We did an email interview with one of the two founders of Swedish wiki topo Sverigeföraren Per Lindh. His site had 1400 visitors during the first 10 days. This is the full interview covering Per's thoughs on climbing, copyright and technology, aswell as ambitions for the content.

My name is Per Lindh, I'm 31 years old and have been climbing for three years. In real life I work at a software company that I founded togetherwith three other guys, specializing in text mining and information retrieval. We're 11 people now, and one of them is Niclas - who got me into climbing and the other person behind Sverigeföraren.

I try to climb about four times a week, mixing bouldering, indoor and sports climbing around Stockholm. With the help of Sverigeföraren, I'm hoping to pick up trad climbing as well - since that has been virtually impossible in the Stockholm area due to the lack of a good climbing guide / topo.

My definitive, primary goal is to drink coffe from my thermos outdoors at least once a week. I'm kind of there,  but that goal is a moving target so it's really never fully accomplished. So I guess the next goal is to be comfortable at climbing 7a's.

The site was announced publicly on August 17, 2006, after a week of setting up the wiki and populating it with some starting articles and images.

The response to the site has been tremendous! During the first days we had about 200 unique visitors per day, and as of today (ten days later) 1400 persons have visited the site. The response has been good both from "readers" and "writers", and I'm especially glad for all the feedback about how easy it is to add and change stuff on the site. Many like the fact that they can just click "Edit" and fix a topo without even having to log on.

We've made short announcements in various climbing forums on the web, such as Bloxc and Jug. We're thinking about how to promote it in otherways - all ideas are welcome :-)

Niclas Emdelius is the other person in the "core" team.  He is the domain expert. Since the start, we've also included Pär Lindholm among the sysops (administrators) - he's the one who has provided the fantastic topo of Offerhällan, and is providing us with great feedback on improving the structure of the site and simplifying the editorial work.

For me, it's the massive frustration of not having been able to get my hands on a climbing guide for Stockholm during my three years as an active climber. For Niclas, it's the fact that so many things change on the crags - access problems arise, get solved, routes gets extra bolts, bolts break, new routes are established and so on. Having a release cycle on a printed topo of ten years is simply not acceptable with the incredible boom that climbing has seen during the last five years.

I mean, climbing is such a "distributed" sport - each and every climber sits on valuable knowledge; which routes need a rack of friends, which ones are overgrown etc. It's an impossible task for a single person to collect, compile and present all this information within a reasonable time frame - and it becomes even more problematic when the compiled information ends up as an information monopoly like it's been in Stockholm the last ten years. One person 'owns' all crag information in an area covering 200-300 crags - if that person for one reason or the other is unable to maintain and re-release the information periodically the climbing community suffers. Therefore the rationale fora living, community edited, copyright free online climbing guide is obvious.

On the same time, it's *very* important to stress that we've got nothing against printed guides - on the contrary we will facilitate the promotion of these guides through Sverigeforaren once they are available. We love printed guides - they are a lot easier to carry than your 3G-capable laptop :-) Instead we like to think about Sverigeföraren and printed guides as synergetic, with each format helping the other develop and improve.

We're continuously contacting other people and many of them have already started to contribute with information and links - keep in mind that a link to where one can get hold of a guide can be as helpful as writing a topo on the wiki. It's sometimes very hard to find a guide even if itexists!

I've been trying to contact both SKK and Klätterförbundet (the Swedish federation) but both organisations seem a bit slow to respond, which is strange given that the wiki is such an outstanding tool when it comes to collecting access information and other important "golden nuggets" for climbers.

Hard to tell. By the looks of it we're solving a *real* problem and there seems to be a real need for this type of site. With the critical mass we're building up I'm hoping that most climbers that use the site will eventually click the "Edit" button and do their little contribution.

The whole point with Sverigeföraren is to create information that is *copyright free*. As such, Sverigeföraren (or anyone associated with it) will never have any claims on copyright on the information being produced and published on the site. As long as the information is used for non-commercial purposes you're free to do whatever you like with it.

Obviously, there is a challenge the other way - we need to be very careful and ensure that copyrighted material is not uploaded to the site.

Well, setting up the infrastructure of the site is really just a matter of installing the necessary software (Apache, MySql, PHP and MediaWiki). What consumes time is thinking about the information structure and how pages is best linked to each other - but this can (and will) be done with the help of the community of editors. We've already had valuable ideas and comments that have found their way to the site - such as automatic symbols next to crags to indicate access problems and the level of completion of the article about the crag.

No, I've not worked with Swedish Wikipedia but I use Wikipedia several times a day - I just love the concept. I've been playing around with MediaWiki before though, with the intention of setting up a food wiki but that project really never kicked off. I think most people that have some knowledge in programming and general computing is capable of running a wiki - MediaWiki (the platform we use) runs on both Unix, Windows and Mac, so regardless of which OS religion you confess to, you're ready to rock'n'roll if you have the hardware.

We're running 99% pure MediaWiki with some notable extensions, the most visible one is the extension that gives Google Maps on the crags.

It's currently privately hosted, with on- and off-line backups every day.

We haven't really considered advertising on the site yet - we started primarily to solve a problem, not to earn money.  However, we do have costs for server, hosting and backups and in case the site keeps growing we may need to get sponsors in some way to keep it running.

Wiki is just a general term for "community edited sites". We're using the open source software MediaWiki. It's hard to compare to traditional content management systems (CMS) as they are generally built on the assumption that the writer-reader relationship is a few-to-many relationship. A wiki is many-to-many. Ideally everybody writes - and everybody reads.

Not really. No Swedish ones, but I've seen attempts in other places.

Yes, it lacks structure - making it harder to do "real" database stuff, like route searches, grade searches etc. But we're working on a hybrid approach.

Always :-) Besides Sverigeföraren I'm trying to find the perfect way of frying an egg, and learn how to stitch panoramic images of crags. Both tasks have proven to be dead hard.

 

 

Interview by David Hässler