About:The Hippo Roller Challenge

Introduction

The Hippo Roller Challenge is a wiki travel guide challenge designed to raise funds to buy hippo rollers for rural impoverished communities with limited access to water.

What is a Hippo Roller?

The hippo roller is a large drum that can hold 90 litres (24 gallons) of water and can be pushed along the ground, making it much easier to transport clean drinking water. It's a simple technology that has the capacity to make a huge difference in places where water is scarce.

For more information about hippo rollers, see the official website.

Milestones

The way this challenge works is very simple: The more people contribute to our wiki travel guide, the more hippo rollers we will donate. There are six milestones along the way, and whenever we reach a milestone, we'll donate a designated number of hippo rollers. Here's how it breaks down:

• When we reach 15 million characters in the guide, we will donate 1 hippo roller
• When we reach 16 million characters, we will donate 2 hippo rollers
• When we reach 17 million characters, we will donate 4 hippo rollers
• When we reach 18 million characters, we will donate 8 hippo rollers
• When we reach 19 million characters, we will donate 16 hippo rollers
• When we reach 20 million characters, we will donate 32 hippo rollers.

The challenge will run from November 2 to February 28 March 31 (we've extended the challenge after some gentle arm-twisting from members:)). If we've reach 20 million characters in the wiki travel guide, we will have donated 63 hippo rollers! At US$ 105 each, that's a total donation of US$ 6615! You can check the current number of characters in the guide on the statistics page.

Getting Started

So you want to get involved, right? If you're not sure how to get started, here are a few good starting points:

• Write about your hometown or nearest tourist attraction.
• Write about the last place you went to on holidays.
• Start an article about one of the popular places that don't have an article yet
• Write about the events and festivals in your country or city
• Write an article about family-friendly activities in your city
• Write a guide to eating out in your hometown
• Put together a language phrasebook
• Or check out some of our other ongoing guide projects

If you've never written for the wiki travel guide before, here are some great guides to help you get started:

• Getting started in the wiki
• Wiki coding for dummies