This is all really good discussion. Hey Fletch, let the 90 day thing go man! Double the number and half your detractors will leave the field (right?).
It's late here and it's been a busy day, so I'll just go out on a limb. I think the membership has spoken. Enough strong contributors have said so clearly that even incremental moves towards a wiki-like approach for SOME (not theirs!) pages would cause them to pack up and head for the hills that I think the Elves' hands are tied. They fear that if you give an inch they'll take a mile, so it's important to be firm and loud. It's easy for them to deny there is a problem because from their point of view there is no problem: their needs are being met.
Fair enough. I've got things I've written and worked on too, things that I couldn't abide being trampled on.
But there are a lot of us who genuinely like Summitpost without putting ownership at the top of the value heap. Who saw it as a better, probably nicer community than ones we were in before. For myself, as an American living in a foreign country, I like the idea of one site where I can talk about things back home, and in my new home. But we aren't all into the idea of owning pages. Frankly, it's kind of old fashioned. Among my crowd, it won't win me any points. I bring value to a climbing outing by knowing the latest information, by steering clear of stupid obstacles like closed roads, or too much snow on the route for the season. I don't want to leech though. I do want to contribute. But it's these up-to-the-minute details where my knowledge lies. Like I said before, haunting "Additions and Corrections" is an unsatisfying way to spend your time. You just want to type the info in and know that it's there. Bam.
I guess I just want to get across to all these staunch defenders of the status quo that I'm coming from a place of integrity too, and I can't just adopt their model. I'd really like it if Summitpost could support this modus operandi.
But maybe it can't. I'm reminded of a recent article about California. We all know the state is kind of a mess. The government can't get anything done. One governer after another, and countless proposals for improvement get thrown out the window. You'd think the residents would be mad, right? Only the uninformed ones. As it turns out, the government functions quite well. The citizens don't want change, they prefer deadlock, and they punish any politician who tries too hard to break it up. I feel like that's an analogy for where we are.
Summitpost is Summitpost. I like it a lot. It's been really good to me. I got to have a dozen TRs on the front page, and sometimes those happened on really bad days where that gave me a real needed boost. I got to meet the Chief, Borut, Stef, Sebastian H. and a dozen other folks with it, all amazing people. But I haven't contributed lately, because I had my day with the TRs. As a guy who does technical routes, I have real ethical trouble putting them up because I was "led" up them by a topo in a guidebook that I bought. Then if I make a route page, I'm just remembering and re-writing in my own words the same information. A hiker doesn't have that problem. You can look at a Google Earth picture, see a faint line and then go walk it...no mental copyright gymnastics going through your head when you write up the route, because it's more uniquely "yours" that a rock climb.
Oh I'll do it...I'll write up rock climbs as routes occasionally. But I don't feel that easy about it. So I'd rather just contribute snippets. Maybe it's this emphasis on ownership at Summitpost that makes a technical guy uneasy. Maybe that's why only 10% of the routes are technical. I really don't know about Mountain Project and other sites, but perhaps there it's easier to dump your knowledge without feeling like a guidebook author is going without. I don't know. Some climbers attempt to solve this by only reporting something very out of the way, or forgotten, or only original climbs.
Basically I'm uncomfortable with "ownership." Curation or maintenence, I could handle. And I guess thats why I can't help but think in terms of wikis instead of owned pages.
Peace!
--Michael