Cruising wikis

[sneuman]

Site administrators Gord, et al:

It occurs to me that there's so much knowledge and experience on this forum that with a little bit of set up, we could collectively create a fairly definitive cruising wiki - ala wikipedia - on a number of subjects of interest.

Some recent topics that would work well for this:

- Storm preparations - what to do
- Heavy weather tactics (how to deploy a drogue, etc.)
- Maybe something like sail trim

This would bring together the various threads into a single, coherent place that is self-regulating in content, updated and cross-referenced by cruisingforum members.

What do you think?

[sluissa]

Topics on various places would be good too. general idea of what places are like(possibly including pictures), most recent price of gasoline/diesel(and beer :P) access to communications(landline phone/internet/cellphone/postal) lists of commonly needed regulation information(finally, a place to put all that firearm law info gord looked up :P plus check-in/out procedures)

[S/V Elusive]

Sneu - if that were to happen, then the general information associated with that thread and others, would be issolated. I believe ( and I KNOW I'll be corrected if necessary) that under the broader scope of the forum format, it is accessable to all with little searching. The wiki is a searchable database - I'm pretty sure that we can search on topics and find what we are looking for with the existing system.

Sluissia - have you tried checking out: http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...splay.php?f=15

This is the destinations forum within our site.

[sneuman]

I'd see it more as the ideas getting hashed out in the forum and then probably transfered to the wiki. the latter would have the advantage of being all in one place rather than scattered among a thousand postings. and it would be only for really "big" topics that have enough gravity to fuel a wiki.

[sluissa]

exactly, I realize alot of info is already here in the forum, but it's hard to find, as the occurance of repeat posts and number of replys saying "do a search" suggests

Scott, I agree with you but... The majority of questions have really subjective answers. We often beat a thread to death, and still come out only knowing that both sides of the equation have their merits. (Take for instance, the parachute anchor)

[sneuman]

there's plenty of room in a wiki for competing ideas - look at wikipedia. i'm sure someone will do it soon, so why shouldn't cruisersforum be first?

[RandyAbernethy]

Sneu: I have been thinking the same thing for some time. Often you want a concise answer not a discussion.

Kia: You are right that many issues have no factual data only opinions. That is, as Thomas says, what the board is for. Yet there are many areas where layers of input on the board build a factual account, one that is widely agreed upon by the most expert posts in the forum. These are the nuggets of wisdom that are very hard and time intensive to retrieve in a board format. No one format is optimal for all types of data. I heartily endorse the Wiki concept for much of the information that lays buried in this vast archive.

Touching base with reality, I know that this board is not free to run. I also know that the Wikipedia has a huge budget and is a challenge to fund. An efficient high hit database as contemplated would require resources. Why not leverage the facility that is already in place in Wikipedia? It seems that a relationship could be established where high fact (i.e. low opinion) content from this board could be referred to the Wikipedia.

I can imagine posts here frequently referring people to concise entries in the Wikipedia, rather than: "just search for such and such" (frequently leaving the searcher with no information and substantially less free time). I can also imagine posts here developing ideas to a point where someone says: "ok Gord, time to add a new topic to the wiki". The topics could be designated as originating from Cruisers Forum and drive traffic this way and vice versa.

[colemj]

Who is going to start the anchor and rode wikis?

Mark

[AdamY]

http://www.wikicruising.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

[RandyAbernethy]

And there it is...

[RandyAbernethy]

So this Wiki cruising guide thing just seems like it has to be the future. It would be great if more folks on this forum contributed to a cruising wiki.

That said, which one?

AdamY identified: http://www.wikicruising.com
I recently ran across: http://captainwiki.com

(saw Gord on both)

Seems Captain Wiki has about 4 times the hits and a fair amount more data (although they're both sparse at present). They're both MediaWiki sites as well.

Anyone have any idea as to the history of these sites or who the heir apparent is? Anyone run across any other similar sites?

[RandyAbernethy]

Also wetwiki.com (46 hits to date...)