CouchSurfing Wiki

What is the CouchSurfing Wiki? And, possibly more important, what is it not? There is already a Brainstorm group in CouchSurfing, where people can discuss in realtime. Wikis have several properties that make them perfect for some things, and less perfect for others.

One important thing that we're working on is a CouchSurfing Guide, which is not a general travel guide, like Wikitravel. It is more geared towards meeting people. It should at least contain information about regular meetings, links to active CouchSurfers. It should have some information about specific cultural issues. It should improve intercultural understanding.

CouchSurfing Documents are another part. These contain not very official, but nevertheless useful information about improving CouchSurfing, media reports, a bug reporting guide and many other things.

What could be on this wiki

• Documents you want to work on with several people, like
  • Overviews
  • Guides
  • Whatever you come up with
• Anything that can be publicly available, which is a bit too general

What should not be on this wiki

• Ad-hominem anything (what?, well, no personal attacks)
• Information copied from any other websites (see also License)
• Anything that fits on Wikipedia, Wikitravel or the Hitchhiking Wiki
• Anything you do no not want to be seen by the rest of the world
• Anything that encourages taking part in illegal activities
• Anything that Ambassadors / Admins need to work with amongst themselves first before releasing to the public, see also Ambassador wiki.

Possible advantages

• Working on improving one text, instead of a bunch of consecutive texts bouncing from one person to another
• Static vs. Dynamic
• History is better integrated
• Better Communications and Transparency
• Dynamic Mission Statement
• Much higher Google PageRank for CouchSurfing pages

Possible synergies

• Group discussions can be summarised, with the "digest" preserving a link to the original discussion.
• Controversial changes can be discussed in the group to form a "consensus edit" that is less likely to be overwritten.

Possible disadvantages

• Poor feedback
• Tends to be majority or expert driven instead of consensus developing
  • Why? This sounds contradicting to me, is it either majority driven or expert driven? Guaka 14:21, 14 August 2006 (EST)
    • Normal user web surfing/interaction patters with the website --Mentor 22:12, 15 August 2006 (EST)
      • Most users do not use even the forums
      • Most users search other people's [[profiles))
      • Most users subscribed to the forum do not interact actively
      • Learning to edit the wiki for the common user is difficult

How can I get started?

If you are interested in contributing to this wiki, check out the following pages:

• How to create a new wiki page
• How to use the CouchSurfing Wiki
• A list of articles that are stubs and in need of conribution
• A list of people willing to assist newbies on this wiki