G80-11900

[elecplus]

wiki/Cherry_G80-11900
This page states that all the switches are always MX blacks, but I have some browns.
It also says the keyboards are grey or black, but mine are cream/beige.
Do I have something strange, or are there just more variants than listed on the wiki page?
https://www.elecshopper.com/catalogsear ... t/?q=11900

[ohaimark]

I think there are more variants. I remember selling a couple with browns.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I would be very suspicious about pretty much anything written on the wiki about Cherry G80 keyboards and classic MX switches. There are all sorts of claims that are not backed by any evidence, and I have no idea what's true and what isn't. Many of the people responsible are gone, and there's no way now to independently verify anything that was asserted.

Your query happens to be an extra facet of information that would be accumulated by a keyboard database:

keyboards-f2/switch-lifespans-through-s ... 15487.html

The ones listed on your site have article numbers ending _U___ and _P___, and both of these denote MX Black (so far as we know!) — I assume that the ones with MX Brown have a different letter in position 2 of the five-letter suffix? (see [wiki]Cherry article numbers[/wiki])

Besides, even if the page said "All keyboards found to date have MX Black switches …" (which is more honest) you'd have to dig through the page history to find when that was written, because the vast majority of new discoveries aren't added to the wiki and these kinds of well-meaning claims tend to become outdated. That claim about the switches was written when the page was initially created, in November 2011! In keyboard discovery terms, that's a very, very long time ago! It feels like we're still only scraping the surface of what's out there.

I would add though that MX Brown is fairly unusual in Cherry keyboards. For example, you cannot buy G80-3000 with MX Brown switches. For some reason Cherry just won't make any. Clears, yes, oddly, which is what I bought, but for industrial/POS purposes it's generally MX Black, and for typists, Black or Blue. Brown seems to be something of a special switch in Cherry's mind, although other manufacturers treat it as a perfectly normal switch.

[seebart]

I've seen those beige G80-11900's more than once over the last couple of years.

I will have to reiterate Daniel here; our wiki is problematic in that a reader may tend to believe the data he/she is reading is validated and "final" since it is a comprehensive keyboard information source after all. This is not the case, bigger problem yet it is very often impossible for the author to estimate if there are other variants of some keyboard or switch that happen to not have been sighted. What to do? Slap a disclaimer on every single page? I don't think so.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

It's a bit awkward, I realise. Careful wording such as "examples discovered to date" help clarify that research is ongoing (many pages already are worded this way).

Even so, this list can end up years out of date. A user-editable keyboard database (see link above) won't directly enrich the wiki, but it would be more amenable to updates and would permit data to be collected that MediaWiki isn't suited for (such as detailed lists of variants that can be mined).

(I've mentioned before to a few people that I would prefer, in my dreams, to completely replace MediaWiki with a software package more suited to our purposes, and one that would incorporate a wiki engine for page content. This would be far closer to giving us what we need: all the data and articles in once place!)