Help:Contents

Welcome

Welcome to our online repository for everything trail related within a reasonable distance from our club's center in Kingsport TN. The goal is to provide an easy way to find useful information about trails in our area so you can figure out where you want to go, how you'll get there, what to look for, and then provide a place to come back and update what you experienced for everyone's benefit.

Please contact us at webmaster@tehcc.org if you would like to share information or if you have questions on how to help or use the site.

New to the site?

• What is this?

It's our trail wiki

• I know what a trail is, what's a wiki?

Well I could write a bunch here, but it's best just to go to the best wiki of them all: Wikipedia, here's their definition. Essentially it's a site made for the easy contributing and editing by anyone on the internet as well as easy cross referencing across the site.

• Woah, any one can edit? Aren't you worried someone will delete something, or mess things up?

Um no.

• Really, you're not worried?

No, most people are out there to help not hurt. Plus you can't get big rewards if you don't take risks. Lastly all changes on the site are monitored and every creation, revision, and deletion is saved, so old versions can always be reverted back if someone messes something up really bad.

• Ha! You're going to collect all of this information, do all of this work, and someone is just going to steal it all, put it on a heavily ad riddled site or publish it in a book

First of all, information here is Copyright TEHCC so legally you can't steal it. Again we're back to risk vs. reward. Trail information that we can edit and control is worth the risk. But seriously please don't steal it, we worked hard to get this.

• Why are there missing pages for some trails?

This project was started in Spring 2011, so it is being built as folks gather the information. If you know something about a trail, then create or update the page. Remember it's a wiki, so will be filled out by multiple contributors, including you.

New to wikis

• What does it mean if the trail name is in red?

Red means it's linking to a non-existing page. The nice thing about wikis is that we can make references to future pages. Sort of like a leaving a note, that at some point we would like to make a page that is eventually on the other side of that link.

• I looked at the "Edit" for of a page, it doesn't look too bad, but what's with the special characters?

That's the wiki markup, here's some information on editing.

• Do you have any more information for those thinking about helping to contribute?

Yeah, read the section below "Helping to contribute"

Finding trails

• Alright, I'm trying to find trails to hike, but it's taking forever going through each page.

You've got lots of options here. You can search the map, we have our trails list which can be sorted alphabetically or by driving distance, by trail use, by category, or if you want to roll the dice, hit "Random page" on the left. Or try our recommendations at ClubWIKI:TopsList. Different paths for different interests.

Helping to contribute

• Well it's a great idea and all, but I hate coding. Oh well, wished I could help.

Hey! Not so fast. It's not really coding, yeah you have to do some markup, but it's nothing like writing a program or making a web page in HTML. If you follow other more complete pages, it should be fairly easy to follow along. It's mostly just writing.

• Yeah, well I hate writing too, regardless I don't want to spend my time writing web pages, I've got trails to hike during the day, and trips to plan at night.

Well then you're actually the kind of person we need most, gathering information. The hardest part very well could be collecting all of the trail information, how to get there, what to look for, pictures, GPS tracks, etc...

• Alright, you convinced me, how do I get this information to you?

Send it to me at webmaster@tehcc.org

• I changed my mind, how do I make changes to the site myself?

Well first I would suggest making a login by going to the upper right of the site and following the links

• Okay, I'm back and logged in. Hey I can edit without logging in, why did I just do that, are you going to spam me?

No, your email address is only for password recovery. Nothing else. Logging in helps identify who's doing what changes, so if needed we can discuss with you about your changes if we want to, plus you get logged for all of your changes and we can see how big of a help you are.

• Alright, let's get started!

OK, either you'll be creating new pages or adding to or editing existing pages. Adding to existing pages should be easy, just hit edit and find where you want the changes and do it. Here's some information on editing. If you're unsure, hit "show preview" before hitting "save page" to see how it would look. Again don't worry too much about messing up, we can always revert back to earlier revisions.

• It's a new trail I want to add

That's going to be a bit more work. But not too bad, We've got templates to make it easy on you and steps to follow. Best to follow ClubWiki:Creating_a_Trail for all of the steps needed. It's fairly easy, I promise.

• Well I'm confused, that's still too hard.

No problem, email me at webmaster@tehcc.org and let me know which trail and I'll add all of the needed pages and references so you can just add to the newly created page.

• Anything else?

Yeah, here's a page of links I often use for editing the site: Useful links to those administrating or heavily editing the site

Please contact us at webmaster@tehcc.org if you would like to share or if you have questions on how to help or use the site.