Re: An idea

Colin MacDonald said:

Bear in mind that, while you can build in legal disclaimers, etc.,
there will be people who will take a route from the site and use it
without checking accuracy, safety, or access rights, etc. (cf Trail
mag's Ben Nevis debacle) You can avoid legal responsibility but I'd
tend to the view that such a site carries a moral responsibility to at
least check that routes are sensible. (I'm sure others will disagree,
but it's a matter of personal ethics.)

I would certainly agree with that. I wouldn't feel happy about
publishing a route on my website that I hadn't already walked myself.
There are so many unknowns. The map doesn't tell you everything you
need to know. There can be unexpected surprises out there.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk
http://www.wildwales.fsnet.co.uk
http://www.photosig.com/go/users/userphotos?id=118749

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the feedback.

Quoted message said:

Hard to
get the energy up to finish the job.

I know what you mean, that's why I want to make this a community
thing. I can contribute technical knowledge about web- and software-
development as well as some skills in knowledge management, and a strong
desire to see a project through to fruition but if it's to work it has to
be something that has a number of contributors. This is a very active
newsgroup and there must be plenty of people out there willing to
contribute in a number of ways: technically; content; and help on legal
issues; and in numerous other ways I haven't even thought of yet.

Quoted message said:

One issue that I kept coming back to is that the management overhead
is substantial. Something like Wikipedia works on autopilot, and I
was quite surprised when an entry that I posted appeared in place
immediately. I could, basically, have written anything I wanted.
Projects of this sort depend on the goodwill of contributors, but I
was always of a mind to build in a kind of Yes / No approval thing
where I could scan a contribution and if it looked reasonable I'd
click the button and it would go live.

I realize that Wikipedia allows _almost_ anyone to post anything. That's
true of the Wiki content model in general. That's its great strength! The
good thing about it seems to be that most people aren't vandals - and when
someone is, they can be blocked from posting for a finite period
(or even indefinitely for repeat/serious offenders) and rollback to
reasonable content.

One thing that always surprises me about this newsgroup is the level of
activity. It's the third most active group I read and I read a variety of
very active newsgroups. (The two more active groups are software
development groups.) So there's a large community here who could spot
contentious/dangerous/... information fairly quickly and post corrections.

Quoted message said:

Bear in mind that, while you can build in legal disclaimers, etc.,
there will be people who will take a route from the site and use it
without checking accuracy, safety, or access rights, etc. (cf Trail
mag's Ben Nevis debacle) You can avoid legal responsibility but I'd
tend to the view that such a site carries a moral responsibility to at
least check that routes are sensible. (I'm sure others will disagree,
but it's a matter of personal ethics.)

This is a problem that doesn't have a straightforward technical solution,
however I do believe it is possible to resolve it. One possibility could
be that no route is made publicly visible until it is verified by a
privileged user. I'm not too keen on this as a solution as it would slow
dramatically the creation of _live_ content. I'd prefer a solution that
allowed for ease of addition of content and community moderation,
presumably with appropriate disclaimers.

Quoted message said:

Issue 2 was trying to find a good way to tie a route to a hill, or
collection of hills, but still maintaining a simple UI. Not that I
spent much time on it, but it could get complex. Also if would be
useful to have a visual of a route. Only good way for this would be a
java applet or ActiveX control where you could drag & drop icons of
peaks, buildings, etc., as well as draw roads, paths, rivers, and
cliffs, etc.

I know that good UI design is key to the whole thing working but I'll skip
over this for now. :-) (Any UI designers out there want to get involved?)

Quoted message said:

Issue 3 was photos. What do you allow? Allow one photo per hill?
Two? Suppose someone posts a few 10Mb high-res photos and you hit
your ISP quota? It's safer to have no photos at all, but that's a bit
[censored]. You could allow links to photos on external sites, but you have
no editorial control then.

This is an interesting technical problem. Storage is now relatively cheap.
However, once you get into the realm of storing large quantities of
multimedia with redundancy and backup it gets much more expensive. I can
propose a potential solution: initially any media uploaded is restricted
in size; if it's good and posted by someone who has provided a means of
contact then a larger version can be requested.

I'd really envisaged a dedicated server (or at least a share in a co-lo
box) to run this on. So storage would be simply a matter of buying enough
disk space.

Quoted message said:

I'm sure there were issues 4 and 5, and so on, but, as I say, it's
been a while since I looked at this, so it's a long way from being
fresh in my mind.

I don't doubt it! This is something that's been in the back of my mind for
some time and I've come up with a number of legal, technical and practical
difficulties but I think that, ultimately, they are surmountable.

It's very useful to hear from someone who's tried something similar
before, I hope you'll get involved as, when and if this takes off!

Regards
--
Neil
[email hidden]
For my direct email replace posting with my forename.

Neil Green said:

One
possibility could be that no route is made publicly visible until it
is verified by a privileged user. I'm not too keen on this as a
solution as it would slow dramatically the creation of _live_
content. I'd prefer a solution that allowed for ease of addition of
content and community moderation, presumably with appropriate
disclaimers.

Disclaimers are essential for something like this of course, but it
would be nice if you could prevent routes from being published that
haven't actually been walked. I know it's difficult to prove that, so a
certain amount of trust would be required, but it would be so easy to
submit "speculative" walks. I could knock out dozens of walks in an
hour or so using Anquet Maps, all of which may look quite believable,
but I know only too well from experience that the best laid plans...

Once I encountered a dismantled tramway, clearly marked on the map,
looked a good route. It didn't exist, replaced by a bog full of reeds.
Then there was that path through a forest that no longer existed, the
trees had been felled and new tracks carved through it, replacing the
older overgrown tracks. Then there's the farmers who block rights of
way, etc. etc.

Anyone who submits a route should be under oath to have walked it to
check it's viability, and recently too. I've done many walks in years
past that may have changed since I was last there.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk
http://www.wildwales.fsnet.co.uk
http://www.photosig.com/go/users/userphotos?id=118749

The message <[email hidden]>
from "Paul Saunders" <[email hidden]> contains these words:

Quoted message said:

Then there was that path through a forest that no longer existed, the
trees had been felled and new tracks carved through it, replacing the
older overgrown tracks. Then there's the farmers who block rights of
way, etc. etc.

I thought for a moment you were referring to the route we took off Moel
Llyfant but that wasn't a revised forest, just a path over a bog that
had disappeared through lack of use.

Incidentally the route I took back to my car on Sunday supposedly
followed the path shown on the Nuttalls sketch map but there was very
little evidence on the ground except the stone stiles where it passed
over some very substantial walls. I lost the path where it entered a
patch of man eating bracken and, on a more direct route to the next
waypoint, was forced to climb a wall without the aid of a stile. To get
out of that field I found yet another stone stile that would put me back
onto the ROW but when I climbed to the top of the wall I found that the
steps down the other side had been completely destroyed.

--
Roger Chapman so far this year 39 summits
New - 22 (Marilyns 8, Sweats 5, Outlying Fells 11)
Repeats - 17( Marilyns 6, Sweats 12, Wainwrights 11)
Knackered knee - 4 times

In article <[email hidden]>, Paul Saunders
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Anyone who submits a route should be under oath to have walked it to
check it's viability, and recently too.

Hear ! Hear!......:-) :-)

--
Bill Grey
http://www.billboy.co.uk