Hitchwiki:About

Hitchwiki is a collaborative website for gathering information about hitchhiking and other ways of extremely cheap ways of transport. It was inspired by Wikipedia and by Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At some point it was left abandoned by its founder, and found and adopted by Guaka. As a hitchhiker you're encouraged to read and write this guide, by adding your knowledge, improving existing articles and starting new ones! Anyone is allowed to edit - you just need to log in.

Hitchwiki is gathering all sorts of relevant information about good hitchhiking spots, knowledge about hitchhiking possibilities in different countries, general know-how about what to pack and when to go, what to eat, and how to stay safe.

How to contribute
Just click edit at the top of an article, make your changes and click Save page. A good article to start editing or writing is probably your home town. To create new articles you can add  and   around the title of the new article, in some other article, on your user page or even here on the main page. Save the page, click on the red link and start writing a new page. Be bold about editing, just do it! If it feels a bit awkward, you can practice in the Sandbox.

There are also some help pages for people who are editing a wiki the first time.

Background
The project started 14th of April 2005, even before the name Hitchwiki existed. However, the person who started didn't respond when the wiki was constantly being spammed. Consequently, on December 17th Guaka moved the wiki to Wikicities (now Wikia), a migration that was completed on the 19th of December 2005.

Guaka organized the relaunch with a first English version of the wiki. A second and final relaunch was done at hitchwiki.org (registered on November 22nd 2006) by MrTweek and Guaka - thanks to Wikia's availability of the database dump. In 2007 Spanish, French and German versions were added, in 2008 Russian and Finnish versions and 2009 brought a Bulgarian language version. More and more versions have been added since (see the front page for an overview).

MrTweek has been handling most of the technical work ever since the second relaunch - and he's doing an excellent job thinks Guaka.

Idea behind the project
The idea in the hitchhiking wiki is not to compete with other already existing marvelous hitchhiking sites, but to provide a way to reorganize a lot of the existing knowhow into one, easily searchable guide. Hopefully the hitchwiki can help all the other sites to flourish. It links to all known sites.


 * See also why we work on Hitchwiki.

Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Licence
The Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, the license under which The Hitchhiking Wiki's articles are available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses which permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under CC BY SA. When authors contribute original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, but they agree to make the work available under the CC BY SA. Material on The Hitchhiking Wiki may thus be shared with, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license.

This means that the content of the Hitchhiking Wiki is available to use on other sites and media that agree to share it alike. Because of this, the Hitchhiking Wiki is not just for itself. It's for all hitchhikers, and for all hitchhikers' communities.

Frequently Asked Questions

 * So I can use the content on my own website?
 * Yes, as long as you give the same permissions to the text there and remember to give the credit to Hitchwiki. Linking back to the original article will suit us fine for this purpose. It is basically possible for anybody to produce a book or other similar publication from the contents of the site, as long as the derivative work is in the framework determined by the Creative Commons Licence (CC-BY-SA).


 * What's the point?
 * Freely shared content will never be lost, as people can copy and distribute it. This also makes the Guide a project that everybody can benefit from – the articles are free to use for all the hitchhiking communities that already exist. And heck, wouldn't it be cool to see somebody actually publishing a printed hitchhiking guide after so many years?


 * Can I download the websites somehow to my computer?
 * Yep, You can download daily generated database dumps here.


 * hitchhikingguide.org, hitchhiking.wikia.com, world.wikia.com, hitchwiki.org – what is now what, what is related to what in which way?
 * Originally this wiki was started at hitchhikingguide.org as Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking, by Teppo Moisio (who is also the originator of one of the founders of Liftari.org). Because it was spammed all the time there, with no maintainer in sight, it was relaunched on Wikia as Hitchhiking Wiki on hitchhiking.wikia.com. Now it has its own domain, hitchwiki.org and its current name, Hitchwiki. The wiki moved from hitchhiking.wikia.org to hitchwiki.org in November 2006. We transferred all the pages (including user pages and images) to here, but unfortunately, Wikia didn't let us export user-accounts, so you will have to register here again. Also, unfortunately Wikia made the old URL redirects to world.wikia.com, and we can't do anything about that. This seems to confuse a lot of people. Anyway, now we have our own domain and own databases, so the wiki will stay here forever!


 * How many people are contributing to the wiki?
 * By November 2011 we've had contributions from over 2300 of logged in users, and an unknown number of people who never created an account. For detailed statistics about users, articles and databases, see the statistics.

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