Input on the Wiki

[Andy R]

I am planning to do some heavy dedicated promotion of Cruisers Wiki and would like some input on what areas need the most attention (ie. where we are light on content and need more) and what sections of the wiki are most complete (ie. Greece). Any chance you can give me your perspective on what you think we need to more contributions on and what areas are most complete?

Thanks,

Andy

[delatbabel]

Hi Andy,
In no particular order I would include:
* South Pacific, especially the less frequented islands/anchorages/stopovers (big hole there now that oceandots has died, and I'm finding noonsite to be less reliable).
* General cruising tips / maintenance rules, e.g. engine maintenance schedules, etc.

One thing that I would like to see is a more prominent jump off to the Wiki Contents page from the home page (currently there is only the one small link on the menu and the other one at the bottom of the "Welcome" section), and some focus on things on the contents page that aren't to do with anchorages/countries. e.g. General / Seamanship.

Perhaps rebuild the front page so that it contains the welcome box, a large text link to each of the contents and Countries (A-Z) pages, and then move the "What is this cruising wiki?" and "What this wiki is not" boxes onto a separate "about" page.

[atheneoflymington]

Andy,

The most complete areas are the Mediterranean countries, especially Greece, Turkey, Italy, Croatia, the major islands and Portugal (OK, not the Med, but close). Countries in this region still needing further input are France, Spain and the North African countries, which are only partially complete. Otherwise, this region on the Wiki now offers a serious alternative to published pilot books.

Really there's no other region I'm aware of that's more than partially complete, although Peter McHugh has made some good progress on Australia and Tasmania.

Any promotion would be excellent, especially if it attracted some more dedicated contributors - the casual ones are fine, but they don't tend to take responsibility for creating major new content as opposed to just editing existing material.

Let me know if there's any help I can provide.

GORDON

[delatbabel]

The advantage of a wiki is that anyone can provide updates. Even if everyone only contributes 1 paragraph, with enough contributors we will have an awesome resource.

[atheneoflymington]

Originally Posted by delatbabel

The advantage of a wiki is that anyone can provide updates. Even if everyone only contributes 1 paragraph, with enough contributors we will have an awesome resource.

With the greatest respect, if everyone contributed just one paragraph but no-one either created the original pages or edited the contributions, the net result would be something about as awesome as the Tower of Babel...

GORDON

[atheneoflymington]

Can I just add to my earlier posting - I wasn't simply trying to be snide. My point is that we already have a lot of contributors to the Wiki; it's just that we have far too few active ones, who are sufficiently committed to familiarise themselves with the software and templates and then devote a fair bit of time to creating new pages and even whole new sections.

Anyone can add to pages and that's of course an invaluable resource, but perhaps we need to focus a bit more on actively encouraging and mentoring some of the more committed contributors so they can develop the skills to create good content. It's also much easier to achieve a consistently good standard of style, layout and content if pages are created properly in the first place.

GORDON

[delatbabel]

I get where you're coming from. I think that mentoring regular or even new contributors is a great idea. What I'd like is for someone to mentor me to have more hours in the day.