User talk:Korby Parnell
From Wikitravel
Hello, Korby! Welcome to Wikitravel. Please take a sec to look at our copyleft and policies and guidelines, but feel free to plunge forward and edit some pages. Scanning the Manual of style, especially the article templates, can give you a good idea of how we like articles formatted. If you need help, check out Wikitravel:Help, and if you need some info not on there, post a message in the travellers' pub.
I really liked your blog entry about Wikitravel and figured I'd respond here to some of your questions.
- The "seed content" is not the Wikitravel:CIA World Factbook 2002 import. We started with a number of personal articles in July 2003, and as we progressed we realized we were going to need an over-arching strategy for geographical information. We used the CIA World Factbook as a basis for this framework, but there were already a lot of articles on the site when we got the import going.
- The factbook data is not all HTML. There's a fancy "quick facts" table in each country page, and that is HTML, because MediaWiki didn't support table syntax up until version 1.1.0. It is intimidating, though.
- The main use of a user account is that your changes can be credited to you. If you click the "Page history" link on any page, it shows everyone who's edited that page. Similarly, you can see everything you've done by clicking the "User contributions" link. We also put author information in our RDF files for author attribution. Obviously, there's also your user talk page, which is how you get messages.
Anyways, I hope you find some time to continue making contributions. Thanks for the link and the write-up. --Evan 18:16, 15 Apr 2004 (EDT)
