EvanProdromou

I’m the co-founder of WikiTravel. I have some half-baked ideas about the Internet in general and wikis in particular. I’m a FreeSoftware advocate and an OpenContent fanatic. My motto: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Wiki’.”

I tend to start pages from here when I don’t want to figure out where they should really go.

• WikiRelationship
• MonkeySeeMonkeyDo
• DublinCoreForWiki
• InformationMetaphors?
• BandwidthTheft
• WikiSuburb?
• WikiGhetto?
• TheMedium
• TheChannel
• AristotelianMean
• OutOfChannel
• DoOcracy
• WikiClock
• WhenVotingDoesntWork (& WhenVotingTechnologyFails) (currently a section on AboutVoting, but ripe to bud out into a page of its own)

I drive a particularly beautiful and impractical car.

I have a personal WikiBlog at http://evan.prodromou.name/ .

FOAF in N3

This is my lame attempt to describe myself in N3 format, just because I think N3 + wiki is interesting. Feel free to update or correct this!

 @prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
 @prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
 @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
 @prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .

 <> dc:subject <mailto:evan@wikitravel.org> .

 <mailto:evan@wikitravel.org>
    is a foaf:Person ;
    foaf:name "Evan Prodromou" ;
    foaf:firstName "Evan" ;
    foaf:surname "Prodromou" ;

July 24, 2007

July 17, 2007

I just posted an essay on paying wiki contributors on my personal site.

April 10, 2007

Wikitravel was nominated for a Webby Award in the Travel category. I hope wiki people will take the time to vote for us in the People's Voice Awards.

April 23, 2006

I was embarrassed to see that Christophe had to get news about Wikitravel from Ross Mayfield’s blog, instead of from me. So I figured I’d make a late announcement about it here.

My wife Maj and I announced last week that WikiTravel and WorldSixtySix were both acquired by a company called Internet Brands, Inc. We’re going to be gradually integrating the two sites’ content and communities. On-site advertising will support our development and admin work, as well as hardware and other software dev.

We’re pretty excited about the events; Wikitravel and World66 have such similar goals that it’s been wasteful to be competing for so long. We also think that having a commercial company back up the projects will mean more stability and less sleepless nights for the two of us.

So far the Wikitravel community has been supportive, although a little trepidatious about what lies ahead. I for one am pretty happy that a company was willing to put money behind an Open Content, Open Source wiki community Web site. I’m not sure what this means for other wikis, but I’m glad ours is on more sure footing today.

May 1, 2004

I’m going to be on the road for the next two weeks, driving my very beautiful and impractical car around the circumference of the east-of-the-Mississippi part of North America. Folks in Toronto, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Florida, DC, NYC, or the APs should send me a mail and we can do some impromptu meetuping.

April 13, 2004

Wikitravel was featured in an article on BBC Online about DIY travel guides. We got seriously flooded with new users and lots of fresh info.

Mar 5, 2004

A case study written by myself and Maj about Wikitravel appeared in CMFocus magazine.

Also, I found this Agora wiki about MUDs and MMPORGs and stuff. I think there’s probably an overlap with CommunityWiki – I don’t see it referenced here or on MeatBall anywhere. Probably ripe for some community cross-talk!

Feb 12, 2004

Wikitravel is in the New York Times. Hooray for us!

Congrats! – LionKimbro

Feb 11, 2004

So, I’m realizing that my page here is starting to look bloggy, so I might as well add some dates while I’m at it.

We have a new French Wikitravel language version up (just barely); see http://www.wikitravel.org/fr/ for details. We have a kind of weird language version policy; we have sister sites for different languages, but I kinda refuse to host any wiki that’s not alive and dynamic. I really don’t want to have a lot of security-hole language version wikis sitting around. So we’ve got a more restrictive language version policy than, say, Wikipedia. We’ll see how it goes.

Also: after being on Orkut for a couple of days, I just don’t see why noone’s set up a SocialNetworkWiki?. Seems pretty easy to do! --EvanProdromou

WikiSocial! – LionKimbro

I’d really love to have some comment, feedback, and suggestions on Wikitravel’s description of WikiWiki for first-timers. It’s intended to get people up-to-speed quickly, allay the standard fears about SoftSecurity, etc. Plunge forward and make corrections directly to this DocumentMode page, or if you don’t want, use the talk page, please. --EvanProdromou

On a similar note, we’ve got a new page on how to handle unwanted edits on Wikitravel, too. I’d also love comments, criticism, and of course corrections. --EvanProdromou

I read it and loved it. – AlexSchroeder

Heh. So, my discussion about UseRealNames on that page was (wisely) elided. But then it got moved to MeatBall:UseRealNamesDiscussion, where now a rather one-sided conversation is going on about it.

I don’t feel comfortable, after exercising my RightToLeave, hopping in to make a lot of trouble about UseRealNames on MeatBall. But it’s also weird to see someone addressing me and asking me questions when I’m not going to respond.

I wasn’t aware how interchangeable pages on CommunityWiki and MeatBall are. It’s funny slipping into another community – especially one with different BehavioralNorms – when you didn’t expect it.

A strange exploration of the WikiNow, I guess. --EvanProdromou

Hm, maybe my suggestion wasn’t that good. It just felt weird to discuss the Meatball policy on this wiki. We can discuss the merits of using real names in general here as well, of course. I just hope there isn’t much to discuss. – AlexSchroeder

I think we were all mixed up, then. I was commenting on CW policy, not about Meatball. --EvanProdromou

I agree that we shouldn’t discuss Meatball policy for UseRealNames on this wiki. However, I do think that we need to address UseRealNames.

I’d like to see this page do these things:

• Say that we use “Real” names here. (Please follow it.)
• Say that we’re not dogmatic about it, it’s just the site preference.
• Summarize arguments for and against the use of real names, in a relatively non-judgemental NPOV-ish way.

I feel we should not delegate general discussion about UseRealNames over to Sunir’s wiki. Sunir’s wiki has very specific and dogmatic ideas about UseRealNames. It feels a little like delegating all discussion of religion to, say, the Mormon church’s wiki. I believe we should try to reflect the larger collection of perspectives about UseRealNames.

We are not dogmatic about real names. We have it as a policy, and we follow that policy. But we are not dogmatic about it. I don’t think the participants of this wiki (Alex included) think that it is a decision that every wiki should follow, or that online culture in general should follow. I think we agree that rational folk may support non-“Real” names.

So, we should reflect that in our UseRealNames page.

– LionKimbro

Weird! I was just in the process of revising the UseRealNames page as you wrote this. Please take a look and see if I did a good job at it. --EvanProdromou

I just want to make sure you saw it- AlexSchroeder made InformationPropagation to include what you were saying in InformationChemicalPotential?. Just to make sure you know about it, and see it. (I agree; What happened to InformationChemicalPotential? was a little too cold.) We still want to keep the main idea, and strongly welcome your contributions. – LionKimbro

Elsewhere you wrote:

“I think tailoring the CC licenses to the needs of bloggers who are ignorant and sloppy about copyright is probably not the best direction to go”.

At least you remembers the #1 lesson from meatball: blogging is sadness! --MartinHarper

:With apologies to Wordsworth: “We bloggers in our youth begin in gladness/thereof in the end comes despondency and madness.” --EvanProdromou

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