Hitchwiki:Community Portal/2009-2012

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How long?

I'm 15, and a highschool student, and I was wondering how long it's possible to keep hitchhiking. I would love to do it for atleast a year. Also, how expensive is it?

There are even older people how are still hitchhiking, like Irv Thomas. There are no limits. And hitchhiking itself is usually free, in most countries. Sometimes you might spend a little on bus/tram tickets, but that's not even neccessary. --MrTweek 10:12, 6 August 2008 (CEST)

Also check out hospitality exchange. Officially you need to be 18 to sign up but you shouldn't be a verified CouchSerfer anyway... guaka^{site, wikitalk} 20:41, 9 August 2008 (CEST)

Google rank

We're still not in the top 10 when googling for hitchhiking. But we might make it in the top 10 soon in the English language if we get some more mention in the press, possibly through the 888 press buzz :) It would be good to add some more links to hitchwiki from any public page (e.g. your blog). guaka^{site, wikitalk} 20:44, 9 August 2008 (CEST)

And it helped! We're at number 8 now, so finally on the first page! --Robino 14:58, 20 August 2008 (CEST)

The results can vary from country to country and from computer to computer, because google creates a personal profile and tries to optimize the results for you. From here, when I delete all my cookies, hitchwiki is already on number 4 :D --MrTweek 15:54, 20 August 2008 (CEST)

Hitchhiking gestures

Thumb up we usually use to stop cars can be understood by some cultures as very serious insult. Signs language varies on every continent/country/culture. Maybe we should create a page to share/exchange this information??? Thanx, Mirto 20:44, 26 August 2008 (CEST)

Sure, sounds good! Just start it ;-) platschi^{site, wikitalk} 12:18, 27 August 2008 (CEST)

It was one of the things why for a night I slept quite bad during a visit to the Polish-Lithuanian border region, where I was staying with artistic hc-members (professional artists), I was thinking much about creating such info on my hh in the Netherlands site. There are one or two sheets with signals of both hitchhikers and drivers in the nice book Autostop polski which was published a few years ago. http://www.ha.art.pl/?view=news&nid=75 --Fverhart 12:30, 27 August 2008 (CEST)

Great idea. Hitchhiking Gestures, I propose. We could start with a gesture, and list the countries? Maybe an idea as well to create icons for the different gestures and to place the appropriate icon in the entry for a country/ city. See also Hitchhiking techniques. --Robino 00:46, 28 August 2008 (CEST)

Great! I was thinking more about continents->countries (->regions if needed).That is the way you will naturally look for information. If I am going to south Italy, I will not check gest by gest to know which one is working there. But it shouldnt be to complicated neither.

So maybe you could find a place where we could put ideas about Hitchhiking Traces? I mean things remaining after something as ephemeral as a ride? Postcards we send to drivers, notes we can find on road sines left by other hikers, cardboard sign found at a spot with the same direction as yours... I am sure there are many more of those things! What you think? You know, hitchhiking is an Art. Mirto

I like your ideas. For such simple things, don't bother to ask, just start a page. ;) It's very likely, that others will help anyway --MrTweek 10:25, 28 August 2008 (CEST)

Cool. But I don't think Hitchhiking Traces is good name. Yet I can't find any better. Anyone?

I think it's not so bad. Maybe rather Hitchhiker's Traces? --MrTweek 17:00, 28 August 2008 (CEST)

OK, as Guaka has changed Hitchhiking Gestures into Gestures, I think just Traces would be good. Anyone for? Mirto 20:23, 6 September 2008 (CEST)

Sounds great, just start it :) platschi^{site, wikitalk} 23:11, 14 September 2008 (CEST)

hitching is not dangerous

I talked lately to some hitchhiking beginners and I realized how annoying can it be to convince your parents that hitching is not lethal. maybe we should create special letter, ready to print, that hitchhikers could show their families?

New Community Portal / Sorting of Categories

Hey everyone, I just played around with the Community Portal and moved stuff a bit, example for this was the de:Tramperwiki:Portal of the German hitchwiki version. It looks a bit more user friendly I guess. Thanks to User:Speckmade for his work! There he also sorted all categories logical and in a good order, so that things can be found easy. When browsing through the english hitchwiki, it all looks quite unsorted and messy at the moment. I want to sort this in the near future, but first want some discussion before on how we could do this the best way.

We can use Category:Browse as the top-level category, and then sorting it into a logical way. Like HitchBiking now appears under Browse, while it might be under General info -> Hitchhiking techniques or something. Suggestions are welcome, ideas, first categoryideas. Will start soon, if somebody has any complaints about it, discuss it here please! --Platschi 13:34, 14 October 2008 (CEST)

As a start, I made a little brainstorming, to be found at Image:Cat_brainstorm.png. Any ideas, suggestions? something wrong? I'm sure I forgot things. Let me know! --Platschi 23:47, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

New Main page

He, somehow the mainpage looks like too much text and anyway, it's not really inviting. maybe we can make it a bit more colorful, just tried out to sort out the not really needed stuff from the main page. see User:Platschi/Spielwiese for the tryout and please play around and try out your favourite layout and stuff. Whatever. --Platschi 14:46, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Yay, I like it. I think it's almost ready to replace the current main page... Though this would require some more yays and a bit of work. guaka 17:33, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

GFDL -> CC-BY-SA

GFDL 1.3 was released. With that we can move to the Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution 3.0 license! guaka 17:29, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I think we should take that chance. We mainly have GFDL to be compatible to wikipedia, if I remember correctly. Now that Wikipedia seems to switch...

How can we do it? I've got some questions there: What about the changes that were made after November 2008? We should probably give anyone the chance to give their opinion. Maybe with a discussion page – maybe one per language – that we advertise with one of these annoying global messages that get shown on top of each page? MrTweeeak... :-) --Speckmade 10:43, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Jep, I'm for! Wasn't there a discussion about this somewhere on the wiki already? Can't find it back...anyway, what about a discussion/vote on hitchwiki asap (according to what Speckmade said)? --Platschi 14:32, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Bringing vehicles Live to hitchwiki

While i was on the road I came up with this idea and was wondering if it is possible as it would be cool to see implimented and could be used to push alot of traffic to hitchwiki via technology websites. The idea is this...

Wire a GPS & HDPSA enabled laptop into a vehicle and setup some software so that it pings back it´s location on hitchwiki maps as it travels. Maybee there are a few people who would be interested in having these in their cars when going on roadtrips and could also display a plot of their proposed travel route/s.

That way hitch hikers may see where they are and arrange to meet up should they be on similar paths. Sure some people may have privacy concerns, but personally if i had a car and was on a roadtrip i would not mind carrying such gear. giveaphuk 20:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Not a bad idea actually. The biggest problem would be implementing a software for mobile phones. You won't need hsdpa, i actually did that with my gprs-only phone, using mgmaps. If you find a open source software, or something that is customizable enough to let it work with hitchwiki, let me know :) We could at least start with a little community map, showing where people are hitchhiking at the moment, and hope that some drivers will join as well. The next problem will be the costs. Here in Germany, people hardly use internet on their mobiles, as it can be very expensive. There are some cheap providers, but usually people don't know their price plans and just thin k it's too expensive, so they don't use it. And if you go abroad, it's definitely way too expensive. But hey, I'll do some research and put it on my to-do-list :) --MrTweek 20:31, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

'Personal Experiences' section

Might I suggest that we group personal experiences when hitch-hiking from places into a separate section? It would make it easier for others to add their experiences without changing more or less 'debugged' content and in case the local situation changes, comments that have become irrelevant(?) can be removed more easily.I've done it for Francisco de Sá Carneiro.

Yes, looks good. I find it kind of annoying that many articles have personal stuff mixed inbetween the article. This would solve the problem. Still a lot of work to clean everything up though. --MrTweek 09:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Jep, good idea. I guess we did this already sometimes in the past by using Trivia as an header, where people can add their experiences and/or interesting/funny things about the spot. --Platschi 14:56, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Google street view

It would be nice to had google street view to Hitchwiki maybe by the maps it's really useful to see how look a spot or to find one, ok only in some part of France and a lot of the us so it's probably can wait.

Would definitely be nice, at least for the future. But might also be very hard or even impossible to implement. Also, I don't trust google :/ --MrTweek 10:23, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Drivers

Hey, we dont have drivers section!

First of all, I want to be also included in the drivers category, and than, secondly, we need an info board - I am going that way and I am looking for hhikers. Just instead of going into every petrol station and checking it out ;)

I know there are other sites specified in exchanging this kind of info (covoiturage and so) but it is about sharing car and costs, not for free-hhiking.

Love, see you on the road! Driver Mirto 15:18, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi! We have Picking up hitchhikers, but yeah, it would be good to have a bit more. I'll be sitting next to Marc this week, and me we can hack set up something in Drupal. For now, maybe we can have a wiki rideboard? guaka 01:07, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Wiki Extensions

What do you think about the idea to use the Collecion Extension for Mediawiki? So you could create your personal Hitchhikers guide for travelling. You just mark the pages you need in the wiki, and then you can export your collection as pdf or odf). You can see it at Wikivoyage how it works. Good for the travellers who don't take any PC while being on the road.

It looks interesting, though it takes more than 10 seconds to see how it works at Wikivoyage... guaka 18:30, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, sounds good. I'll try to install it tomorrow when I'm sober again --MrTweek 21:14, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Google Maps extension

I've been playing a little bit with the Google Map extension on Trashwiki. Check Amsterdam and Trashwiki:Trashcan. I think it could make sense to see if we can migrate maps.hitchwiki.org towards this extension. What do you think? guaka 10:23, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, looks pretty cool. The question is, how can we migrate the old data from maps.hitchwiki.org? We would have to split one big database into many small ones. Any ideas? --MrTweek 11:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Would could set up a bot based on pywikipediabot that tries to insert t_points into articles. I'll first set up mirror.hitchwiki.org so we can play with it there.

The bot should probably also be able to create a .kml file. And maybe it's possible to hack OSM into the extension. With that we would have all current features covered, right? guaka 11:48, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Partwise. Markers in areas for which we don't have articles will get lost. However, they would still exist on the main map, so not a real loss. But I think, the main goal should be to have only one database.

Maybe we can make a mix of both extension, thus allowing to edit markers inside the wiki but still having them in one big database.

Not so easy. I'll think about it. --MrTweek 12:15, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. Tricky issues. Also, it would be nice to have spots in many articles, so maybe the approach of the extension is not right for what we want. But maybe there's a way to build something on top of the extension so that people can edit map stuff directly from inside the wiki. guaka 14:17, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Should not even be too difficult. I think I started something like that some time ago, but eventually forgot about it :/ --MrTweek 14:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

License

I think its high time for a licensing change here at Hitchwiki. (A little background: For a limited period of time - til august this year - the most recent version of the GFDL offers the one-time chance to switch to the similar Creative Commons license Attribution-Share Alike. This seems to be the more reasonable thing for wikis as comapred to the GFDL that is designed especially for documentation of software. Wikipedia has finally decided to move, which removes our main reason to stay with GFDL here.)

The clock is ticking. How do people feel about it? Should we also go for double licensing like Wikipedia?--Speckmade 14:36, 4 June 2009 (UTC)