before I came to my senses), so I should say a few words at some point. This was truly my intent when I opened the doors on The Signal Saloon. There's so much not documented or passing data that gets lost when we gain/lose people/archives from the clubs. I was hoping to give a lot of documentation and detail to each of the couple (ha ha) signals I was going to collect. What's inside. What's outside. What works. What fails. Yes, there's a lot of nice websites out there with great pieces, photos, and style but they didn't go far beyond the lens in most cases.---------------------------------------------------------------------
Volunteers. What does it involve? First and foremost, collecting, or even just providing Hard Data. Informal word from a SFC member is a start, the commentaries and personal accounts from the industry are much better (IE the account by "Ray" from his times at Econolite and experiences with Winko-Matic on the Winko Wiki page. Catalogs, vintage advertisements, brochures, manuals, and photographs are even better. If you can't, or just don't want to be involved with the page creation providing source data in the formats previously mentioned is simple for those who posses but half the work for those who need to seek out. Even if it's just a dated photograph of Grandma in front of the fire station next to a Horni beacon that could form a better timeline for when signal X was around.
Second is organizing and cataloging this data before uploading it to the Wiki. There's going to be a lot of tedium, duplicate entries, and conflicting sources. I'm not pretending this is the easy part. It's probably the toughest. An inane attention to detail is a must. It'd be much better if the people doing the research also were familiar with that type of signal hardware, but that's just not realistic for most cases. My favorite example the Deco 8" singleface. It looks simple but then you have Type D, Type DT. Early and Late D reflector frames. Aluminum and Glass DT reflectors. At least five types of endplates. All that will eventually be captured. It might start out for now as the Type D and Type DT signals but as more detail is accumulated it will grow to include all these kinds of nuances.
Third (two and a half) is maintaining dates. Whenever Possible the dates should be noted for each item, at least the earliest and latest recorded dates. Eventually we will create a master signal timeline off this kind of data and signals could be identified down to only a few years based on their hardware configuration.
Fourth is Attributions. I have not been stringent myself on much of this data either, but we're all trying to straighten up. Just like your high school research paper, I don't care if "John" says there's no Darley's equipped with blue lenses, we need to see a reference to the catalog, advertisement, or data source that said "no blue lenses." Lest I flush away good information here, at this stage, please provide that kind of information - the old "everyone knows that in 1947..." stories, but do note it as such with disqualifiers as [opinion] [uncited] [assumed] in the body text containing unsubstantiated data. A lot of the stuff will probably never be citable and we have to make those inferences now and correct them when countered. Tokheim/Signaphore is an example - We've yet to locate papers linking them together but we know when Signaphore disappeared from industry publications, when Tokheim got into the market and started using the same name, and have patents in that timeframe attributed to each of those companies signed by the same head engineer.
Wow!! 
My hat's off to you Cap'n Wiki!! 