Announcing A New Wiki: Toyinstructions

We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new site, toyinstructions (www.toyinstructions.net), a community wiki where users can find and help build deep links to instructions for toys and kids' games online.

Instructions for kids' toys can be a major headache. In our family we have treated them as just one more form of paper we have to file and keep track of if we want to make sure that many of the toys we buy today can still be used after they've been played with, put away for a while and rediscovered. We also do a lot of work hunting down instructions for toys we find at garage sales or get handed down, because parents often give up on saving instructions in order to preserve their sanity.

We created toyinstructions to help solve that problem, and in the process we discovered that we had created a site that had the potential to be a community hub. Toyinstructions.net offers links to the exact pages and locations on manufacturers' websites where their toy brand's instructions, user manuals, and building guides can be found. It also links to fan sites, which sometimes do a better job of maintaining such data than the companies do, and to documentation fans have scanned in and uploaded to Flickr for the same reason.

We decided to take the wiki a step further, too, and added links to photo searches (Flickr), blog posts (Technorati), user groups (Yahoo Groups), and DIY project ideas (a Google custom search which currently searches Instructables and the Make: blog). Since we only list these categories when we see significant search results for a specific toy brand, you won't see these links in every toy entry. But everywhere you see them, there will be something cool to see on the link, sometimes a whole community of users waiting for you to jump in and participate. We've also added a simple search box you can use to check the Consumer Product Safety Commission for product recalls.

The site also hosts randomly rotating images from Flickr for popular toys and makes great use of Creative Commons licensed toy photography. We have ideas for other community features we'll be tinkering with as we get some additional wiki administrators on board.

We're really proud of the way the wiki is shaping up so far, and we're excited just to have you check it out. But what will truly make or break the wiki is its user contributions and collaboration. Our offerings are pretty sparse right now relative to the incredible variety of toys out there. A lot of those toys have instructions. And a lot of those instructions are under the couch, up in the attic, or long since thrown away.

So check out whether we have listings for your favorite toy brands, and see if you'd like to chip in with a little Google research. If you have instructions for classic toys which are no longer or never were online, we encourage you to upload them to Flickr and tag them with "toyinstructions" so our contributors can find them and link to them. Make sure to license them through Creative Commons if you'd like us to be able to add a thumbnail to the listing. Top contributors will eventually be invited to participate more deeply in the site as moderator/admins with additional site privileges, a voice in big decisions about the site's direction and growth, and a linked bio on the toyinstructions site.

Click here to visit toyinstructions.net now.