Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed?

by **mrchad9** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 7:08 pm

I check the summit logs too, to see what the latest conditions might be. Often just a sentence or two there is as useful as a photo album someone has labeled as a trip report. And every few weeks I get a PM from someone who saw me in a climbing log, asking about conditions or specifics. It is a good way to let people know you might have some info if they are looking for it.

I don't really see the need to revamp the weighting system of trip reports, if power is not that important anyway (which it isn't, someone's who's power is 200 as essentially as much vote weight as someone who is 1000). It affects very little.

by **Bob Sihler** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 9:36 pm

lcarreau wrote:
mrchad9 wrote:FOR THE RECORD:

The elves here have deleted three posts here and changed the contents of at least two others, without disclosing having done so.

And, they probably had a good reason to do so.

I did it. This thread has been mostly constructive and civil even though there is wide disagreement on some of the issues raised. Then personal sniping began. This thread and forum are not the place for it, and there is no reason to send this thread to Off-Route. Anita and Larry, your posts were harmless, but after I removed the snipes, your posts had absolutely no context in the thread.

The following user would like to thank Bob Sihler for this post
anita, lcarreau, Sarah Simon

by **Castlereagh** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:47 pm

Why stress out about power and vote weight and what should count more or less or what not? Who cares? As I understand it, it exists as a check to prevent abuse of voting/downvoting privileges, nothign more. If you put up quality, useful contributions, people will notice, and people will respect your work regardless of our "weight" or "power".

And if you really don't care about that stuff, why even object to its existence? Just treat it as a bunch of meaningless numbers and keep climbing.

The following user would like to thank Castlereagh for this post
anita, mrchad9

by **JasonH** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:51 pm

I think we should get power points for thanking people.

The following user would like to thank JasonH for this post
Castlereagh, Dave K, lcarreau, NewDayRising

by **lcarreau** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:57 pm

Bob Sihler wrote: Larry, your posts were harmless..

Yeah, try telling that to my wife! She probably wants me to spend more time with her.

:roll:

by **mrchad9** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 1:09 am

Castlereagh wrote:Why stress out about power and vote weight and what should count more or less or what not? Who cares? As I understand it, it exists as a check to prevent abuse of voting/downvoting privileges, nothign more. If you put up quality, useful contributions, people will notice, and people will respect your work regardless of our "weight" or "power".

And if you really don't care about that stuff, why even object to its existence? Just treat it as a bunch of meaningless numbers and keep climbing.

Agree- that was much of my point.

by **Castlereagh** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:22 am

tazz wrote:Castlereagh

I am NOT stressing about points and power. In fact I am not "stressing" about anything. I do ignore them. If i wasn't then i would not be giving my mt pages away. I decided a while back i wanted to give them up. I am giving mt pages away because IMO It is not the way to get good beta anymore. I am giving my opinion that SP should focus more on Trs and less on Mt pages that read just like a guide book with poor beta. Just because one can manipulate a computer and make a page look fuller and prettier with beta copied from books and the net (especially if they have not climbed the peak!) does not mean the beta is good.

Trs are the new way to get good beta. Area and range pages are good. Route pages are good. beta images are good.

Yes when i say weight/value i mean that. Because the power system will never leave SP. Been here a long time and it has been a huge issue around here. I also know there are some excellent trs (none of them mine) out there that have not been seen because they are not in the power grid of Mt pages.

This is not about ME. It is a discussion about Mt pages, SP and poor beta.

Don't get me wrong, I've absolutely nothing against TR's. I love them, and have read and consumed more than my fair share, and in my own sparse contributions I've much more TR's than area/object pages.

I'm not too familiar with CC or NWHikers, but I've seen some TR's from there, and the ones I've seen have been great. Still, if my memory serves me correctly those TR's are all forum based, right? So even the best TR's are buried into oblivion after weeks, months, years. (correct me if I'm wrong.) Yeah, older TR's may be irrelevant and offer some bad beta; others might still find them useful though, and there still might be relevant information.

SP, all the TR's are attached to the mountain. So even if a mountain page is crap, all copy and paste guidebook stuff, it's an easy way for anyone to access the beta in whatever form they want (pics, TR's, climber's log), whenever they want. You're right: no mountain page to attach it to, and even the best TR is floating around useless in SP purgatory. Only when there's an existing mountain page can the TR beta be useful, preserved for all immediate eternity. That alone justifies the worth of mountain pages, in my opinion. (and if you have a TR for a route or mountain with no existing mountain page, why not create one? obviously you've climbed it)

My point is, why bash one at the expense of the other? Area ranges, mountains, canyons, TR's, pics, detailed climber's logs, if it's good, it's good, and if it's trash, it's trash. When I'm researching for something I'll look at everything: TR's, climber logs, pics, the mountain page, it's all good, it's all helpful (guidebooks too!). What makes SP great is the taxonomy, and the organization, and how objects such as mountain pages can be used to facilitate the finding of good TR beta. (That's why I'm really thankful for the new thread recently started about combining hermit pages with prospective parent pages)

I'm sure there's pretty pages with nothing more than guidebook text (completely different story, of course, if the page owner actually wrote the guidebook himself). That theme's come up a lot these days. Yeah, what can you do? At least on SP other people can add pictures, TR's and routes to your guidebook text. Tom Lopez's Climbing Idaho book is great, but that's the final word; a local climber can't exactly add his own contributions to Lopez's guidebook and have it instantly available to everyone else in the world. Furthermore, there's also a LOT of SP mountain pages not in any guidebooks, where you can't find any beta on these places except the SP mountain and route pages.

And I don't think changing weights for TR's is going to result in more quality TR's or less crappy mountain pages (or vice versa). All TR's are created equal; they all show up the same one line link in the What's New Section. You don't even know who's the author before you click it, much less what his / her vote power or weight is. Like I said before, if you post good stuff, people will appreciate and trust your contributions and use it as beta, even if your vote power is low because you post exclusively TR's

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mrchad9

by **Castlereagh** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:45 am

And I want to clarify too, I've nothing against increasing "power" for TR's if that results in even more quality TR contributions from everyone. That'd be great! I'd personally doubt its effectiveness but who knows, maybe it'd be worth a shot.

But if the goal of this website is to improve its beta by going in the direction of focusing on enhancing the quality/quantity of TR's, I'm sure there's other ways to go about accomplishing that as well, that will appeal to the widespread SP community at large, rather than only to those misers who sit in a corner watching their vote power accumulate. (not accusing you, tazz, or anyone else of doing that; just making a general statement)

by **yatsek** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:09 pm

tazz wrote:Mt pages are not the best anymore now that better beta (trs) can be found on other sites. (…) They should be seen and talked about more often than Mt pages which are just copy & paste from guide books and web sites.

I live in a different corner of the world (BTW To me, yours is one of the few dream places on Earth

) and what I'm going to say refers to SP pages over here. There's lots of copy and paste stuff and what I'd call pseudo info on Mtn or Area pages but there are quite a few pages which are not only a pleasure to look at or read when you're stuck to your desk but also – yes, it does happen – there are pages I would use myself as the main source of info while preparing for a trip: It all depends on the writer. To cheer us all up a bit, let me give some examples.

http://www.summitpost.org/area/range/59 ... tains.html
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock ... ojvet.html
http://www.summitpost.org/area/range/50 ... tains.html
http://www.summitpost.org/area/range/47 ... Hills.html
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock ... nfalk.html
http://www.summitpost.org/area/range/17 ... deira.html
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock ... -Hrot.html
http://www.summitpost.org/area/range/15 ... tains.html
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock ... lerga.html
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock ... mtind.html

P.S. I can't guarantee this but I bet all the creators of the above pages have climbed the mountain(s).

by **Fred Spicker** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 1:53 pm

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yatsek

by **Bob Sihler** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 2:11 pm

tazz wrote:there are very few peaks in the US other than alaska that are not in a guide book/or on the net. Mt pages work well for peaks with trails. But the meat/beta of a page for off trail scrambling or climbing is in the route page and trs.

The majority of pages I post these days are for peaks that are not in books or elsewhere on the net, unless you count lame sites like peakbagger.com that basically give nothing but lat/long and elevation. While there's nothing wrong with "guidebook peaks" being on SP (I have pages for some such mountains), I think SP's greatest value is the information on obscure peaks. Unless I can justify multiple route pages or see the future possibility, I always include what I hope is useful route information on the mountain page itself.

I am saying there is not enough attention paid to trs. Yeah a few get posted on the front page. The unfortunate thing is that mt pages have been the main focus of SP since it started. I remember when that was all they had. Now they have areas and ranges which there were threads just like this one hashing out why areas and ranges should or should not be on SP, or have more value on SP.

I remember those days, too. I actually liked SP better for its simplicity back then even though SPV2 is much better for page formatting. As I recall, there were list pages or indexes for ranges, but not actual area pages. Area pages can be useful, and many are very nice, but I'd venture to say we'd be fine just with lists or indexes as there used to be. Oh well, that's not going to happen, so I should just leave that one alone.

I think part of the problem with trip reports, or the lack of attention/focus, is that so many are just "Hey, this is what we did last Saturday; it was fun!" There are some great stories, there are some great route accounts, and there are some that are both, but I think the majority are pretty useless and that most of us know that. I can't really think of any way to put more focus on quality trip reports. Plus, it just seems people mostly post trip reports to tell stories, not to share important information. I am guilty of it myself, though I have provided route details in many trip reports as well.

Something I wish would get more attention is the climber's log. I don't "sign" the ones on my own pages since I have route information on the pages themselves, but in the logs, people can report on route conditions, commenting on difficulty and exposure and such, without going to the length of a full trip report. Unfortunately, the typical log entry is more like this: "Joe and I climbed it last Saturday. What a great day!"

So to put in my own two cents, I'd say SP's best resource is a well-written route page, especially when there are photographs of the conditions and maps with notes. And that brings us back to one of the main points of this thread: it is incredibly selfish and even reckless for a person to post a route that he/she hasn't climbed.

The following user would like to thank Bob Sihler for this post
yatsek

by **Proterra** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 4:46 pm

Bob Sihler wrote:So to put in my own two cents, I'd say SP's best resource is a well-written route page, especially when there are photographs of the conditions and maps with notes. And that brings us back to one of the main points of this thread: it is incredibly selfish and even reckless for a person to post a route that he/she hasn't climbed.

Agree. I actually think that submitting phony beta on route pages (or submitting phony route pages in the first place) should be treated the same way by the elves as downvoting or taking PnP grudges to the content area of the site...

by **mrchad9** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:29 pm

Bob Sihler wrote:
tazz wrote:there are very few peaks in the US other than alaska that are not in a guide book/or on the net. Mt pages work well for peaks with trails. But the meat/beta of a page for off trail scrambling or climbing is in the route page and trs.

The majority of pages I post these days are for peaks that are not in books or elsewhere on the net, unless you count lame sites like peakbagger.com that basically give nothing but lat/long and elevation. While there's nothing wrong with "guidebook peaks" being on SP (I have pages for some such mountains), I think SP's greatest value is the information on obscure peaks. Unless I can justify multiple route pages or see the future possibility, I always include what I hope is useful route information on the mountain page itself.

Agree with Bob. There are thousands of peaks in the US, even hundreds just in the Sierra, that don't have much information out there on them. If you head to the less known and more remote areas getting good info can be hard to come by. At least in CA, SP is often an excellent resource, for both mountains and routes.

As far as trip reports being more useful, I would much rather see a page that lays out the route and any difficult sections, and explains things in a way that is intended for someone to who's goal is to complete the activity. Many trip reports are stories of how someone's trip went, not laying out the route. Sometimes a good read but not usually what I am looking for. Mountain and route pages are better.

by **Dow Williams** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 6:33 pm

mrchad9 wrote:As far as trip reports being more useful, I would much rather see a page that lays out the route and any difficult sections, and explains things in a way that is intended for someone to who's goal is to complete the activity. Many trip reports are stories of how someone's trip went, not laying out the route. Sometimes a good read but not usually what I am looking for. Mountain and route pages are better.

Well said Chad. It amazes me at times how much bs can be spewed before simplicity reigns supreme.

by **mvs** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:56 pm

It makes total sense that there will be users who like TRs and users who don't like TRs. Many people find them off-putting. That is fine. I think they are highlighted pretty well for folks who like them.

How about people who write TRs who never climbed it?

Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed?

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Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

Re: Is it OK to create pages about peaks you haven't climbed

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