h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I see Wikipedia relaunched their Wikivoyage product this week. It's a collaborative travel guide project, built by (excuse the quotes, Dmitri) 'Wikivoyagers' from around the globe.

Amazing idea. I wish we'd thought of it first.


Seriously, all h2g2 needs is another threat to its small corner of cyberspace. I wa really worried when I read the news.

That is until I read these two items from the list of 'Non-Goals', i.e. what they're not going to accept:

1. Travel essay anthology. Wikivoyage is not a travel magazine. Articles should be directed toward practical information about travelling.

2. Personal travel journals. Wikivoyagers usually have interesting stories about their personal adventures, which should instead be written somewhere other than in our articles.

3. Vacation photo gallery service. Photographs and illustrations should be targeted towards illustrating destinations and sights, not toward showing Grandma how big the mai-tai was that you drank at the luau.

(it goes on)


Panic over!

Link: http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page

Those people who want to write travel journals should come over and join US. Hitchhikers are better than Voyagers, anyway. I'll bet those Wikivoyagers forget their s.

We happen to prefer our travel journals interesting.

I tried to read their Policies page, but almost feel asleep after reading one fourth of it and skipped the rest. Not even the BBC House Rules were *that extensive!

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Policies

I seem to recall some very complicated history behind Wikivoyage. There was another site, run by a different company, and there was a rift between management and members, so the members left and moved to the Wikimedia Foundation, taking their content with them. Or something like that.

TRiG.

History of Wikivoyage: http://meta.travel.stackexchange.com/a/882/253.

Forgive my ignorance of the Wiki empire, but are these actually independent businesses or are they all part of the dull monolithic Wikipedia? And should we care?

I couldn't see any value to the separate product at all while they were rejecting any vaguely interesting travel writing.

Wikimedia is the charity which runs Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage and a couple of others. I find the history interesting, even if the writing isn't. Wikitravel was run by a different company (Internet Brands), and the community were unhappy with them, so they left, taking all their content with them. And then Wikimedia gave them a new home at Wikivoyage. And they could take all their content with them because of the license it was under.

Sorry, but content licensing and the concept of free cultural works is something I can get *extremely* geeky about. I sometimes forget that not everyone else is quite as interested in these things as I am.

TRiG.

Wikimedia is rich ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ ) and yet still keeps asking for money and to my mind not really giving my back to those that volunteer for them.

I know if we had that amount of cash I'd at the very least buy each and every one of our volunteers a small drink

I don't really go in for the whole Wiki bashing, but no matter what they do, I can't help but think of the difference between the Encyclopedia Galactica and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

{I'd at the very least buy each and every one of our volunteers a small drink}

Sounds like one of your typical programming 'sessions', Pastey.

There's nothing "typical" about my programming sessions

That's true. I'm barely recovered from the

I remember many years ago, when this place was run by the BBC, someone compared h2g2 and wikipedia to Encyclopaedia Galactica and the Hitchhiker's Guide. But in this person's opinion, we were Encyclopaedia Galactica - old fashioned, slow to change and traditional, while Wikipedia was like the Hitchhiker's Guide - with updates on the fly, hundreds of thousands of researchers, and if not reliable, at least definitively unreliable.

I think things have changed - we haven't changed a lot but Wikipedia has become much more set in its ways. A good few things I put into it were removed because although they were true, they weren't backed up with references in print. And things which are obviously untrue are left in - if I remove them, I'm considered a vandal.

We've got a few people here who are refugees from Wikipedia. Talking to them off site it's for those reasons that Gnomon has mentioned, entries that are obviously wrong not being removed because it's considered vandalism, yet ones that are definitely right not being allowed unless they're backed up by stuff in print.

I find that last one counter-productive personally, because it means that Wikipedia will *never* contain anything new. It will always be churning out repeats.

There's nothing wrong with the Wiki model. People just have to understand that it lies between Information and Knowledge on the DIKW model. H2G2 lies between Knowledge and Wisdom.

I'd h2g2 to lie somewhere between Wisdom and Enlightenment.

..I'd like h2g2...

Isn't enlightenment more the effect of wisdom? You can't publish enlightenment, can you? It's a bit like publishing happiness.

You're right. Enlightenment is a result of the reader receiving the right sort of wisdom. So I would like h2g2 to give the sort of wisdom that provides enlightenment rather than just informing.

So Wisdom spawns enlightenment.

Knowledge spawns education (maybe you have a better word?)

Information spawns a word meaning 'the state of being informed' (whatever that word is - it's how you feel after reading a Wikipedia page)

Data spawns a hell of a lot of meaningless numbers.