User:SHB2000/Wikivoyage is not an encyclopedia

Wikivoyage is a travel guide that anyone can edit. While Wikivoyage is the sister site of Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia, that doesn't mean Wikivoyage is an encyclopedia (UK spelling: encyclopaedia). By reading that first sentence alone, you can certainly tell that the last bit (encyclopedia [UK spelling: encyclopaedia]) doesn't belong in a travel guide. Nevertheless, don't worry too much about keeping Wikivoyage different from an encyclopedia. If anything, plunge forward, and someone else may eventually remove the excessive encyclopedic content.

Ways of keeping Wikivoyage away from being an encyclopedic travel guide

• Listings can certainly have some historical info in them, but it shouldn't be too long.
• No country gets the exemption of getting to have an overly long history section on that country list. The "Understand" section of a country article should just have some basic quick history about that country. A good example can be seen at Papua New Guinea or Canada.
• Articles should focus on travel content. A page (a destination, a topic or an itinerary, etc.) with no travel info and just historical sections doesn't benefit the traveller in any practical way, and therefore isn't truly a travel article.
• Phrasebooks of dead languages like Latin or some creole languages such as Singlish, Manglish or Tinglish that it would be insulting for travellers to speak don't serve the traveller. There could be travel topics about them, to help travellers understand what others are saying, but not phrasebooks that seek to teach them to speak the local languages.
• Avoid adding large bits of unimportant history that's not relevant to the traveller. However, this is a somewhat subjective one. For example, if a building burned down and eventually reopened, that's something many travellers would want to know. The same applies to serious historical events such as the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre. Although a traveller can theoretically go to a destination and not need to know anything about its previous history, knowing it could help you in that it informs you to be sensitive and tread carefully on certain topics.

What does "keeping Wikivoyage away from an encyclopedia" not mean

• It does not mean that travel topics are prohibited. In fact, travel topics bring colour to Wikivoyage. If you are more interested in writing good travel topic articles than working on destination articles, by all means do so. The same goes with itineraries and phrasebooks.
• It does not mean that pages should not have history sections in them. They're certainly welcome; they just shouldn't be too long.
• Laying out basic knowledge about major historical events can be important to help travellers have context for what they are seeing and experiencing at a destination. (By contrast, see the caution above about adding "Large bits of unimportant history.")
• Listing random bits of trivia in articles is something to do with caution. Add such content only when it makes a Wikivoyage article livelier to read, and then consider using an infobox, similar to what's seen in Turku riverside walk.
• Listing things that a traveller should ideally avoid in a certain place is great, as long as it's not advice from Captain Obvious. Include all information that travellers need to know.

Travel topics

The core of travel topic articles, like all Wikivoyage articles, is serving travellers. Travel topics filled with factual descriptions but lacking travel advice are likely to be deleted. Examples include the former articles about Yoga or Cycling in France.

Districts

As Wikivoyage is not an encyclopedia, region boundaries don’t exactly have to follow official boundaries. On the other hand, sometimes using official boundaries is quite beneficial, such as if you want to get mapshapes on the map as OpenStreetMap only uses official boundaries, unless you want to do the tedious job of creating a mapmask.

Examples of overly encyclopedic regionalisation:

• Montérégie as at June 13, 2022