Talk:Places

Discuss the Places page here

I've taken out comments related to Imagemap that have been resolved. I've left the rest since there are still issues to be resolved. Michael Daly 17:11, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

[edit] Wikipaddle.org Guidebooks. A competitor

I've always been very keen on the idea of creating a kayaking guidebook as a wiki community. Here on the Places page is where I started to try and to do this, but I've just spotted some new competition:

http://wikipaddle.org

Looks like a chap called George Drummond has set this up very recently (19:44, 26 June 2006), and there's very little content. However it looks like he's done a few things better than kayakwiki (at the moment at least)

• Focussing on guidebooks. I really think the wiki guidebook idea is a winner, and much more interesting than just defining kayaking terms (although we should do this too) I think our Main Page should lead into the Places section more prominently. A clickable world map? (see next point)
• Integrated maps. Check out the nice google maps integration. This is pretty nifty for showing all the different places described on the wiki so far. Maybe we could do something similar. Having said that, I think we could arrive at something even better by custom designing some kayak map resources. Wikipedia and to a lesser extent wikitravel.org, have custom map images. A best of both worlds might be if we install the ImageMap Extension, and make zoomed out world maps, which are clickable leading into regional kayaking guides.
• Wider appeal. The wikipaddle name can also appeal to open-canoe people and rafters. We can't go changing the name, however I think we could improve the logo graphics of kayakwiki to have wider appeal. At the moment the graphics is very sea kayaking oriented, and a bit of a turn-off for anyone into other types of kayaking. I mean I dont mind the logo myself, but I think some young whitewater whippersnappers will take one look at the wooden sea kayaking logo and turn on their heels. Need to reflect other kayak/paddlesports in the graphics somehow.

If we get these things right on kayakwiki, then we can blow the competition out of the water. Alternatively we could work with wikipaddle.org somehow (they do the guidebooks, we do the kayaking terms), but I think one big kayak wiki will work best, otherwise the community wont grow big enough on either site. As we know, the community doesn't exactly grow massively even without competition.

Speaking of competition. http://www.paddlepedia.com/ has been around for a long time but has attracted very little content/community.

-- Harry Wood 13:38, 10 July 2006 (EDT)

I saw wikipaddle very recently and paddlepedia. I have a problem with several of the other wikis related to paddling - most of them are advert based. I know that the costs of running a wiki can be more than some would support out of pocket (this wiki costs me an occasional CD to do backups and the annual fee for the domain registration - other than that the incremental cost is zero) and I have a problem with folks making money off of free contributions from others. Playak's Kayak Wiki is the most egregious example of greed IMNSHO - he takes donations and the site is an unmanaged mess. For that reason, I like keeping this wiki free and ad free.

That also makes me uncomfortable with making a strong link to another advert-based site to support paddling destinations. I don't like duplicate effort, but I don't want to move the work done here to financially benefit someone else (no matter how meager the income likely is).

The only real problem is getting contributions to the Places pages. I've moved a bunch of pages from my personal web site to KayakWiki and that's why there are a lot of sea kayak places in Ontario, Canada. There have been some good contributions from GB and Europe too. The American contributors that got this wiki going have largely abandoned it - I guess they feel it's done. I don't know how to get more interest in providing contributions.

I agree that the site has a sea kayak feel to it. It was started by American sea kayakers for the most part and those biases are still around. I've been trying to give it a more international flavour and to make it more whitewater friendly.

When I started to convert the wiki to Mediawiki, I was pondering several options for making the whitewater part more conspicuous. However, the simple conversion took precedence over other changes and I didn't make significant changes.

There are five kinds of pages:

• Sea Kayak (SK)
• Whitewater (WW)
• Other kayaks - eg, slalom, flatwater, surf (OK)
• Pages common to SK and WW
• Pages common to everything

I don't know that it's easy to focus on a two-way split when there are other kayaks out there. Certainly WW and SK are the dominant forms. I have considered a parallel set of navigation pages that focus on either SK or WW in addition to the existing pages that are focussed on activities rather than kayak types. I have a bit of an attachment to the logo, since I chose it to reflect on kayaking origins rather than sea kayaking specifically. That kayak is a skin on frame type historically used in the Canadian Arctic. If you squint and read the words on the logo, they are various spellings of kayak used over the years.

Perhaps a new main page with a SK/WW split would do. That would require significant reorganization of the main page and movement of the current content to secondary pages. As well, the navigation menu on the far left may have to change. Your ideas are welcome.

[cut superflous comments by Michael Daly and Harry]

Maybe we could blend some photography into the current graphic along the top somehow. In the background behind the traditional kayak design perhaps. Anyway I should start by contributing some more graphics to jazz up the Whitewater kayaking page contents. I was just thinking aloud about things which potentially make wikipaddle more attractive.

-- Harry Wood 05:31, 12 July 2006 (EDT)

The big logo is the background. There's no easy way of putting photos behind that without opening up a lot of CSS files. I do not want to do that - it is hard enough getting all the files for all the different browsers to work for the minor changes that I made - I don't want to make more serious changes. I could create a second skin - instead of kwskin, we could have SKskin and WWskin. When a user registers, they could select one or the other and get either a Sea Kayaking look or a Whitewater look. However, that would do nothing for the unregistered user.

The KayakWiki small logo (upper left, with the kayak lines viewed end on) can be replaced with anything whitewaterish - it just has to be the right size (about 120x110 pixels at 72 pixels/in).

NASA satellite images are often public domain. I downloaded a huge image (40MB IIRC) of the Great Lakes region of N.A. and edited it to make smaller images of specific lakes and thence the mappings to allow clickable areas.

[edit] Image Map fixed

[edit] Resolved $mapfile variable issue

Add $IP to function renderImageMap:

function renderImageMap( $input ) {

global $wgServer, $wgScriptPath, $wgTitle, $wgUrlProtocols, $wgUser, $IP;

Change $mapfile to the following:

$mapfile = "$IP/../$Mapurl";

- (Smcnaught) 02:05, 18 July 2006 (EDT)