Help:About

This section of Venipedia explains what separates Venipedia from other sources of information on Venice, Italy. This page also provides contributors with a reference to the types of information that Venipedia seeks to include as well as what types of information do not belong in Venipedia. To read about the history of Venipedia, visit the Venipedia Institutions page.

Venipedia's Purpose

Venipedia provides in-depth information about all aspects of Venice that could be relevant to scientists, academics, professionals, and public officials without duplicating generalized information that can easily be found on other websites such as Wikipedia. Venipedia seeks to promote scholarship, real world operations, and management for various institutions and therefore provides information under a Non-Commercial ShareAlike License.

Venipedia's Userbase

Venipedia is designed to be accessible to English-speakers around the world. The information that Venipedia provides is intended to aid academics, scientists, scholars, city planners, and other professionals who may have a need for primary data on Venice.

What Makes Venipedia Different

Venipedia provides in-depth primary data-driven information about the city of Venice. Whereas most online resources provide general information on popular topics, such as the Rialto bridge, Venipedia provides information on all aspects of Venice. Visit this [slide show] to see a visual example of the differences in the content that Venipedia contains as compared to the Italian and English versions of Wikipedia.

What Venipedia Is Not

Venipedia is not a generalized encyclopedia for Venice, a place to advertise Venetian businesses, or a duplicate of Wikipedia. Rather, Venipedia is a site to host specialized information about Venice that cannot be found elsewhere.

Why Venipedia?

Initially, Wikipedia seemed to be a reasonable medium to present data on Venice to the public, but after careful consideration the founders of Venipedia decided that uploading such a large amount of data to Wikipedia would be too time-consuming given the need to have articles approved by Wikipedia administrators. Such a reliance could have led to the said administrators impinging on the sovereignty of Venipedia contributors and stunting the growth and usability of data that Venipedia provides. Additionally, the information that Venipedia provides is much more specific and detailed than Wikipedia typically incorporates into its articles. These reasons led to the creation of Venipedia as an independent wiki site in 2007.

Venipedia's Organization

Venipedia utilizes a bottom-up organization of its pages to provide users with a more accessible and intuitive layout of articles and information. The three main types of pages that appear in Venipedia are the Typical Page, the Individual Page, and the Aggregate Page.

Typical Pages

Typical Pages describe a typical manifestation of a certain object. Typical Pages include specific information about the average object in a category and avoid general information about the category as a whole. For example, the Masonry Bridge page contains information about the anatomy and purpose of a typical masonry bridge in Venice, but does not contain general info about all of the masonry bridges in Venice. Note:In general Typical Pages are titled for the object they represent (in this case "Bridge") in the singular tense to signify that the article is the representation of a typical object of that type.

Individual Pages

Individual Pages are data-driven, and the most specific pages in Venipedia. They contain individual information about a single specific object in a category. For example, see the Ponte de la Feltrina article, which contains information specific to the the bridge named, "Ponte de la Feltrina." In the case of bridges, there are 433 Individual Pages- one for each bridge in Venice. Expand the navbox below to see the links to all of these pages.

Aggregate Pages

Aggregate Pages contain information about a group of objects as a whole. These pages contain statistical information about the group of objects in general and avoid discussing particular objects in the group. The Aggregate Page for Bridges, for example, shows statistics about the longest, oldest, and newest bridges as well as a map showing the locations of all 433 bridges in Venice.Note:Notice that for Aggregate Pages the title of the article is in the plural tense to signify that the page is an Aggregate Page.

Categories and Portals

Typical, Individual, and Aggregate pages are grouped into categories, which are groups of similar articles. Subjects that require Descriptive and Aggregate Pages are generally categories of their own. Categories allow quick navigation through similar content topics and through related Descriptive and Aggregate pages.

Categories are further grouped into Portals. Portals appear on the heading of the Main Page and are the most generalized groups of subjects in Venipedia. Portals make browsing through categories quick and easy, while providing information on the various types of articles that one can find about a large scale topics, such as Infrastructure, in Venipedia.

Venipedia's Content

As aforementioned, Venipedia seeks to provide data driven information specific to Venice. To that end, Venipedia users should seek to contribute information that is unique and/or not available elsewhere.

Desirable Content

Good content in Venipedia focuses on the specifics of the city of Venice. Such content can range from specific objects, such as Coats of Arms, to history about the city that cannot be found elsewhere. In general, articles on individual objects within the city are good content, provided they follow proper formatting. For more generalized articles, visit the following pages for examples of good content:

• For art, view the Street Altars page.
• For economy, view the Cargo page.
• For institutions, view the UNESCO page.
• For infrastructure, view the Bridges page.

Undesirable Content

In addition to avoiding general content that can easily be found in other websites, Venipedia seeks to spatially limit articles to the sestieri of Venice and the Lagoon. Therefore, information regarding the Common Wealth of Venice outside the city itself should not be included in Venipedia. Furthermore, information regarding popular culture does not belong on Venipedia. This rule applies to music, movies, and other such topics that do not directly deal with the city itself.

The Future of Venipedia: Growth and Development

Although Venipedia is currently an English based encyclopedia, that is not to say that in the future Venipedia will not cater to other languages as well. Rather, Venipedia seeks to grow in size, user base, and accessibility. As a whole, Venipedia is open to the idea of presenting data in multiple languages once such feats are possible. Venipedia also seeks to develop in such a way that data about Venice can be integrated from various sites and shared with the world through collaboration. If you are interested in helping to accomplish these goals, please visit our Become a Contributor page.