User talk:Vadim

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:: Yeah, Lisp was a tricky one --[[User:Vadim|Vadim]] 12:38, 21 February 2016 (GMT)
:: Yeah, Lisp was a tricky one --[[User:Vadim|Vadim]] 12:38, 21 February 2016 (GMT)
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== Future of the Wiki - a viewpoint ==
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TO THE WIKI ADMINS
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 +
It is with no small regret that I have decided to relinquish my admin status on the World Cruising Wiki. I have given this decision quite a lot of thought over the past few days and I have concluded that it is the best decision for the future of the Wiki. While I am happy to continue as a contributor (at least, for Croatia, where I now cruise), I feel I can no longer take an active part in the Wiki's future development.
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I signed up for the Wiki in 2010, following which I undertook the reworking of the country and port pages for France, Spain and Portugal over 2010-11, with much early guidance from Lighthouse and Istioploos as I found the editing (and particularly page creation) process initially very complex. I addressed Corsica, Sardinia and all the Italian islands in 2012-13, creating or fleshing out most of the port pages, for which little or no content existed.  From 2013 I worked with Istioploos on Turkey and Greece, updating content and photography for many of the islands and ports for which data was lacking and revamping the Sea of Marmara section to add detailed entries on the harbours there.
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 +
In 2014 while based in Ionian Greece I revamped all the islands and ports, with revised content and new photography, following which in 2015 I completed the major task of building the Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania sections, for much of which there was again very little existing content, creating entirely new pages for the majority of the harbours. Lector, si monumentum requires, circumspice.
 +
 +
I write this not out of self-satisfaction but to demonstrate that I have committed a great deal of time to the Wiki and, I believe, developed an acute sense of its strengths and weaknesses as a result.
 +
 +
So, it may seem illogical that I have decided to reduce my involvement at this point. However, by resigning I feel able to offer my candid views on where the Wiki has failed and the challenges it must address if it is to survive and flourish.
 +
 +
My thoughts were crystallised by a message I received from [http://www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Fair_Game], a subscriber I signed up in 2014 and whom I had re-approached following the recent change of the Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania pages to test a new approach to encouraging more contributions. His experience is by no means exceptional and is, I believe, why we have around 1,500 subscribers to the Wiki but almost no regular, active contributors if you exclude the admins.  His message is below (I've omitted his personal details as I haven't asked permission to reproduce it here):
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HI Gordon,
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Thanks for your email.  How are you finding cruising north of Greece?
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I confess I stopped uploading to the Wiki some time ago.  A number of updates I made were reverted back to their original (out-of-date) content within a week or so of me making the amendments.  I sort of got the impression someone wasn’t happy about having their original postings modified - I could have got it wrong but that’s how it came over.
 +
 +
Anyway,  it is without doubt that the Wiki is a very, very good idea.  Pilot books by their very nature are often out of date before they even hit the shops and the CA’s Captains Mate is held back because, for some reason, they don’t want to be seen competing with printed books.
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Personally, I am very grateful for the ‘accurate’ information you always leave in the wake of your visits and I am only too willing to pass on my findings too for others to benefit so will look forward to the new style submissions. Not sure I can remember my passwords etc., so a bit of digging is in order to get up and running again.
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Fair winds
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Best regards
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XXXX
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(sy FAIR GAME)
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Time and time again over the past five years I have witnessed subscribers sign up then wade in to edit the pages (after all, the Wiki does encourage them to 'Grab the page and build it!). They find, inevitably, that the formatting is quite complex and the templates not easy to manage without messing up. So, either they get immediately discouraged or they do their best and the result is exactly what one would expect from a pilot book if several people scribbled notes all over it. The admins then spend time patiently trying to restore order without de-motivating the new subscriber (not always an easy task and sometimes I wonder that I myself survived as a newbie!).
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 +
It seems there is a general consensus that the Wiki should develop into an authoritative and credible alternative to the numerous pilot books that, because they are in print form, are invariably months or years out of date. To achieve that, however, the content needs to be well-written, accurate, up to date, consistent in presentation and credible. In my view this will prove impossible to achieve if every subscriber, regardless of experience, skills and even knowledge of English, is encouraged to edit at will. The result will be, and indeed already is in places, a 'dog's dinner' and the admins will continue to spend their valuable time restoring pages instead of filling the numerous gaps on the Wiki or mentoring new editors.
 +
 +
You'll notice that I have made a distinction here between subscribers and editors and that is at the heart of the change that needs to take place in my view. I no longer believe that new subscribers should be encouraged to 'Grab a page and build it' because experience shows that all too often they lack the necessary skills. It's like turning a novice driver loose on the freeway without a single driving lesson. I believe that new subscribers should be encouraged to input their comments or updates on the new 'Comments' page but only be allowed to change the 'Last visited' section on the main page until they have earned their spurs. Once a subscriber demonstrates the necessary commitment and skills – and after a suitable period of mentoring by the admins - then and only then should they be given editor privileges and let loose on editing and creating new pages. To me, this is a win-win situation, since less committed or capable subscribers would still feel motivated by just submitting comments and updates while more competent and experienced ones would feel privileged to be invited to become editors. It wouldn't be difficult to implement at this point since there are virtually no regular contributors and it could be done in conjunction with announcing the new easy-to-use 'Comments' facility to existing subscribers.
 +
 +
I know this 'three-tier' approach, with admins, editors and contributors, is controversial and it is unlikely to achieve much traction at present, but if the Wiki is to achieve the status and quality of content that I believe it can it will require a move in this direction.
 +
 +
Meanwhile I wish the Wiki and its remaining admins every success for the future. I hope this note may help focus discussion on the measures needed to ensure that success.
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GORDON KNIGHT
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Athene of Lymington

Revision as of 14:41, 25 February 2016

Welcome to CruisersWiki!

We all look forward to your valued contributions to the Cruising Wiki to help it grow as a useful, free resource for all cruisers around the world. Now you are registered, you can set your personal preferences in "My Preferences" (link at top R/H of page when logged in).

Spend a little time reading the Wiki Help and the Style Guide to gain a better understanding of the Wiki formatting and how to edit articles. Also, please read the Cruiserswiki Copyrights notice, as well as the General Disclaimers (links at bottom of pages) before starting to edit. Then, do add what you can - even correcting grammar and spelling errors in articles is a great help - but do not use the Rich Editor to do so, since there is a problem with it at present. It is easy to see if you are going wrong, since you cannot save your changes to a page without previewing them first.

Use any page's "Discussion" tab (top of page's menu) to ask any questions or make any suggestions about that particular page.

Finally, please note that massive changes by a new editor are liable to be considered spam and the editor will be blocked. Please concentrate on editing pages of the places that you have actually visited. Also please avoid using the "Rich Editor", it does not work well and creates problems.

Again, welcome and have fun! Bring out that hidden "Cruising Guide writer" in you. Istioploos 11:40, 28 March 2015 (GMT)

Contents

Castelsardo

Vadim, I'd prefer it if you didn't remove the heading (unless you're volunteering to make the same change on all the other port and marina pages, which will probably keep you busy for quite a few months!). Vasilis and I have spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to establish some consistency of style across the Wiki, since otherwise it begins to lack credibility. There's still a lot to be done on that score, as you will have noticed, but at least most of the Med pages are reasonably consistent. While there's certainly a lot that can be done to improve the layout and usability, it would be dangerous IMHO to do it piecemeal as we'd wind up with something akin to the proverbial dog's dinner.

GORDON
Athene of Lymington

Hi Gordon! I appreciate your efforts very much. I've just noticed that these two successive headings look somewhat repetitive (Olbia). It seems Vasilis wouldn't mind removing the 2nd repeating header would be done gradually.
As a matter of interest this CSS rule hides the the 2nd heading if it's a very 1st thing in an article: 
#jump-to-nav + h2,
script + h2
{
    display: none;
}
Cheers --Vadim 16:00, 1 April 2015 (BST)

Infobox marina & country

Vadim,

For some reason the "notes" in these templates do not work. However the "note" in Template:Infobox passage does work. I was unable to trace the cause of this. --Istioploos 16:22, 21 January 2016 (GMT)

Hi Vasilis! I seems to be fixed by now. As you spotted there was some inconsistency between "notes" and "note". It was "note" in Template:Infobox bottom hence Template:Infobox passage was OK. Now the both are using now "notes", like the others --Vadim 17:12, 21 January 2016 (GMT)
Yes I see that they are now working. Thanks. --Istioploos 20:14, 21 January 2016 (GMT)

Infobox Country

Vadim

I wanted to add 3 optional items in Infobox Country (with their icons):

  • {{Coord|17|32|S|149|34|W|}} with [[image:World_icon.png]]
  • {[Gallery link}} with [[image:Photo_icon.png]], and
  • {{Chartlet link}} with [[image:Chart_icon.png]]

I am afraid that I might mess up the template so, since you have been rather active in templates recently could you do so?

Also when you are done with your templates upgrades could you please let me know so that we can revise Help:Embeddable_templates to reflect the upgrades?

--Istioploos 14:26, 29 January 2016 (GMT)

Infobox and Image right templates

Something happened between Template:Infobox and Template:Image right. The first one should display, by default, an image in 350px and the second in 345. This numbers make the images appear the same size. Now they are drastically different. As a matter of fact Infobox now displays the image smaller then 350px. For example see Europa Island. --Istioploos 21:57, 29 January 2016 (GMT)

My fault, sorry. It must be OK by now --Vadim 03:57, 30 January 2016 (GMT)
Thank you Vadim. It is now fine.

POI

Hi Vadim,

I see that you are working on POI so most likely this is a temporary problem, but do see Bilbao where it is giving an error. --Istioploos 14:58, 1 February 2016 (GMT)

Apologies, Vasilis. The changes reverted, I must not make scrambled eggs with templates --Vadim 15:26, 1 February 2016 (GMT)

Credits

Vadim, I noticed the new template {{credits}} in the Santa Teresa Gallura. I have to confess that I strongly prefer the {{Contributors|}}. .

This is for several reasons. After a lot of discussions several years ago we, the then active editors, agreed to have a means of recognizing major contributor to a page so that members will be encouraged to contribute new material, especially from places that they had actually visited. By major we meant the creator of a page and others who had made substantial addition of original material. We deliberately excluded cosmetic and corrective editing. You will note that although I have worked on many pages I have included myself only to pages where I provided new material.

The new {{credits}} is non selective and mentions everyone who had edited the page regardless of contribution. In the Santa Teresa Gallura case it mentions a contributor twice (Lighthouse) and also a spammer (Riley Huntley) whose changes had been reverted. To do this takes a certain amount of critical judgement and would be very hard to automate. --Istioploos 19:52, 8 February 2016 (GMT)

No probs, Vasilis. That was only a test and I was not quite happy about how it renders either --Vadim 08:44, 9 February 2016 (GMT)

Vector Skin

I have been using, the "Vector Skin" instead of the default "Mono Book" for several days. I noticed that it does not give an editor the options (Move, Delete, Unprotect, & Watch/Unwatch) that "Mono Book" offers. --Istioploos 13:56, 11 February 2016 (GMT)

At the top of the page there is a small triangle between Read, Edit, Add topic, View history and a search box. When you hover over it you'll get Delete, Move, etc. --Vadim 14:04, 11 February 2016 (GMT)

You are of course right. Did not notice it. V

Wikipwdia

Vadim, after the last edition to clarify the doc both {{wikipedia}} and {{wikiyoage}} do not work without a parameter, they just go to the corresponding main page. --Istioploos 20:16, 20 February 2016 (GMT)

Fixed. Thanks for letting know. --Vadim 09:17, 21 February 2016 (GMT)

All these curly brackets in templates do make it ten hard to develop. They remind me when 30 years ago I was doing some programming in Lisp also a very powerful language but very error prone. --Istioploos 12:55, 21 February 2016 (GMT)

Yeah, Lisp was a tricky one --Vadim 12:38, 21 February 2016 (GMT)

Future of the Wiki - a viewpoint

TO THE WIKI ADMINS

It is with no small regret that I have decided to relinquish my admin status on the World Cruising Wiki. I have given this decision quite a lot of thought over the past few days and I have concluded that it is the best decision for the future of the Wiki. While I am happy to continue as a contributor (at least, for Croatia, where I now cruise), I feel I can no longer take an active part in the Wiki's future development.

I signed up for the Wiki in 2010, following which I undertook the reworking of the country and port pages for France, Spain and Portugal over 2010-11, with much early guidance from Lighthouse and Istioploos as I found the editing (and particularly page creation) process initially very complex. I addressed Corsica, Sardinia and all the Italian islands in 2012-13, creating or fleshing out most of the port pages, for which little or no content existed. From 2013 I worked with Istioploos on Turkey and Greece, updating content and photography for many of the islands and ports for which data was lacking and revamping the Sea of Marmara section to add detailed entries on the harbours there.

In 2014 while based in Ionian Greece I revamped all the islands and ports, with revised content and new photography, following which in 2015 I completed the major task of building the Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania sections, for much of which there was again very little existing content, creating entirely new pages for the majority of the harbours. Lector, si monumentum requires, circumspice.

I write this not out of self-satisfaction but to demonstrate that I have committed a great deal of time to the Wiki and, I believe, developed an acute sense of its strengths and weaknesses as a result.

So, it may seem illogical that I have decided to reduce my involvement at this point. However, by resigning I feel able to offer my candid views on where the Wiki has failed and the challenges it must address if it is to survive and flourish.

My thoughts were crystallised by a message I received from [1], a subscriber I signed up in 2014 and whom I had re-approached following the recent change of the Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania pages to test a new approach to encouraging more contributions. His experience is by no means exceptional and is, I believe, why we have around 1,500 subscribers to the Wiki but almost no regular, active contributors if you exclude the admins. His message is below (I've omitted his personal details as I haven't asked permission to reproduce it here):

HI Gordon,

Thanks for your email.  How are you finding cruising north of Greece?

I confess I stopped uploading to the Wiki some time ago.  A number of updates I made were reverted back to their original (out-of-date) content within a week or so of me making the amendments.  I sort of got the impression someone wasn’t happy about having their original postings modified - I could have got it wrong but that’s how it came over.

Anyway,  it is without doubt that the Wiki is a very, very good idea.  Pilot books by their very nature are often out of date before they even hit the shops and the CA’s Captains Mate is held back because, for some reason, they don’t want to be seen competing with printed books.

Personally, I am very grateful for the ‘accurate’ information you always leave in the wake of your visits and I am only too willing to pass on my findings too for others to benefit so will look forward to the new style submissions. Not sure I can remember my passwords etc., so a bit of digging is in order to get up and running again.

Fair winds

Best regards

XXXX (sy FAIR GAME)

Time and time again over the past five years I have witnessed subscribers sign up then wade in to edit the pages (after all, the Wiki does encourage them to 'Grab the page and build it!). They find, inevitably, that the formatting is quite complex and the templates not easy to manage without messing up. So, either they get immediately discouraged or they do their best and the result is exactly what one would expect from a pilot book if several people scribbled notes all over it. The admins then spend time patiently trying to restore order without de-motivating the new subscriber (not always an easy task and sometimes I wonder that I myself survived as a newbie!).

It seems there is a general consensus that the Wiki should develop into an authoritative and credible alternative to the numerous pilot books that, because they are in print form, are invariably months or years out of date. To achieve that, however, the content needs to be well-written, accurate, up to date, consistent in presentation and credible. In my view this will prove impossible to achieve if every subscriber, regardless of experience, skills and even knowledge of English, is encouraged to edit at will. The result will be, and indeed already is in places, a 'dog's dinner' and the admins will continue to spend their valuable time restoring pages instead of filling the numerous gaps on the Wiki or mentoring new editors.

You'll notice that I have made a distinction here between subscribers and editors and that is at the heart of the change that needs to take place in my view. I no longer believe that new subscribers should be encouraged to 'Grab a page and build it' because experience shows that all too often they lack the necessary skills. It's like turning a novice driver loose on the freeway without a single driving lesson. I believe that new subscribers should be encouraged to input their comments or updates on the new 'Comments' page but only be allowed to change the 'Last visited' section on the main page until they have earned their spurs. Once a subscriber demonstrates the necessary commitment and skills – and after a suitable period of mentoring by the admins - then and only then should they be given editor privileges and let loose on editing and creating new pages. To me, this is a win-win situation, since less committed or capable subscribers would still feel motivated by just submitting comments and updates while more competent and experienced ones would feel privileged to be invited to become editors. It wouldn't be difficult to implement at this point since there are virtually no regular contributors and it could be done in conjunction with announcing the new easy-to-use 'Comments' facility to existing subscribers.

I know this 'three-tier' approach, with admins, editors and contributors, is controversial and it is unlikely to achieve much traction at present, but if the Wiki is to achieve the status and quality of content that I believe it can it will require a move in this direction.

Meanwhile I wish the Wiki and its remaining admins every success for the future. I hope this note may help focus discussion on the measures needed to ensure that success.

GORDON KNIGHT Athene of Lymington

Retrieved from "http://www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Vadim"
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