Hitchwiki:About

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Revision as of 18:30, 27 March 2006 by Guaka (talk | contribs)
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking Wikicity is collecting tips about good hitchhiking places, knowledge about hitchhiking possibilities in different countries, general know-how about what to pack and when to go, what to eat, and how to stay safe.

This is a collaborative web-based project to gather a good set of knowledge about hitchhiking for the benefit of hitchhiking.

(The project started 14th of April 2005. However, the person who started didn't respond when the wiki was constantly being spammed. Consequently Guaka moved the wiki to Wikicities, a migration that was completed on the 19th of December 2005.)

Not competing but co-ordinating

The idea in the Guide is not to compete with other marvellous hitchhiking sites already existing, but to provide a way to reorganize a lot of the existing knowhow into one, easily searchable encyclopedia. Hopefully the Guide can help all the other sites to flourish. It links to all known sites.

Free content

The GNU Free Documentation License, the license under which The Guide's articles are available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses which permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When authors contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on The Guide may thus be shared with, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license.

This means that the content of Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking is available to use on other sites and media that agree to share it alike. Because of this, The Guide is not just for itself. It's for all hitchhikers, and for all hitchhikers' communities.

So I can use the content on my own website?

Yes, as long as you give the same permissions to the text there and remember to give the credit to Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking. Linking back to the original article will suit us fine for this purpose.

It is basically possible for anybody to produce a book or other similar publication from the contents of the site, as long as the derivative work is in the framework determined by the GFDL license.

What's the point?

Freely shared content will never be lost, as people can copy and distribute it. This also makes the Guide a project that everybody can benefit - the articles are free to use for all the hitchhiking communities that already exist.

And heck, wouldn't it be cool to see somebody actually publishing a printed hitchhiking guide after so many years?