New Community Features

Data quality has always been top-of-mind when building Wingit. Fortunately, the pilot community has been very generous with liberally sharing information: from thermal maps, over weather data and tracking data, to data sets of flying sites. Wingit has merely been a hub tying everything together. With respect to sites, we owe a special thanks to paragliding.earth, paragliding365.com, and DHV.de 🙏.

This approach has worked well but certainly wasn’t without challenges. Critical information could be scattered across panels from different sources. Updating stale data didn’t only require following a source’s processes but also Wingit to sync back any changes 🫣.

I’m happy to announce that going forward, Wingit will let you edit and add flying sites right from within the App. This feature is very dear to me and has been a fair while in the making. Notably, it did require shared ownership and adding user accounts. Until now, Wingit had never prompted for any credentials. Worry not, Wingit takes your privacy seriously and all prior features will continue to work as is without prior sign up. In any case, with this work finally out of the way, it will hopefully ease future community features :foreshaddowing:.

So how does it work?

First you have to sign up/in from the settings drawer. Once that’s done, edit buttons will magically appear on existing flying sites and when long-pressing the map.

For existing sites, you’ll get the option to either update an existing Wingit entry or “fork” a new Wingit entry from one of the other sources. New sites will send you straight to the edit form ✍️.

Ownership

Can anyone edit everything? In short, yes, at least for now. Behind the scenes everything is modeled as “append-only” operations, so “bad” or unintentional edits can be reverted. Deletions are only allowed within the first 48h by the person who created the site. Afterwards, deletion will require divine intervention but sites can still be marked as explicitly closed. I do expect that there will be a need for more local moderation as the data set matures. Modeling shared ownership is always a bit iffy, so if you have any questions or insights, just hit me up via [email protected].

You made it this far. If you enjoy using Wingit, consider donating to help cover some of the operational expenses.

Thanks so much,
Sebastian 👋