Wiki vs forum

[Mark hadley]

Hi, it strikes me that for some topics a wiki page would be a more appropriate platform than the forums that we have.
For example border crossing information. Rather than the challenge of reading all possible threads in the regional forum and hoping that I dont miss the vital comment, I'd prefer a page that was up to date. It would slso save the reptition of travellers asking the same information time and again.

[Threewheelbonnie]

I'm not sure it works for information that may change over time. I follow some articles on Wikipedia itself to view the state of edits and re-edits as urban myths are repeatedly typed out and typed over. With the forum approach you get both the "anyone who sets foot in Africa gets....." plus the "I've been there it was fine" response.

The articles in the Home/Get..../Gear.... bar above the forum give a balanced starting point from what I've read too?

Andy

[Tony LEE]

Yes, you are right for topics that don't require personal interaction. Describing things objectively. No subjective stuff.
Example is topics wanting to list camping spots willy-nilly. Useless because updating isn't possible except by writing a new post. The other way - more or less a wiki - is like iOverlander has for points of interest useful to overlanders. If you look up a place you know it is the most up to date record available and you know the date as well. If there is nothing there, sign in and put something there. If it is no longer there, mark it closed. Dynamic, so can be current.

Question will be have you got the resources to manage many independent wikis because although someone can add or edit, and those changes do go through immediately, someone with authority (and knowledge) needs to keep an eye on things and review each change before confirming or rejecting it.

Worth considering

[Tony LEE]

At the risk of getting banished from HUBB tied backwards on to a vespa scooter, there is a wiki - WikiOverland, the encyclopedia of Overland travel - which has gradually been gaining momentum and I wonder whether there would be any .......
Nah, wouldn't be practical

[chris]

I fully concur with the idea of a wiki being much better than a bulletin board like this one for factual information. All the stuff you need in one place and no fluff to sift through. It just needs someone with the time and inclination to "for no remuneration" administer it.

On a recent trip around South America, I found the above mentioned iOverlander far superior as an information resource in comparison to the hubb/HU Facebook. People who had actually recently been there!... And with gps coordinates... What was interesting too, was that virtually nobody fom iO had cross-posted onto the hubb. Usability/functionality of the hubb/hu is a major reason for this, IMHO.

[chris]

Just looked at WikiOverland. Looks like an excellent resource as long as there's a critical mass of people willing to contribute to it.

[rachel_norfolk]

I hope Grant is happy for me to try and explain the improvements we are working on for HU.

It has long been recognised that there is a need to make the fantastic information that we have between us all available in a way that is easier to find and more clear what is up to date. Structure is key and forums, of the current kind, don’t really cut it.

So, we have been working on a solution we hope you will love.

We are (slowly!) moving the whole site to a single platform and the first thing to move are the old travel blogs into a new Travel Stories section.

Now, any *new* content added to a Travel Story will allow the author to add as many “Travel Experiences” as they like, including such things as Border Crossings, Mechanics, Internet access places, general points of interest, gps tracks etc etc.

Because we can collect that data in a structured way, we can show it all on maps, and show what is the most recently collected data for, say, a Border Crossing in Bulgaria. You’ll be able to see both the basic location info and then a list of experiences logged by travellers as we pass through.

(I’ll add some screenshots in a while!)

In the first release of the website (hopefully, this weekend if I manage to sort out some migration issues) you’ll be able to add these travel experiences either as part of a Travel Story Blog you are writing or directly on the, say, Border Crossing map page. In the future, when we migrate the forum to the new system, you’ll be able to add your experience right in your reply to a post. So, rather than just guessing what to write in a post, we will be able to ask you specific questions, like did you need a carnet and insurance.

The end result is we will have structured data, that we can present in a way that makes it very easy to navigate, find the thing you want and then add it to your list of “bookmarks” on the site to hold all the information you need in one place in your user account.

Hope you find it useful!

It’ll be clunky at first, no doubt - but we are building something really flexible that we hope will be the best resource anywhere.


Rachel (and yes it was me that Graham Field was going on about working too hard at Motocamp Bulgaria in the Adventure Rider Radio Raw Podcast - I was working on this very thing at the time)

[Mark hadley]

That's very interesting, more going on than I realised. I had wondered about systematically using an existing Wiki. What's to stop us putting a list of repair shops onto the Wikipedia country page? Same for border crossings.
Eikioddia do sll the computer side already, and with appropriate references, the entries are an advert for HUBB.

[Tony LEE]

Nothing wrong with that Mark, and it was obviously what I was about to suggest, but decided it wasn't appropriate.
Yes, promoting that wiki could be beneficial to both sides and result in one wiki that was far superior to the sum of two lesser ones

Chris, one thing ioverlander has going for it are the apps that allow new points and checkins to be added in a couple of mi utes complete with photos, even offline. Those on the road lose enthusiasm if they have to store stuff up for days or weeks until they get online

Collating stuff from blogs is useful, but I wonder what percentage of Hubbers have blogs

[chris]

Originally Posted by Tony LEE

Chris, one thing ioverlander has going for it are the apps that allow new points and checkins to be added in a couple of mi utes complete with photos, even offline. Those on the road lose enthusiasm if they have to store stuff up for days or weeks until they get online

Indeed. iOverlander is very useful piece of kit. Very user friendly and accessible. On my trip I didn't contribute myself as my laptop broke (they don't bounce well...) and in most cases, had nothing to add.

Also having contributed a lot to the hubb over many years, 99% of the time without thanks and even with occasional abuse from selected fools, I felt that it was up to others to take the strain in the giving stakes.

[Mark hadley]

Dear Chris,
Don't have any doubts about your contributions being widely appreciated. The number of users who look at the site and come back again and again speaks for itself. Ive seen lots of potentially valuable forums wither and die just because the level of contributions was weak.

[Mark hadley]

So are people saying concetrate on ioverlander, not the big wikipedia?

[Tony LEE]

No, I wasn't really suggesting ioverlander. Did put it forward as an example though of what works as it is more or less a wiki, just without "wiki" in the name. There are other similar lists - wikicamps Australia/NZ/USA/Canada is one example also available as an APP on smart phones - and all of them are well patronised, very busy and do their job very well. They are basically camping and accommodation applications that have gradually expanded to include lots of other information that the users find useful so of course workshops, customs and immigration are there as well. However they don't have the sort of information that HUBB has in its reference section. Wikioverlander is another that has a very wide focus - but does not include camping locations of course - but suffers a bit from lack of contributors despite the best efforts of the hard working owner. Is growing though. It does have a lot of the sort of info that HUBB has though.
You rightly suggested having a wiki within HUBB and that would work well to make info a little more immediate.
The HUBB information on Carnets is a good example of what this thread is discussing. On the surface it is a great reference work, but it might/does? suffer from the requirement that all information has to be provided to the webmaster and then collated and then published on the web page. Pretty easy to get out of date or be missing crucial information, or maybe just as bad, including too much out of date stuff in an information tail that needs pruning from time to time. Trouble is any sort of Wiki is going to suffer exactly the same sort of problems if there are not experienced and enthusiastic moderators, good publicity and a wide user base. No easy answer which is why I suggested wikioverland as maybe capable of better things if it had a bit more coverage. Otherwise, HUBB already has a huge amount of information available from the top menu bar (which is probably overlooked by many) so if it were transferred into a wiki format, would/could be a fantastic resource. Trick will be finding a niche that works.

[rachel_norfolk]

Wikis are great and we love the idea of multiple people being able to update - that’s essential. The thing is, though, they have no data structure.

When we have structure, we can do really clever things, like create pages where you can search for “X in Sibiu”. And then see a categorised map of results.

This level of functionality is what people are beginning to expect from websites these days.

We have a good infrastructure now, and we have migrated a couple of hundred travel stories, a few thousand updates to those stories and tens of thousand of user accounts.

We have our first of many “travel experience” entities defined (where anyone can tell us about their experiences of crossing borders but in a structured way)

It’s a start towards what might be regarded as a “structured wiki” - you get to tell us all you know but we ask the questions in such a way that we can present all the info intelligently across the site.

Also, because it is a structured thing and because we have used the right infrastructure, building apps to access and update this information is pretty easy*


Rachel


* don’t tell Grant I said “easy”

[Tony LEE]

you get to tell us all you know but we ask the questions in such a way that we can present all the info intelligently across the site.


Sounds a painful process