Getting Started

The Walking Wiki is here to collect favourite walking routes. Anyone can contribute to it, and anyone can use the information.

If you are going to put information on this website, you must agree to licence your contributions under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. That means that you are allowing other people to use and modify your contributions provided that they distribute the resulting work under the same conditions. It also means that you must not upload information that you do not own (e.g. copies of maps, descriptions by other people) unless that information is licensed under compatible terms.

Working the Site

The first thing to do is to register:

You may find the tutorial helpful: BeginnersStartHere

If you have not used a Foswiki or TWiki site before, then you should next go to the Sandbox and try a bit of editing and page creation to get the hang of it. You might also want to go to some of the existing walks pages and click the "Raw View" link at the bottom to see how they are put together.

Now go and edit the main walks index page and add a pointer to the page you want to create:

When you save the page, your pointer will have a blue question mark: click on that to start editing your page. We have lots of information about how to edit pages: a quick overview appears when you start editing a page, and you can find more on these pages:

Finding Maps

Be very careful where you get maps from. Most (such as Google Maps, Streetmap, Multimap etc) are owned by map companies who want payment for online use. If you upload maps to the Walking Wiki it is important to state where they came from, and what the terms are. The site managers will probably have to remove any maps that might have commercial origins.

In some countries you can use old government maps for free. For example in the UK, any Crown Copyright item over 50 years old is OK.

The best source of maps in most places is the OpenStreetMap project. If you have not met this already, do go and have a look (and get yourself a GPS unit and start adding your walking routes). There are several different renderers for OSM data: you might want to look at the cycle-map variant as that includes contours.

One way to make quite good-looking maps is to overlay OSM data onto NASA Landsat images. These are also freely available, and can be fetched with OSM tools such as Josm. It needs some familiarity with image-editing tools like The Gimp to combine the images, but the results are very usable.

-- AndrewFindlay - 2009-06-26

This topic: Walks > WebHome > GetStarted
Topic revision: 26 Jun 2009, AndrewFindlay
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