User talk:Felix505/Archives 2009

This is an archive of discussions on my (WT) talk page from 2009 - early 2010 No further edits should be made to this page

Hi Felix. I am guessing from the edit history of [Lombok] that anonymous user 125.167.150.126 might be you. Please see the messages below which I placed on that user talk page today. Thanks for all your work on Lombok.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 06:45, 6 October 2009 (EDT)


 * Hello, 125.167.150.126! Welcome to WT.


 * To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Project:Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 03:11, 6 October 2009 (EDT)


 * Thank you for all the work you are doing on Lombok. Could you please though avoid giving references for the points you are making about history and culture. WT does not require references and citations and we make a point here of stressing that we are not an encyclopedia. Thanks and please keep it up!--(WT-en) Burmesedays 03:11, 6 October 2009 (EDT)


 * And please do not repeat everything in every article! Indonesian driving habits, for example, belong in Indonesia, not Lombok and Senggigi and Mataram and... (WT-en) Jpatokal 07:44, 6 October 2009 (EDT)


 * Felix, I just like to assist my fellow WTers here: Please stop adding links! This a travel guide and not wikipedia. I reverted your edits. (WT-en) jan 09:13, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

Content placement and guidance
When working on Lombok and its sub-articles, you might like to refer to Bali for some guidance about what should go where. For example this:

''There is also a Warung [16] catering to local people selling fresh and well prepared traditional Sasak Food at 'Warung Mur' to take away (Nasi Bonkos) or eat at the rough bench in front of Mur's warung or taken to the nearby beach. Cold drinks may be purchased at Warung Amsi a few meters north opposite Windy Beach Cottages [17] entrance gates and next to the small Handfone and Pulsa (pre-paid phone credit) shop (Maya Cell). (information current mid-late 2009) This is a good place to buy some traditional local food and some cold refreshments at harganya biasa (local prices) for the trip northwards as everything becomes a lot quieter once you cross the northern headland of Mangsit bay.''

.. should really be in the Senggigi article under eat or drink, not in Lombok in the get around section.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 08:19, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

Block
Hi James. I blocked your account for a short period to try and get your attention&mdash;I think you haven't noticed your talk page yet? Please respond here before further editing, so that we know that you have read these messages. Thanks! --(WT-en) Peter Talk 13:35, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

Welcome
Hello, Felix505! Welcome to WT.

To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Project:Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub.


 * I have seen your comment on the Senggigi talk page. WT is consensus oriented and therefore communication is appreciated. Please discuss major changes and have a look on the formatting so everybody can have fun. I case of uncertainty feel free to contact other users. (WT-en) jan 07:16, 8 October 2009 (EDT)

response
I hope my attempts to revise the Lombok and Senggigi pages has at least prodded the dead horse back into life now. Upon first viewing those pages it struck me that the style of writing indicated the considerable work of maybe only 1-3 people without much apparent follow up by others then it appears to have somewhat died from lack of further attention some number of years ago. Maybe I misread that but the time capsule quality of the information pretty much tells the story itself.

Again and with sincerity, I hope my contribution has assisted the WT purpose and that many others may be interested to keep the lombok information program alive, growing and up to date and that I have not offended anyone although it seems somewhat apparent that I have. if indeed I have it is unintended and of course I apologise for any noses or other things that may have been put out of place.

However, GT Air stopped flying years ago and Lion AirWings also stopped DPS-AMI-DPS years ago and there were many other serious problems with content and accuracy. I do not aim to pick fault, far from it as doing this sort of thing has no clear and tangible reward but it was clearly apparent that both "Lombok" and Senggigi Area" were really seriously out of date "Lombok"="chilli" in bahasa "indonesian" (whoops) I hope that was only a typo rather than an indication of someone seriously struggling with their own understanding of both Lombok and Bahasa Indonesian. What was that doing sitting right there in clear view right on the middle of the Lombok page, and there was much more.

My own revisions where authored in direct response to the daily tortures and confusions I have seen many tourists enduring in Lombok. Nothing is served by visitors to Lombok having their stay ruined by a fight with a greedy and short sighted car renter or some other opportunistic misfit. Information is a premium commodity and the more plentiful, accurate and adjusted to target the better. If they seemed off topic I assure you they are not off topic on the streets of Senggigi as I have seen some funny things going on from time to time.

For the future well being of the Sasak people, the tourism operators and the visitors themselves Lombok as a destination needs to be demystified as much as possible without sucking the 'adventure' out of it for people. It is a trip to a remote tropical area in a distant province of a large, dynamic and potentially challenging archipelago. It is not constructive to sanitise it or soften it but the less people suffer from nonsense the more they will enjoy the place and both give to it and learn from it.

The happier visitors to Lombok are the more adventurous they will become and all the better for the story they tell when they get home. Similarly the more the local culture is understood and promoted the more likely it will be preserved instead of being swamped by tourism and it's commercially driven motivations. Lombok is lucky to have an intact culture but tourism development can and is easily leaving the sasak of the table and relegated to sweeping the floors and manicuring the lawns instead of them having a significant stakeholding in the whole thing.

Lombok could easily get sanitised into being just another tropical resort with anonymous 'foreign' speaking brown skinned people quietly pandering to the needs of tourists who go home not knowing or even caring it they were in the caribbean, malaysia, bali, maldives thailand or lombok. In the case of many they are not going to lombok because they think they will be confronted by fanatical bomb lobbing muslim extremists. Frankly I think they are more likely to get done in by a falling coconut or one of lombok many homicidal drivers. Maybe lombok does not even need such scaredy cat tourists arriving and maybe all the global war on terror fantasy stuff keeps the idiots at home watching tv but still I think something like the WT site can help on many levels. Also it has an air of authority and credibility to it I guess in part to its partial similarities to Wikipedia andthat sites own developing resource and sense of credibility.

I am obviously a bit disheartened by the outcomes of my attempts to clean up what had obvious appearances of neglect. Slash and burn of a contributors work whilst it is still being formed is rather like throwing a cold bucket of water over the person making lunch. Almost without doubt the person will pack up and go home and lunch preparations will not be finished. Don't worry, I got the hint.

I (naively) hoped in putting up the initial rework that if by any chance there was any interest then some others may get involved. Frankly due to the 'forgotten' appearance of both pages and their seriously obsolete information I assumed not. Consequently I had no expectation of assistance and was prepared to see it through on my own should that be necessary. I was surprised when someone (sorry I have not looked back over the histories but I am sure you know who you are) did a a quick format and content rearrangement of a section of airline info. This surprised me but gave considerable encouragement.

Understanding it would take me no doubt several days to try and breath some life back into the two pages if I was working alone I got rather encouraged thinking that WT was 'as advertised', that is, a community effort. The effort sadly degenerated into little more than frequent massive ablations of anything further put up before I could even adequately review it or see if someone else had added a constructive further contribution/edit/formatting or similar. Given that both pages were not in good shape before and had many errors apparently of several years vintage then surely there was nothing so bad about what I was uploading that it needed to be torn down, put back up, and torn down again and generally derided so that both myself and anyone else who might be foolhardy enough to become involved would probably have the good sense to just abandon it as a lost cause and go off line. What was the emergency and if there was one why did nobody do anything to the pages to fix them themselves rather than getting their noses out of joint when I had a go at it. Really is the outcome of the Lombok page all that bad a couple of days later, surely it is a bit better than it was before and at least is a bit more up to date. If you do not like my writing style ok I am not offended in any way frankly I am not sure that I am all that fond of it myself but at least give someone a chance to do something with out tipping it all into the sink before it has a moments to shine a light of clarity upon it.

BTY I do not seek to try and change the formula if already firmly established but if people did give appropriate links and attributions it might go a long way to making sure content was up to date and assist in ensuring that what contributors upload is not just something they dreamed up whilst staring into a flat glass of beer in an airport lounge somewhere. Also it would assist people to just go and learn about something or seek clarification this especially so on a website where anyone con just come along and write something completely silly on a page and then vanish again.

I continued only because I wanted to rid the pages of the misleading sort of information that so often confuses people arriving in Lombok and because in the best traditions of 'concorde syndrome' I thought I may as well just press on and either finish it myself or see someone else get constructively involved. As I mentioned on the Senggigi discussion page I hope it has a happy ending. If you are going to be protective about it try and remember that it needs an occasional walk in the sunshine or it will die.

Frankly I do not use WT when I travel, just never really thought to do it but I really hope the information I came upon on the Lombok and Senggigi does not represent the accuracy of other WT pages. If it does there must be a lot of unhappy Wikicampers wandering around out there looking for taxis that are not there to go to nightclubs that don't exist and having fights with locals because they think they are being ripped off when they are in fact getting a discount and then overwhelmingly disappointed with the whole thing then trying to book a flight to somewhere else instead on an airplane that has not flown for years.

Help me understand this, WT is meant to be enhancing this experience in which particular way...surely people can screw things up perfecttly well on their own with out misleading information from an 'authoritve' website helping them to make it even worse. Frankly I wonder if I will look at the site in a week or so and discover the previous page I first saw put back up again. Maybe GT Air will be flying again on WT some day soon. Thanks for the kind comments that were made on a couple of occasions.

Maybe we will meet at the lost baggage counter one day and have a good laugh about this.


 * Hi Felix. WT is a collaborative effort written and administrated 100% by volunteers like yourself. That the Lombok and Senggigi articles were out of date and contained some factual errors should not be a surprise. WT relies on people like you putting that right. And there is no doubt that both of these articles have been improved by your efforts. When you embarked on this task though you will see that myself and other users were trying to get your attention and make clear guidelines on what goes where, the lack of need for repetition, citing references etc.
 * WT can only work if the hierachical structure is adhered to..... otherwsie it all becomes a bit messy very quickly. The structure for Senggigi for example is Asia-> South East Asia-> Indonesia-> Nusa Tenggara-> Lombok-> Senggigi.  Only information pertinent to Senggigi should go in the Senggigi article... and so on.  If you have any doubts, please look at developed articles for similar destinations. I suggested Bali would be a reasonable place to start as a large amount of work has been done on those articles recently (although they are certainly not perfect).
 * On citing references. No travel guide ever does this nor should it. WT is not an encyclopedia and indeed, encourages original writing.
 * Personally I care a lot about Lombok and all of the Lombok articles were and still are on my own list to address - have a look at Mount Rinjani for example, which I have just re-vamped. As I said, the main Lombok article and Senggigi are both greatly improved by your efforts and please do not be discouraged. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 22:48, 9 October 2009 (EDT)

Thanks for those comments they are appreciated and understood as are the considerable efforts especially that -Burmesedays- has taken to assist with the process and to clarify working guidleines. If you have the time you might want to look over the further comments I recently placed on the 'senggigi page' discussion. (WT-en) felix 17:29, 10 October 2009 (EDT)

2009 - early 2010 archive ends here

This is an archive of discussions on my (WT) talk page from 2009 - early 2010 No further edits should be made to this page