Hello Veit! Welcome to Wikivoyage. Please take a sec to look at our copyleft and policies and guidelines, but feel free to plunge forward and edit some pages. Scanning the Manual of style, especially the article templates, can give you a good idea of how we like articles formatted. If you need help, check out Project:Help, and if you need some info not on there, post a message in the travellers' pub.

Apart from being busy with your commendable activities, I also hope you'll find the time to collaborate on Wikivoyage. I haven't visited your website, but I surely will! See you. (WT-en) Akubra 13:14, 22 Apr 2004 (EDT)



Hi Veit!

Nice to see you here! :) I think it would be good to kind of forget the HC wikisystem about places: use the material available from Wikivoyage and direct people who want to add or change stuff to this place. Just to create some more synergy :) (WT-en) Guaka 19:15, 14 Jun 2004 (EDT)

Hi Guaka, thanks for the nice note. But no, my experience with Wikivoyage so far was too negative, so I don't want to send our members here. I agree that this would be best for Wikivoyage, but I do want people to add content to the HC and I think that in the end most people feel more connected to the HC and "their" city or region page there than they do to Wikivoyage. And since we already have it programmed I don't see the need to take it away. I will continue to have an eye on Wikivoyage and how it progresses, but don't feel like participating here much anymore. We already have a much nicer and friendlier community in the HC anyways, here just the technology is superior. (WT-en) Veit 01:22, 18 Jun 2004 (EDT)
Veit: I'm sorry you didn't find what you were looking for here. I hope you know that the door is always open if you want to collaborate with us on creating a high-quality travel guide. --(WT-en) Evan 10:55, 18 Jun 2004 (EDT)
It's not only the tech, it's also the license. It would be nice if the HC texts were under the same license (CC-BY-SA), so that texts can be copied back and forth legally. (WT-en) Guaka 09:47, 19 Jun 2004 (EDT)


@Guaka: We will definitely look into the license stuff, but since it is not our primary mission, is also not top priority. But from what I have learned here it seems that Wikipedia's license might be more applicable to the HC, since we really WANT people to link back to our site so they can learn about hospitality exchange. Our mission is NOT to create travel guides that are free-for-all, but bring people together in the real world.(WT-en) Veit 00:56, 21 Jun 2004 (EDT)
The license doesn't have anything to do with linking to a site. It's about the possibility for others to copy the text on the site. So you only want it on specific places. And if you want to have text compatibility with Wikipedia, you definitely need the GFDL, but since copying text from and to Wikivoyage is more appropriate, the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike is probably the best option. I don't think the GFDL forces people more to use backlinks than the CC-BY option, does it? (WT-en) Guaka 12:54, 21 Jun 2004 (EDT)
@Guaka: Ok, I have now read the two licenses several times in the last weeks and my head is still spinning. Have emailed with people, talked to people and somehow I can't figure it out. Would love to get your help and make you "special HC-Wiki investigation agent" ;-) Could you find out about the exact details of the licenses in relation to our HC-goals? I can tell you quite precisely what they are: of COURSE we are happy to share any content created by the members with the net and put it under a public license. In fact, I was thrilled when I discovered Wikipedia a year-and-a-half ago and we clearly based the travel guide sections on WP ideas. The only reason for the link back is that I want people to come and learn about the HC and when we set up those sections, I thought it would be a very straigthforward and fair way. We didnt really think about copying text back and forth. Also, I just reread Wikipedia's copyright policy again, and they quite clearly state that the best way to fulfill their requirements is a link back to the original article. So yes, that's about the only thing I really would like to see.
So if you would like to, take some time to investigate, put it all together and then we will take a decision, whether we should place the content on the HC travel guide pages under a license. As to copying text back and forth from Wikipedia as opposed to Wikivoyage - well, I am not so sure WT will do well in the long run. The communication and management skills here have not impressed me at all. So I can see the thing dying quite quickly if people are treated that way. And there are other options like World66. Even the HC Travel Guides might become better than this here in the long run, since people will feel much more attached to the HC than to a Wiki-site and will take pride in building good travel pages for their country/city. And - I can even see Wikipedia integrate travel info into it's own frame, already there are tourism pages about countries or cities, so all that needs is a bit of expanding and Wikivoyage will be obsolete. So compatibilty with WT is definitely not a big concern anymore. That being said, I did see quite a bit of potential for it, especially if we had cooperated in a nice manner - copying content back and forth, us sending contributors here and WT sending travelers who havent heard about hospitality exchange our way. Anyway, we have seen that attempt die and I am not willing to invest any more energy into WT - in fact, I guess I just spent so much time here because I was challenged and hate bowing to "authorities" just for the sake of it.
Soooooo - if you take up my offer, let's continue by email (veit@hospitalityclub.org) as I dont feel like coming here too often anymore.(WT-en) Veit 01:12, 25 Jun 2004 (EDT)


@Evan: Well, sorry, buddy. I can understand that you want to maintain high quality on your site and that it is your baby. But I really think that you are policing it way too much and that your communication skills seriously suck. Why would you post on my talk page that "the door is always open" etc. and at the same time silently delete a page that I created and that not only me but also Valmi voted to keep? That's not really a way to collaborate. I usually try to put myself in the shoes of other people, and again, I can fully understand why you would not want to have HC links everywhere on your site. But you deleted or reversed just about any contribution I made, whether it was setting up a separate HC page, or adding links to the most relevant sections on our site so newbies can quickly find their way, to making a list of HC-Wikivoyageers. If you wanna build a truly happening site you will have to be integrative and accept that people have different visions and approaches to a project and not punch them in the stomach all the time. Have fun with your baby.(WT-en) Veit 00:56, 21 Jun 2004 (EDT)


Hi Veit, I just wanted to point something out to you that perhaps you already know. Now, as I've stated before, I think the HC license conditions effectively forbid copying stuff from HC into Wikivoyage. But I wanted to point out to you that, under some circumstances, you can copy stuff from us.

Here's an example: Suppose you wanted to use our Germany content into HC. You could do so and then put the Wikivoyage Germany content onto a special page on HC. You could insert links to appropriate other HC pages into the content. The only thing you'd be required to do is clearly mark that one imported page on HC as being licensed with our license.

This might be a nice way of handling this whole integration problem where HC links don't really fit our goals: You can end run (with our complete blessing) by copying our content into special pages (licensed with our license), insert all the HC cross-links you like and then you'd have your own special HC-branded and linked version of Wikivoyage.

See Project:How to re-use Wikivoyage guides for some hints on this.

Cheers, -- (WT-en) Colin 02:13, 11 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Thank you very much, Colin! Didnt even think about this option but it might make sense if we get the programming ready for that... Will definitely save that info and bounce it off the other volunteers in the next months.(WT-en) Veit 01:38, 14 Jul 2004 (EDT)