SeattleWiki:FAQ

This page was largely taken from Wikitravel

Here are some Fearfully Anticipated Questions that people have heard, or think they may hear, or wonder about themselves.

If you don't see your question answered here, ask it at the coffee shop, and someone will answer it as soon as possible (probably).

General questions

What is SeattleWiki?

Seattle Wiki is a website about Seattle that anyone can edit. Here you can read and write about places to go, things to do, community, organizations, happenings and events, resources, politics, and anything else related to the greater Seattle area.

Who are you people?

We're like you!. People from Seattle who want to create a great new site about everything Seattle. Most of us are people who stumbled across the site, just like you, and decided to share our knowledge.

Who edits and organizes all this, though?

We do. The users. We create articles and then edit them, and we organize the articles into hierarchies and make links between them and have navigational pages, and things like that.

So, anyone can just drift in off the Internet and start writing travel articles?

That's the idea, yes. We use a technique called WikiWiki that lets any reader edit any page, instantly.

Well, that's never going to work.

Bzzzt. Not a question.

How is that supposed to ever work?

Doesn't seem like it ever could, does it? With anyone able to edit any page, things should just descend into terrible chaos, shouldn't they? Madness, mayhem, and a horrible bog of unusable drivel.

Strangely enough, it doesn't. People who care about having a useful site with well-written articles are the majority. People who just want to vandalize or delete things eventually get bored with it -- and, you have to admit, it's not that much of a challenge -- and the rest of us come in and clean up.

The other great part is that wikis converge. One user adds as much as they know about a topic, and others start adding more information. Other people come through and condense it all so it reads well. As the topic changes more people can add that in.

It's strange, and it doesn't make a lot of sense, but it just happens. It's really cool.

I still don't believe it.

Bzzt.

Do you have any proof that this works?

Well, we have the existence proof of other projects that create references collaboratively. Probably the most famous one is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and also Wikitravel, a great open-content travel guide. A lot of informational pages are borrowed from them (including most of this FAQ!)

OK, so, there's all this hippy-dippy love stuff about working together, but who's really in charge?

You are. Any user can change articles, rewrite navigation areas, even overwrite information about the site itself. We try to make decisions about policy and guidelines collaboratively, but if you have a good idea for how we should work, let us know.

What is this nifty software you're running?

We use MediaWiki, the open-source software developed by Wikipedia. You can get it from http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ .

Where's the contact information?

There isn't any. If you have a question about an article in particular, post it on the talk page for that article. If you have a question about SeattleWiki in general, try posting in the coffee shop.

If you are from the press, contact Matias using his user talk pages or the "e-mail this user" link on his user page.

Questions about content

This article is all wrong! You have to fix it!

This is Wiki -- you can fix it yourself! Click the edit this page link, and change the parts that bug you. That's the whole idea.

I am trying to find Topic X, and there's no article about it!

We're still a new project, and there's a lot we have nothing about. Feel free to start the outline of an article. Maybe other users will add to it.

I am trying to find Topic X, and all that's on the page is one sentence!

Like we said, we're still a new project, and there are huge parts of the globe we've only begun to work on. Some topics only have stubs covering them. If you don't think there's enough information on a topic, feel free to add more!

I am trying to find Topic X, and all that's there is "asdfkjadflkjfd EAT MY BUTT"!

This is typical vandalism. Feel free to go ahead and delete the vandal's garbage and replace it with a full article, or at least a stub.

Questions about editing

This all looks like gobbledygook! How do I edit these pages?

Pages on Wikitravel are formatted using Wiki markup. It looks funny at first, but after a while it seems like second nature. You should read about how to edit a page.

Hey! I wrote this long nice article on Topic X, and it got changed! What gives?

Any user can edit any page. When you submit an article, it's subject to ruthless editing for style, subject matter, spelling, factual information, and just generally fitting into the SeattleWiki scheme of things. If you don't like that, you shouldn't work on SeattleWiki.

Hey! I changed my nice long article on Topic X back to the way it was before, and it got changed again! What gives?

You're in an edit war. You need to go to the for the topic you're writing about and work out your differences with the other article editors.

How do I delete a whole page?

You can't delete a page directly. The procedure is somewhat more complicated: Go to SeattleWiki:Votes for deletion and add a link to the page together with a reason for deletion. After one week, an Admin will delete the page.