Vinismo is written by its readers -- Internet users like you -- and we need your help! Try our getting started guide to learn how.
The mission of Vinismo is this:
- Vinismo is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guide of all wines in the world.
If we were a big company and needed a commercial slogan, maybe that would be : tasting wines better, tasting better wines. Or something like this. You get the idea : this is a place for people who want to have great wine experiences.
Vinismo articles should be useful for at least the following purposes:
- For on-line use by wine enthusiasts, who need information on a particular wine while planning a dinner, or want to learn the specifics of wine regions, appellations, varietals, and other things to know when tasting a wine;
- For off-line use by wine enthusiasts sitting in a restaurant with a subset of Vinismo on their PDA, laptop, mobile phone, or digital camera.
- For individual article printouts, that is, for printing a wine description or a list of wines that share specific characteristics and putting it in your back pocket for when you need it -- or making a photocopy when someone else does;
- For ad-hoc wine guides, small fit-to-purpose wine books that cover a particular region or varietal;
- For inclusion in other wine books, giving up-to-date information for wine guide publishers.
There are probably hundreds of other uses for Vinismo articles; these are ones we try to keep in mind while authoring and editing pages.
edit Non-Goals
These are some specific non-goals; things people might think we want to do with Vinismo, but we don't:
- Create a wine essay anthology. Vinismo is not a wine magazine. Articles should be directed toward practical information about wines.
- Create a collection of personal wine reviews. Wine enthusiasts usually have interesting stories about their personal experiences with wine which, sadly, need to be put somewhere else on the Web. Many websites serve that very purpose.
- Provide a personal photo gallery service. Photographs and illustrations should be targeted towards illustrating wines and their regions, not toward showing friends funny pictures of you.
- Provide a personal homepage service. Each registered user on Vinismo has a User page; these should be used to support the development of the wine guide, and not as an All About Me and My Cat Web site. One or two photographs on your User page is reasonable; more than 5 is really pushing it.
- Create a wine chat board. There are plenty of Web-based and email discussion groups on the Internet, where people can talk about their experiences, ask questions, complain, make friends and joke around. Vinismo has Talk pages for each article, but these should be used to develop the article itself, and not as a "comments" area. Anyone can edit a Vinismo article; if you have useful information about a topic, put it in the article itself.
- Make an advertising brochure. Vinismo of course can include listings and information about wine-related businesses around the world. We would be thrilled to have representatives of these businesses keep those records up-to-date. However, blatant advertising is not welcome, and overcompetitive acts (like deleting information about rival businesses) is gravely deprecated.
- Produce a Yellow Pages of restaurants or wine stores for a region. Region pages should certainly include information for wine-related companies, but these should be kept at a useful number.
- Build a Web directory. Vinismo articles can and should have links to external resources about regions and appellations, wineries and other wine-oriented businesses, and other wine-related Web sites. However, it's not a goal to collect all links about any wine. External links should support and complement the content of articles; they're not a goal in and of themselves.
- Make a wine guide supplement. The Wiki technique we use for Vinismo makes it possible for us to include information that's not in other wine guides. This doesn't mean that we only include information not found in other guides. Vinismo aims to be a complete wine guide -- not just an additional resource on the side of traditional guides.
- Make an encyclopedia. Vinismo aims to help people know more about the wines they taste, not document everything there is to know about grapes and the history of winemaking. If you find yourself needing references and footnotes on Vinismo, whatever you're writing should probably go to Wikipedia instead.
- Promote abusive drinking. Vinismo doens't want you to get drunk every time you drink wine. Actually, the more wine people drink, the less they taste it. One drink or two a day seems a reasonable dosage. It may even improve your heart condition. At a greater dosage on a regular basis, wine ends up having the opposite effect : it ruins your health and can bring you all kinds of problems. Needless to say, don't drink and drive. But you knew that already. See Vinismo:Drink responsibly for details.
