MOTD

Message Of The Day

Fri, 07 Nov 2003

18:26 [zork(~)] cat kuro5hin.txt

KURO5HIN

In my endless quest to promote Wikitravel, I wrote an <a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/5/202514/331">article</a> for Kuro5hin about the site. Talk about your hostile crowd -- I got voted down to almost dump status before I decided to pull the story and submit it for editing. After some simple editorial comments -- "You use '--' too much" -- the mood was much better, and when I submit it for voting it was posted within a few hours.

I think this article is better than the Advogato one. For one, I wasn't drunk when I wrote it. It abuses the Cathedral-and-Bazaar metaphor something terrible, but I figure that's OK. The big problem is that most readers seem to have all kinds of fear about Wiki abuse, vandalism, commercial advertising, etc. I have been fielding questions in the K5 comments area, but most foks just don't seem to get that dedicated Wiki users can overpower transitory abuse. I'm going to have to put info about that in the next article I write.

The articles I've written this week have had good effect. People seem to really dig the idea behind Wikitravel, and there's been a lot of activity and new users. We jumped up over 100 registered users last night -- how long till we have 1000? It's been a little hard absorbing the new user base, but I think we're proceeding apace. I'm kind of glad we've had the last few months to figure out what we're doing, since our <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Help">help text</a> and <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Manual_of_style">manual of style</a> are more or less complete and ready for newbies to peruse. We'll see -- I'm fearing the first mention on slashdot.


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