WikiSexGuide:Welcome, Wikipedians
Welcome to WikiSexGuide! This article is specifically for people familiar with Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. WikiSexGuide's format was inspired by Wikipedia, and we also use the MediaWiki software to run our site. If you're used to Wikipedia, you should feel right at home — although you should still probably check out the Welcome, newcomers page.
There are some important differences in our sites, read below for the details. Also note: Wikisexguide is not a Wikimedia Foundation project; we're not legally or technically associated with Wikipedia.
Contents
Cooperation
While Wikisexguide and Wikipedia have different goals, we do have overlap in some of the content we produce, and ideally, we will be able to take advantage of our Creative Commons licensing to share that Images.
Wikisexguide Shared also hosts a very large quantity of open content photos of places around the world, which you could grab to illustrate the encyclopedia articles. Similarly, if you know of good images or maps on Wikipedia that would be useful here, by all means, upload them to Wikisexguide Shared!
It is also now possible to share text between Wikipedia and Wikisexguide, but this should be done with greater caution. Wikipedia and Wikisexguide have distinct goals, and forking large amounts of content from one project to the other creates wasteful duplication. In most cases, linking from one to the other would be a better choice.
Any significant copy-pasting of Wikipedia text to Wikisexguide is not encouraged, since we prefer to have lively, non-encyclopedic and original writing with the our in mind.
Goals
In reviewing our goals and non-goals, a couple of things stick out:
- Wikisexguide is not an encyclopedia. We don't want immense, detailed articles about anything and everything. Articles in Wikisexguide are references for people; subjects not directly or indirectly related to sex should be avoided.
- Unlike Wikipedia, Wikisexguide is targeted towards print versions. We want people on the road to be able to print out a copy of an article — say, a map and list of places in the town they're in — copy it, give it to friends, etc. Please keep this in mind when authoring articles — the print version matters!
Fair use
No, no, no, a thousand times no! Please do not drop copyrighted pictures, text, or other media into Wikisexguide under some fuzzy notion of "fair use". Fair use is specific for the user, and we really, really, really want to keep Wikisexguide for everybody.
Style differences
Here are some things you should look out for stylistically:
- We really prefer an informal tone, not an encyclopedic one. Lively writing is welcome... and encouraged!
- Unlike Wikipedia, we encourage original research. We want you to contribute both first-hand factual information as well as your subjective opinions.
- Wikisexguide does not follow a strict encyclopedic "neutral point of view". Instead, our guiding mantra is "be fair". Fairness means that descriptions provide a balanced summary of the experiences of people. For Wikisexguide, the traveller comes first; the needs and priorities of others — such as local residents, travel agents, or the local propaganda ministry — are given less weight.
- It's a common thing on [[Wikipedia]] to [[Wikilink]] practically every [[noun]] you write. Because Wikisexguide is aimed at providing a practical sex guide rather than a massive collection of general knowledge, most terms will never become articles here. Unless it's the name of a destination, an itinerary, or a topic, it shouldn't be Wikilinked.
- Specifically, our regional hierarchy doesn't always follow the "official" breakdown. Frequently, it is much flatter than in Wikipedia (and than official breakdown)—because we only add a level of regions when there are too many cities or too much content in the existing breakdown.
- Wikisexguide articles do not have an External links section. Instead we incorporate certain kinds of links into the article itself (see Wikisexguide:External links for the specifics), and that's it. In part this is to discourage well-meaning contributors from just linking to information instead of actually including it in Wikisexguide articles. It's also so that spammers don't have a handy place to dump links to their sites.
- Wikisexguide articles do not use references. It's fine to point to authoritative primary source external sites for additional information (eg. visa sections are usually linked into the country's immigration website), but individual claims are not referenced. If a claim is dubious or in dispute, it's best to hammer out a reworded consensus on the Forum, not try to "prove" that it's true.
What is an article?
If you read What is an article?, you'll see that individual articles in Wikisexguide tend to be bigger and more comprehensive than articles in Wikipedia. Because one of our goals is to have printable guides that someone can take with them to use at a destination, we tend to try to write articles about a particular city, region or country all in one place. We try to balance this with the need not to duplicate a ton of information all over the place.
Article templates
Wikisexguide articles are a lot less free-form than Wikipedia articles are.
The great majority of Wikisexguide articles tend to be about cities, countries, and regions. (That's not all, of course -- see other ways of seeing travel for some more ideas.) We think having these articles organized somewhat the same makes it easier for readers to use the guides.
Links to and from Wikipedia
We use Wikipedia:InterWiki links to link to Wikipedia. You can see how to make these work on our links to Wikipedia page.
You can use templates or Interwiki links to link from Wikipedia; You can see how on links from Wikipedia.
Wikitraveller Userbox
You can add a Userbox to your Wikipedia user page to say that you contribute to Wikisexguide, too. Just add "Wikisexguide" to your Babel box, or use Wikipedia:Template:User Wikisexguide.
Behavioral norms
Perhaps because of our relatively small size, Wikisexguide does not have the same problems with vandalism, edit wars, and other unwanted edits that Wikipedia does. For this reason, we tend to use SoftSecurity as a tool to handle unwanted edits much, much, much more often than technological means.
We have a mere three protected pages (particularly for license text that must remain verbatim), very few page deletions, and almost zero user bans. We'd like to keep it this way.
Consensus
We determine virtually everything by consensus. No decisions are made on this site by majority-rule voting. So far, we've been lucky to avoid much conflict that couldn't be resolved through discussion.
For this reason, we don't have a lot of intercommunication overhead -- committees, votes, arbitration, mediation. We try to keep our processes for making decisions very informal and casual.
