Westie Wiki: the moves of West Coast Swing, documented by the people dancing them
I’m thrilled to announce my newest project: westie.wiki, a community wiki for West Coast Swing moves. If you’ve ever come home from a workshop weekend with a notebook full of half-remembered pattern names, or argued with a friend about whether that thing is called a “basket whip” or a “wrapped whip,” this site is for you.
What it is
Westie Wiki is a catalog of West Coast Swing moves that anyone in the community can edit, Wikipedia-style. Every move gets a page with a description, difficulty, aliases (names collide constantly across scenes, and the wiki treats that as a feature, not a problem), variants, handholds, and links to related patterns: what to learn first, what it’s a variation of, and what it leads into. Every edit is stored as a numbered revision with full history and diffs, so nothing is ever lost.
One principle I care a lot about: the wiki is descriptive, not prescriptive. It records how the community actually dances and names things. It’s a learning aid, not a source of truth about WCS.
The best part: mapped dances
Here’s the feature I’m most excited about. You can register any YouTube video of a real dance, label the dancers and the event, and then mark it up move by move with timestamps. The result is a fully annotated dance: a timeline of every pattern, right next to the video.
This turns out to be a fantastic way to build the catalog. Instead of hunting for isolated demo clips, you map one great competition dance and get a dozen labeled examples at once. Every marked move becomes a clip on that move’s page, on each dancer’s page, and on the event’s page, automatically.
It’s also a fantastic way to study. As the video plays, the timeline highlights whichever move is happening right now. Click any move and the player jumps there. Set a start and end and you can loop a single pattern at full, half, or quarter speed, no account required. If you’ve ever dragged a YouTube scrubber back seventeen times trying to catch what a follower’s feet are doing, you know exactly why I built this.
Learning paths
There are also curricula: ordered paths through the moves with notes and hand-picked example videos for each step. Log in and you can check off moves as you learn them and track your progress. The “WCS Foundations” path covers the core patterns nearly every beginner class teaches.
Come contribute!
The wiki currently has dozens of moves, over a hundred labeled video clips, and dances from real events mapped move by move, and it’s just getting started. Anyone can browse; editing takes a free account. If you dance West Coast Swing, come add the moves your scene calls by different names, map your favorite Jack & Jill finals, or write the description you wish you’d had as a beginner.
Check it out at westie.wiki. I’d love to hear what you think, and even more, I’d love to see your edits in the Recent Changes feed.