, there's, you know, grammatical errors that may need edited, even if you don't know pinball repair, stuff like that. But if you just want to contribute one time to tell me what vehicle you moved your pinball machine in, so be it. We're always happy to get any of that information. Do you have any info on the number of users? That's what I said. We had a bit. Oh, right. yeah I off the top of my head I don have a unique page view numbers off the top of my head We running about 200 300 gigabytes of bandwidth a month now
    12:25
    Traffic has never slowed on the site. We definitely are not talked about as much anymore because we're not the brand new pin wiki developing.
    12:33
    But the traffic has never stopped. We are a very heavily used resource, and it's only growing. So what's next? as I touched on we've kind of worked on some of our more generalized information with that said though I want to grow more of that again we're trying to be the place for everything pinball so while we're strong point is definitely our repair information if you have some pinball story you want to document pinball designer stuff like that things that don't necessarily fit into IPDB for example we want to document them as well we're also trying to document all the new games systems like i said we have more manufacturers than ever putting games out a lot of them do seem to be using the p-rock system or fast system and stuff like that so some of the generic information is already kind of documented but every game and every system is unique so not that there's any manufacturers sitting in this room if there is any who hear this though happily reach out we'd love to get some of your machines tear them apart document them and send them back i'm not trying to keep your game but trying to document some of this would be great But getting not just the information out of manuals, but pictures of mechanisms, games, things that are unique and stuff like that goes a long way.
    13:47
    And as again, I said, standardizing some of the formatting. We've gotten a long way from when we first started. And when we first started, it was definitely an information dump. Get it all up there and kind of work through it. So now we've had some time to do some formatting and we want to continue that.
    14:05
    And the next two items kind of go hand in hand. We're about to do another server migration. Again, as I said, we've constantly grown. We're upgrading our service to be even stronger. And with that, once that is done, we are in the process of beta testing, launching some forms with a big focus on repair. The goal is to be very heavily moderated. It's not going to be the Wild West. We don't need 1,700 opinions. It's about getting repair information, documenting, and focusing on the pinball information at hand.
    14:39
    It's integrated with the wiki as well to be able to pull sections from the wiki to put into form posts if you're trying to describe how to fix an issue to someone, as well as logins will be standardized between them, and that will help clean up some of the back end for us. So we're beta testing it now. We're getting all the technical side worked on, tested out, and here in the next probably month or so, So our admins will get some access to it to kind of give us our feedback on that. And then sometime about the beginning of 2025, I'm not saying January 1st, but that's roughly the goal. We're going to launch them. And again, with a big focus, heavily moderated. We're not trying to argue and bicker. It's about the repair information and good discussion versus bickering, I guess is the best way to put it. so that's that's where we're going now is going to add that and that's kind of our next step into to providing more repair and just you know the location for pinball stuff we're not trying to replace a pin side or anything like that i think that also has its place but we want to provide a more calm organized type location for pinball discussion so um and then in my final point um Very close to me. I know very close to Chris Hibbler. Jim Paulson passed on us roughly around this time last year. He was a very early supporter, contributor, and voice for PennWiki. He gave us a lot of information that he had stored away in both his head and on his computer, both information and pictures. and we miss him. He was, we would not be here today where we're at without him. So I just want to give a little in memoriam for him. It was definitely well-earned. So is there any questions about PenWiki?
    16:36
    I'll start out. You made a passing reference to the manufacturers. Do you see any hope of getting some synergy with the tech support teams at any of the manufacturers? I know in the past, at least with Spooky, we have talked back and forth and gotten some apparent information from them. We're now kind of looking to start documenting some of their stuff even more in depth, and they've always been very open to that. So, yes, I do think we have some in-grounds on that. some other manufacturers i have reached out and heard nothing i've heard some say would like to support that in the future but we're not in a position to do that just yet so i think we're slowly getting that page open for it i know some of the i wouldn't say negative but some of the holdback seems to be there's a lot of competition now and the documenting current systems no one kind of wants their trade secrets out there i guess and not that we're looking to dig that deep into the repair side of it but that seems to be a little bit some of that information is a little harder to get obtained now because of that so i have to confess that i'm not very familiar with your site but it sounds very interesting and i certainly will check it out at my first opportunity but i did want to have a uh ask a question um you have uh your your friend and early supporter memorialized there. Is there any thought about doing that within your system as well for people who are currently with us and those who have passed? I think there's definitely room for that.
    18:17
    More broadly, what are you doing about people in pinball? Is that a thing? So people in general we have very lightly treaded on documenting people in pinball a good way to put put a game design a game program or stuff like that um it takes a village uh yeah yeah so we do have a little some limited sections of that we need to kind of develop that more um if that's something you're interested in there's a contact button on pin wiki on the left side bar pin wiki there's a contact button shoot a message over um and if there's something that you feel is missing or not sure how to even approach Can I tell you why I asked that question? Yeah, go for it. Wikipedia seems to be uninterested in documenting the history of people in pinball. Yeah. They have told me directly that some of the entries that I tried to make, the person is not significant enough to be included on their site. so I would like to have these people that are significant to us remembered somewhere yeah absolutely again as the all encompassing place for everything pinball as our slogan we absolutely want that reach out to me and we can absolutely get that worked on I would love to do something like that so anything else I got another question then I tried to register to be a user and it said at some step in the process I was going to get an email or some next step didn't happen. Okay. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe you've debugged that. But now that I can see that I could be user number 666, I don't know if I want to do it or if I want to hold it off a little longer and let someone else be that.
    20:08
    He wants the number. Okay. So to go a little hand in hand with that, our user numbers, registered user numbers, as I've touched on a little bit, most of them are not very active. Part of with the repair forms, we're working on the integration of single sign-on, basically, to simplify it. So you don't have an account for the WIC. You don't have an account for the form separately. In that process and part of what we're beta testing now, we're going to be cleaning a lot of that out. And then it will be tied to an account on the form, which is much easier to manage. Okay, so you might find my partially created registration. We did. I know a few years back I had some bugs. We got – the current existing system got them worked out, so that may have gotten aid in that process.
    20:52
    So, again, if you ever have an issue, there's a contact button on the website if you also want to. Chris Hibbler is always on the forums and always listening. He will gladly point me in the direction if I miss something. So definitely always reach out. If you have an issue, we're here to talk. so i'm one of those occasional users but anyway um i'm curious you know i'm sure at the beginning there was a huge influx of contributions yeah how's that look now the activity is it pretty steady growing declining nothing will compare to the first probably six months of you know information dump as i call it there was so much information coming in and at the time every single edit we still you know review edits to make sure nothing malicious has happened you know someone makes an accidental mistake and deletes a whole page stuff like that so we still review them um back then it was insane uh someone contributes something at least you know once a day once every two days type deal we're still whether it's major information or minor information we're always getting something um chris has retired from his day job and his last i know is still doing pinball repair so he gets a lot of oddball stuff and with the great part of that is when a board comes on his bench if it's not documented on the wiki that man whips out his camera and immediately takes a high-res photo and it immediately gets uploaded there's so many oddball williams boards for example the with oddball part numbers that this man has gotten pictures of that i didn't even know existed um so yeah there's still it's not anywhere like it was obviously because there's nothing to compare to that initial inrush but we are still getting more information it's still maturing hi you were talking earlier about a website where a lot of this information came from a long time ago maybe a couple decades ago so clay harrell's guides of pinrepair.com now so he's rewritten some of them putting them back up was at the time before pin wiki had started in my eyes the place to find that pinball repair information um at some point a little before uh pin wiki went up that site he on his own choice and then you know i had to talk to him that information got pulled from the internet yeah it disappeared yeah that's why i wonder so that's kind of where we i was already beating around the idea of a pinball wiki at the time and that kind of took the opportunity because there was so much hate and negativity going on towards clay on that um and i'd rather focus the community again to contributing in a centralized location so we kind of kind of took the opportunity that was there to fill in where that had disappeared so yeah and And a big difference is that Clay's website was basically the voice of Clay only. This is the whole community. So that's groupware versus a website. And that's part of where some of the hate was that it was all his content that he took away.
    23:42
    I'm glad he brought it back, though, because he's been a positive for the community. He really has. He's passionate about pinball, just like we are. And we need more, not less. So it was good to have him back. He was tickled to death to see that a 16-year-old kid had that much interest in it.
    24:01
    We did meet with him here at Expo a couple times. It was a positive thing. There was no hate there at all about him starting the wiki at all. So it's been good. It's been good. He beat that idea around for about a year and a half before we actually put it up. Okay, last call.
    24:24
    All right. All right, stay up there, Walter. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you all listening to me ramble on about my website.