Fellow SPers,

It's that time of year again. The time for earnest and well-meaning new contributors to begin dipping their toes into SP mountains, routes, trip reports, etc., to share with the community their summer adventures. Some of these new contributors are "naturals" and others, well, need some community assitance to shine. This is a good chance for us seasoned old folks to provide some constructive criticism to help new arrivals improve their pages.

Some new contributors need help with very tactical matters: Proper coordinates, elevation, removing the "External Links" section if not in use, etc.

Others need more strategic guidance: You know, along the lines of - just putting up two sentence with no pictures integrated to the page then signing the summit register is not really a "Mountain Page" contribution.

It's important to maintain our community page quality standards so that SP continues to be a source of quality, reliable (and, heck, nice-to-look at) climbing & mountaineering beta - and does not degenerate into a compilation of personal scrap book junk and half-arsed postings.

This isn't a call for contributors to march forth rudely and on fire like some SP Quality Control Gestapo, but rather work to foster tomorrow's contributors, providing them with the guidance - quality guidelines and and tech support - needed to bring value to the community.

And, if being nice and fostering fails: We'll send hgrapid after 'em! (Just bustin' your chops, 'ole boy.)

Hope everyone had a great weekend,

Sarah

sarah.simon wrote:just putting up two sentence with no pictures integrated to the page then signing the summit register is not really a "Mountain Page" contribution.

To be fair, this is not an issue restricted to new members at all. There are some people who been signed up for years that can't seem to get very far beyond that description.

I can hear people groaning already, but man, I wish this place were like a wiki. I've got some interesting information on some mountains or routes, but they are small snippets, not enough for a page. I'll bet a lot of people have that.

I want to contribute information, but I don't want the responsibility of owning pages. Sometimes I've tried to contribute that info in page comments, thinking that the owner will see it and decide whether or not to integrate the information to the text. But then I click on the owners page and see they didn't log on since 2007. Oh.

And don't tell me I could easily get page ownership because I don't want it!

I would be willing to be a page administrator. Like, let people add stuff and I have the right to edit. That way content "swarms" into the page, but "weeds" can still be removed (mixing my metaphors like crazy here).

Just daydreaming...

Wow,

Am I being known as that guy who is super harsh on the comments?
I suppose I should be nicer. For the record, I have given many people
latitude and longitude and corrected many pages. But, I can see how I
might be a little harsh.

I have found that when a new contributor submits a page and there are obvous issues, sending a nicely worded PM to the contributor with recommendations on how to improve the submission goes over quite nicely. I have done this a number of times with very positve feedback. An explanation justifying the change also helps.

It isn't always obvious to new contributors the hows/whys of how SP works.

Just remember - you catch a lot more bees with honey than you do with vinegar.

sarah.simon wrote:Fellow SPers,

This isn't a call for contributors to march forth rudely and on fire like some SP Quality Control Gestapo ...

Geez, Sarah. Are you running for some sort of public office ???