Guide Improvements
The CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.
The Couchsurfing Locations Guide is by no means perfect. There has been plenty of talk, especially on the CS wiki group about the need to improve the guide, specifically through better organization. Below are some ideas of how this can be done. Feel free to comment or edit, but please sign your comments.
- see Guide Improvements/Archive for previous discussions
Categories
A standard structure for categories for them to be the most useful. The most logical structure is the one already used by most pages. World region categories contain country sub-categories and those country categories contain all articles related to that country. The difficulty is in deciding what to do with states and regions. This is perhaps best done on a per country basis. If it makes sense to the editors of Germany articles that Germany should be organized by state sub-category then so it is. The point is consistency within a certain group of articles.
To get started with this, see also the list of uncategorized pages
Templates
We are currently using a variety of templates to keep the wiki organized- the city, country, province, and state templates. Many have complained that these interfere with the Table of Contents. They take up a lot of room and often do not provide much additional informaion. An alternative which allows each country to be more or less organized in its own fashion is to have a unique header template for each country which will be included in each of the articles about that country. For an example see the Australia Template linking together all Australia pages. The current templates can then be elminated, with their info being included contextually or with other, much smaller header templates below the one for that country. This makes it much easier to navigate through related articles and keeps the pages themselves easy to read. --Metal.lunchboxTalkCS 17:55, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
IsIn functionality
Like on Wikitravel, Hitchwiki and Trashwiki. Needs some extra extensions first though.
