Talk:Oman/Archive 2004-2016

uh, why is there all this India stuff in the Oman article? (WT-en) Majnoona 01:40, 13 Feb 2004 (EST)

Which one? Just borrowed the template because the headings looked different on the Oman Page (WT-en) Sridhar Pandurangiah 14:45, 13 Feb 2004 (IST)

All the links (North East South west), and the map and some other stuff are all India! Kinda confusing for georgaphically impaired... I can clean up. (WT-en) Majnoona 12:53, 13 Feb 2004 (EST)

Had Removed Them! (WT-en) Sridhar Pandurangiah 15:15, 14 Feb 2004 (IST)

Regions

Nine regions for Oman seems very excessive..... 9 regions and only 6 cities on the country page (!) :). There are probably orphaned cities and other destinations and I will try to find them. But nonetheless, 9 regions has to be too many. I have been to Oman briefly twice but definitely do not have enough knowledge to consolidate the regions. Help and suggestions please! --(WT-en) Burmesedays 04:50, 7 December 2009 (EST)

7 cities and 1 other destination plus 9 regions after a search. And slightly difficult to imagine where too many more cities are coming from. My knowledge is limited to knowing:

• The coastal area north of Muscat is green and fertile and very different. The Hajar Mountains inland from here are quite stunning.
• Muscat (a fine city) and the north is generally very different from Dhofar in the south.
• The Empty Quarter, is well, just that (and mostly in Saudi Arabia).
• Musandam is very isolated, small and surely does require its own region.

I suspect we ought be looking at 4 regions max. If we can reach a sensible solution for the regions, I pledge to draw a Wikivoyage style map of Oman.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 05:19, 7 December 2009 (EST)

This is a tough one and I have thought long and hard.

Oman has two exclaves - Musandam and the tiny Dibba (just visible as a dot on the UAE map). Neither are of much importance to travellers (although a certain Wikivoyager was once arrested at gunpoint in Musandam when he got lost - something about security measures in The Straits of Hormuz) and can probably safely be included in a slightly inappropriate region. I propose:

• Northern Oman (Muscat, Hajar Mountains and most of the current content plus the two exclaves). Could alternatively be called a more lovely name like Al Hajar Mountains and Muscat.
• Central Coastal Oman (from Sur south to the Zufar region, inland to the main central north/south highway).
• Zufar. The south as shown here] but with some going into the Empty Quarter. Very interesting region for the traveller.
• Empty Quarter (which already exists with no hierachical assignation) - sand and a passsing Bedouin every year or two.

An alternative would be to have the two exclaves as a separate 5th region called something appropriate.

Oman's a great country and should have a much higher profle with travellers. A bitch to regionalise though. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:50, 11 January 2010 (EST)

I first put out a request for input 5 weeks ago and nothing. Therefore I will push ahead with my proposal:

• Four regions, merge/empty/re-direct the existing 9 region articles, produce the map. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 21:47, 11 January 2010 (EST)

Done. Also working on the main article which is very thin for such an interesting country.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 06:04, 12 January 2010 (EST)

From the main article

I removed the following from the main article and do not know whwre to put it as neither Biladi Shuhoom nor Mokniyath seem to exist (Google search). If anyone knows the correct spelling or the villages which are being referred to, please let's get this info into the correct sub-article. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 07:45, 13 January 2010 (EST)

Some Villages

Biladi Shuhoom is a small village with only a few hundreds of people. There is a Juma mosque but Friday prayer is a new thing here as the mosque is of recent origin. Formerly, it was customary to have the noon-time prayer during Fridays as the long trip to the next village of Mokniyath was a difficult exercise. Even now the Zaid bin Al-Kathab senior secondary school, is the only building here showing off the green, red and white national flag. All government establishments have the privilege to carry the national flag.

Mokniyath is a little bigger village with one more flag-bearing building, a public clinic. But even there there is no post office or public telephone. For all these higher services, you have to travel another 100 km to Ibri which is the nearest town and the headquarters of the wall who is the district collector here. Ibri itself is 500 km. or so from Muscat hut it is only two hours by car to Dubai across the border.

Biiadi Shuhoom is a village without roads, telephones and other modern amenities. Electricity is there, but it is a recent development like the Friday prayer. During the annual mountains floods, the village is totally marooned from the outer world and essential food supply is provided by helicopter. The villagae Bedouins are engaged in wheat cultivation, sheep rearing and there are plenty of wheat farms. You need a four-wheel drive vehicle to reach there and you can drive across the mountains in an as-you-please manner. The sheikh provides water pumped from a wadi or mountain steam. Sending letters is a big task here as there is no letterbox to drop them. You have to entrust them with some Omanis going to the Ibri market. Incoming letters end up in the post box of the Ministry in Ibri and the principal brings them during his weekly trips. Some visitors carry their mobile telephones to the village but it is impossible to make or receive calls as the signals are blocked by the mountains surrounding the village.

I've identified the location of one of the villages, 'Mokniyath', most commonly spelled Maqniyat, in the Hajar Mountains. I'm not sure if 'Biladi Shuhoom' and 'Biiladi Shuhoom' are the same place (with a typo), but from the description they seem to be near Maqniyat, so I will copy all of these to the appropriate page. I don't believe any of these villages though merits an entire article, so I'm removing the (dead) links. StellarD (talk) 09:32, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Warning Box

User by the name of XTC joined wikivoyage just to add warning boxes on a bunch of Middle Eastern countries indiscriminately. Even Canada's travel advisory website, which is EXTREMELY alarmist to begin with, doesn't have a travel warning in place for Oman.

So I removed the box from this website. Just because a country is in the Middle East does not make it automatically unsafe to travel to. General tips in "Stay safe" should be sufficient, not a giant bright red warning box, which should be saved for ACTUAL unsafe places (I.e Iraq) (WT-en) Kayla 13:51, 2 March 2011 (EST)

Time formats

It would be nice to get some Oman guides to Star status. To achieve that status they need to have consistent and policy compliant formatting and language variety.

At the moment they have a mixture of 12 and 24 hour formats.

wv:times says: "Use one of these formats: 09:30–17:00 or 9:30AM–5PM. Do not use both 24- and 12-hour formats within one article. Choose between formats by following predominant local usage. Ask yourself which format visitors will see in timetables, on shop doors and in newspapers."

I presume the 24-hour format is the more common of the two? (I've only been in the north of Oman). --W. Frank^email_talk 17:53, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

I agree it would be great to get some Oman guides up to par. There are some gaping holes in some badly neglected regions like the Hajar Mountains, which I will start attacking soon.

Re: time format, I'm not sure which is more common, as I've seen both. I'll be visiting Salalah in the next two weeks, and will make a point to take note of that. StellarD (talk) 18:18, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

The 12-hour format does appear to be the standard format, used government offices, museums, and businesses. A look at any of the linked websites will confirm this. StellarD (talk) 08:25, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough. In the absence of any dissenting opinion, we can now harmonise on the (generally more long winded and less precise) 12 hour format for all Oman articles. --W. Frank^email_talk 16:18, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Freedom of panorama issue for Oman

Swept in from the pub

Hi, everyone. We have a problem that right now is affecting the Muscat article and its Destination of the month nomination, but is likely to affect any article about Oman that has photos of buildings. Please read this post in Commons to understand the problem. Commons cannot host images of buildings in Oman because Omani law does not allow such images. That policy makes sense for Commons because it is a repository of images. However, such a policy does not make sense for a travel guide, which is what Wikivoyage is. Instead, it's necessary for us to depict the attractions that are most important for a potential visitor to know about, and in Muscat, the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque and its splendid Svarovski crystal chandelier are prominent among such attractions. So for the service of travellers, if there is anyone who can locally upload any good (or, for now, even half-decent) photos of the exterior of the mosque and the interior, showing the dome and chandelier, that would be great! Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:46, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

I think we can upload the same photos here that I uploaded on Commons but with low resolution. You can see plenty of CC-licensed images of the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque here. --Saqib (talk) 13:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Btw, I've been told that FOP is not disallowed in Oman anymore. The Omani copyright law was later amended but on Commons, the changes are not made yet. I'm trying to get the English version of the amended law and will brought it up on Commons. --Saqib (talk) 14:16, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

That would solve a lot of problems. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:37, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

External link

An anonymous user added two links, one of which I reverted on sight and another one which I considered reverting but decided to take up on the talk page first: [1]. It looks like it is a link to another travel guide, and thus forbidden. But on the other hand, given that the country is mostly desert, is it so useful for travelers to see where it's good/safe to drive (it might be a time-consuming importing the information here and the material is probably copyrighted anyway) that we should keep the link? ϒpsilon (talk) 18:20, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

The link is to a well-respected UAE-based publisher which produces excellent regional guides. Their Oman off-road guide is in my opinion indispensable, and has already been listed in the Understand section. Their published collection of trekking routes, also invaluable, have been listed in the Hajar Mountains article, so I agree that the link should be deleted. –StellarD (talk) 19:41, 25 August 2016 (UTC)