LAS VEGAS – Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, an auctioneer of industrial equipment, rolled out an industry-first — a free online wiki for the equipment industry at www.RitchieWiki.com. Using the software provided by Wikipedia, Ritchie Bros. has created a one-stop public resource for equipment information, one that the community at large can research, read, add to, and edit.

“Dave Ritchie, co-founder of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, has always wanted to collect the knowledge and expertise of our company and our customers and gather it in some sort of library or repository,” said Clay Tippett, vice president of Internet Services for Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers. “There is a vast body of information about equipment in the world — but it was not all in one place and a lot of it is hard to access.”

Tippett said that a wiki is the best way to compile information and to ensure availability to the greatest number of people. Information can be constantly added, elaborated, and updated democratically by thousands of individual contributors that all have different information to share.

The new equipment wiki, called RitchieWiki, has reference-quality material on equipment, manufacturers, people, uses, projects, and history. There are also specifications for more than 9,200 different machines and growing. Not only can you find out the length and width of a machine, perhaps for transporting purposes, but you can also find out other information such as the depth an excavator can dig or the bucket capacity of a wheel loader. There is also a comparison feature on the specifications tool that allows you to evaluate up to four different models of equipment at a time.

The free public site is sponsored by Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, and will be moderated by the company after the roll-out with rules in place to only allow reference-quality, encyclopedic material. No promotional, libelous, or self-serving writing will be allowed on the site.

Before the launch of RitchieWiki, Ritchie Bros. staff worked for months to populate the site with:

• 2,000+ pages
  

  
  

• 650+ photographs
  

  
  

• 9,200+ equipment specifications
  

  
  

• 500+ articles