The way I read it, it's wrong as it confuses a number of things, starting with the title. Here's what it says:
There's such a thing as 'dry plate', which in practice mostly means gelatin-based 'dry' emulsions. There's also such a thing as collodion, which in practice is virtually always wet plate, since collodion dry plate just wouldn't work very well (although attempts have been made; AFAIK they were usually not very satisfactory).
Oh, I see, I have sources mentioning all three of "dry collodion", "dry collodion-albumen", and "gelatin dry plate", and I smashed them all together (in my head and on the page) without realizing they're rather different.
It doesn't seem like the terms for dry plates are very clearly defined... is a dry emulsion on darkened glass still an ambrotype, or is it a separate thing?
They're all a bit out of place on my site anyway, so I think I'll collapse the first three sections into one generic "collodion plate" family... glass/metal, wet/dry, gelatin/colloid, they're all emulsion-on-plate instead of emulsion-on-paper. This site isn't meant to be a history lesson.
In other words - people won't find what they're looking for even if you went through the effort of putting it up there.
The point is rather that you come to Scratched Emulsion exactly when you don't know what you're looking for. It's for people asking the question "what unusual things can I do in the darkroom?" The moment you find your thing, you should go somewhere else for actual details.
Thus, an important part of the design is that it's a single page. It's supposed to be taken in as a whole. The sections roll into each other without clear division on purpose.
I also expect a single-digit number of visitors per year, so best not to get ahead of myself hyper-optimizing. I spent more time replying to you here than anyone will ever spend on my page
Most of the techniques and processes (I'd distinguish between the two; see also above) I see on your page are to the best of my knowledge fairly well or even very extensively documented. One resource that you also extensively refer to is alternativephotography.com, which furthermore contains numerous links to additional literature in many of its articles. That's just one strand; if you look at the overall literature, online articles, forum posts and old mailing list archives, you'll find that there's a treasure trove of information on many of the things you briefly touch upon.
We're in agreement, except on one important definition: I consider
discoverability a part of (well, linked to) documentation, and, while much is technically published on the internet, finding can be extremely hard. If it's written down somewhere where nobody will ever find it, is it really documented?
There are many things that are documented... on page 8 of an APUG thread 20 years ago, or in a Usenet post in 1994, or in a public-domain book on archive.org. You've probably collected quite a bit of that information yourself
As you say, I linked to alternativephotography.com from nearly every one of my reference sections, which is absolutely the prime source when you already know what you're looking for. It's rather too big and scattered to get a good summary, though, and that's the same for all of the large article-based sites. Both article-based sites and forums are highly temporal; if you subscribe to them and read them regularly you will eventually learn a great deal, but they're difficult places to get started, or to get a broad overview of a new domain.
The problem is significantly worse for experimental photography, specifically. If you want to follow in the footsteps of Ansel Adams, there are tons of very comprehensive books and sites and youtube channels to guide you. If you search for "experimental darkroom" (or "abstract" or "surreal"), you get the same handful of popular tricks over and over again... I hope you like solarizing prints, because that's
the one. Some experiments become
Instagram cool (film soup), but many wither away in obscurity on some university student's long-abandoned blog.
That's exactly where this project came from. Every time I see experimental prints I try again to search for ways to introduce surreality into the darkroom, but Search Engine Optimization works against me. The information is there, it's just hard to surface. This is my first stab at surfacing some of it.
On some techniques and processes, documentation is indeed poor. The example technique you mentioned is indeed one I never heard of, although it seems straightforward enough. Processes that are relatively poorly document are for instance the woodburytype and the autochrome process, although recent advances by dedicated enthusiasts (also reported here on Photrio) have started to fill this particular void quite effectively.
Oh, these are neat! This brings up the challenging question of deciding when something is possible-enough to be included. I only want things that can be practically done today, and "practical" is pretty hard to define.
So at this point I would offer for consideration to you to decide what your project is really about and what ambition it has, and then structure and pursue it accordingly. In doing so, I would also recommend taking stock of similar endeavors that have already been undertaken, and asking the question whether it's feasible to contribute to those, and/or if they leave systematic gaps that can be filled in no other way than building a new repository from the ground up.
I thought about using the word "glossary", though I don't really like its connotations. It might convey the intention better. There's absolutely no intent to compete with the existing resources; the point is to drive traffic to them. And, ideally, more to the individual artists, when possible.
You used "portal", which is maybe a better word. I see its practical value as an in-between, when you know you want to "experiment" but you don't yet know what that means. Or when you've just learned about one technique (
cough solarization), and wonder what other options you have.
