HTYP:About
Overview
HTYP is a free directory of practical information about anything and everything. At the present, most of the articles have been created by the Editorial Despot as information came to hand, but HTYP is intended as a community effort, for community use.
Free
HTYP's contents are, except where noted, available under the GNU FDL, and may be freely copied and reused. There is also no paid advertising within HTYP.
Topics
HTYP has two major subject areas at present:
- A location-oriented directory: a directory of (eventually) every place known, starting at the Earth and moving both outwards and inwards.
- A directory of practical knowledge, with working notes. This should include not only knowledge relevant in the present, but also knowledge related to the following question: If the infrastructure of civilization were suddenly to go away for some reason, what knowledge would we need in order to rebuild it?
The HT in HTYP also refers to The HypertWiki, where the wikified version of HTYP was first tested.
Contact information for HTYP is here: HTYP:Contact
The Name
HTYP is the HyperText Yellow Pages.
This name might seem a little redundant at first (wouldn't an online directory necessarily be formatted using hypertext?), but on the other hand most online yellow pages directories seem to be little more than searchable databases with plain text content and very little in the way of hyperlinks. Sometimes they will link to a business web site, but that's about it. HTYP goes far above and beyond ("hyper-: 1 over, above or beyond" - Wiktionary) that by allowing anyone to make new entries, create new pages, and even write reviews – basically anything relevant to any of the subjects HTYP covers.
HTYP also stands for the "Here & There Yellow Pages" (referring to the location oriented directory) and the "How-To Yellow Pages" (referring to the directory of practical knowledge).
Policies
- Advertising: HTYP has no advertising – or possibly free advertising, depending on how you look at it
- Purpose Guide: ways in which HTYP may be of use to particular groups of people
- Original content: we prefer to create new content, with links to relevant existing content, but copying is allowed under limited circumstances; see our content copying policy
We reserve the right to amend these policies as needed, of course.
Redundancy
How HTYP is different from other available resources:
- Wikipedia: HTYP is less formal and is aimed at being more practical. Content on HTYP may be opinionated and personal. Where Wikipedia attempts to be authoritative, HTYP is more like a huge (but organized and searchable) collection of working notes. Information on HTYP may be incorrect, but since HTYP is a wiki, anyone can fix any mistake they see (see this for a discussion of how this works).
- The Open Directory Project:
- HTYP does not require an approval process before you can start editing.
- HTYP's wiki format allows much more flexibility in the kinds of content which can be posted.
- HTYP encourages articles as well as links
- HTYP encourages uploading of relevant images and audio
- new 2006-02-10: yellowikis, apparently created in early 2005 (home page created September 2005), seems to be taking on part of HTYP's mission, though with a slightly different emphasis
History
HTYP has its origins in The Red House Yellow Pages (archive), a project I started on the web starting around 1997 (before Google, before dmoz.org) but had to abandon because it was taking too much time to maintain (people were starting to use it and wanted to add listings, and I started getting further and further behind – it was killed by the beginnings of its potential success).
Wiki software, however, makes it possible for anyone to add a listing, thus removing the single-admin bottleneck. HTYP was created in wiki format on the HypertWiki as a test in early 2005, and was moved to htyp.org beginning 2005-10-09 (John Lennon's birthday, by coincidence; this date was arrived at mainly because MediaWiki 1.5 had just become available) as it had became plain that the format could work, and would work better in its own framework rather than being mingled with the other information on the HypertWiki.
Related Projects
- Issuepedia: an encyclopedia of issues and related discussion