User talk:PeterW

From General

Hello Peter,

welcome to Wikivoyage. Fine that you finaly have found the way to our project. I believe you when you say that it was somewhat hard to find us. Well, it's a matter of search engine ranking. In German speaking areas, it's not too bad compared to Wikitravel, but sure, if you search in English, Wikivoyage is not well known there.

I remember your name from the IB discussion on Wikitravel. If I remember well, I also had been thinking about contacting you, but I still don't know any more why I didn't. Either because I didn't find your mail address or because I wanted to concentrate on German speaking contributors or because I simply was too lazy ,-) However, sorry for that, I maybe had saved you a lot of googeling.

Some general remarks on the project: First of all, me (and many others of us) think that it is still too early for an English language version. An English version from scratch would probably be lost against the well knonw and established WT/en. A fork from WT/en, as we have done with the German version, is a hazardous risk. I fear we wouldn't get fast enough the amount of contributors we actualy would need to take of. Even very idealistic contributors come to the point where they seriously begin to reflect whether their effort stands in a reasonable relation to the result. Writing for a poorly known wiki with few readers is not that attractive for authors. It's like stock market: If there are many people that believe that some stock's value is going to raise, they will buy and the value will raise. And that's exactly our problem, where to get this initial drive from? Most critical thinking English contributors, as you are, have left Wikitravel and have spread somewhere in the net. How to rebuild a community out of them?

This was much easier with the German language version. There was only a fairly small group of active admins and important contributors on Wikitravel's German version and everybody knew well each other. Most of them were willed to contribute to a new project so that we could be sure not to crash after some weeks. However, I must admit that I have underestimated the power of search engine rankings. WT/de still gets more new contributors then we (allthough, most of them stay only for some days, some others switch over to us). Many new readers and contributors do not care too much about the rather abstract fact that WT is owned by a commercial venture as long as they don't see ads. Anyway, we are in a quite good position compared to WT/de. But we wouldn't be compared to WT/en.

I propagate the long term strategy to first get still stronger on the de: version or some other European languages (perhaps Dutch!) before we fork WT/en. So, maybe, you have come in at the right moment if you should be interested in helping to start a Dutch version. I think, we have become strong enough to be able to risk a WT/nl fork. Well, I can't decide it by myself, but if there were some more Dutch speaking interested contributors, I would support a Dutch version right now.

An other language version beside German,for sure, would bring back our general more into the focus. As you will have realized quite soon, my English is not the best, and it is simply more convenient to write in my mother's tongue. Well, we always try to be disciplined, but anyway, many inportant things have been discussed in the German pub. Having an other language version, we were rather forced to discuss general topics on general: where they belong to.

Last thing: It's much saver to contact me on my German talk page rather than here. That's where I'll be looking for new talks.

-- Hansm 11:23, 29 May 2007 (CEST)

[edit] Sandbox-Wiki for translations

Peter, I hope I have fixed the access problem. For some reason, the link was broken. Unfortunately, we need this extra wiki with read restriction for logged in users only since there is a lot of unedited WT/en material that should not be published by WV before it has been reviewed. So, if you would like to do some translations, go for it. However, in many cases it might be more convenient to use the WT/en articles as base and adapt them according to the corresponding German version on de:. -- Hansm 14:29, 30 May 2007 (CEST)

[edit] language versions

Hi Peter, we are talking about language versions here. I would like you to join. Regards--Der Reisende 12:20, 18 July 2007 (CEST)

[edit] English language version

Just a note to say that I am also interested in contributing to an English-language travel Wiki. Best. -- Skakagrall 08:22, 28 August 2007 (CEST)

@Skakagrall: Great I will add you to language versions/Interest. Peter, how about joining? I signed you in for Dutch and English --Der Reisende 14:51, 6 September 2007 (CEST)