User talk:Jukeboksi/Traveler routers

Rationale for this article

Of course I get why this kind of article could be thought helpful to travellers, but first of all, I've never heard the phrase "traveler router" before. But that's really a side point.

Check out the history in Wikipedia.. there was some fan of some tech company making article w:Journey Planner and w:Intermodal Journey Planner (yes, with the caps). Journey planner is what the travel agent(ure)s used to use in the 70s and 80s. Traveler router routes the traveler. Journey planner routes the travel agent only. --Jukeboksi (talk) 17:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

To me, this doesn't really seem like an article, or at least a Wikivoyage article. Instead, it's really just a list of links, essentially a big external links section. And Wikivoyage does not permit "External links" sections in articles.

User:Ikan Kekek: Now I've added all relevant information I have on the subject. Maybe it looks more like an article now. And the links.. the links are for the convenience of the consumer. Also I would like to note the source of this information is designed for maximum kindness towards the consumer hence the Wikipedia links and the external links. If the Wikipedia links are a problem we could change them to (mostly) red links in Wikivoyage but why not do that gradually as articles are written about the travel information services entities. --Jukeboksi (talk) 17:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Am I missing something? Is there a way this article could be fleshed out so that it's a real article, not just links, or is the list of links itself so useful that an exception should be made for it? Also, on a practical level, what criteria would we use to keep touters from adding listings that really aren't very useful to travelers? Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:01, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Your concern is valid. Automatic addition of spammy stuff is a problem on many crowdsourcing sites. I should imagine a system of where one is able to specify different classes of URL e.g. is_official_site, is_official_travel_and_tourism_site, is_3rd_party_site, is_spamster_site, is_scamster_site... and using tiny graphics in the links to inform the consumer. Something like that. --Jukeboksi (talk) 17:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, there are only three types of content on this page: a history and description of journey planners (which all seems too technical to be of much help to travelers) a long list of links to travel booking services and price comparison sites, and a long list of transit planner sites. The travel booking and price comparison sites are explicitly not allowed per our external links policy. Some of these transit planner sites are useful enough to link from Wikivoyage, but they should be linked from the cities/regions with the transit systems in question, where you would expect one to look for information about the local transit system; I don't see the point in having a giant list of every transit planner in the world. Given all that, I don't really see what the value of this page is. PerryPlanet (talk) 18:06, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

This is an interesting "problem" that has been presented. Personally, if I'm a traveler and I'm planning a trip, I might find these links incredibly useful. I didn't even know these services existed before the creation of the page. On the other hand, it's a very different topic from what I've seen Wikivoyage cover. Without well defined rules defining what is and is not permissible, this page could easily become bogged down with touting or become unfair. If the page is left, perhaps it should be protected. I almost feel like this is better suited as a tool of some kind, not an article. I would be a little disappointed if the consensus decides to remove, what I believe to be, this valuable information but I trust the judgment of those who've been here longer. DethDestroyerOfWords (talk) 19:03, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

No one here argues that travel planner sites aren't useful. The problem — as I see it, anyway — is one of workload and fairness. Historically, we've tried to avoid being curators of lists of third-party trip planning sites. It invites touting, it raises the question of what should be included and what shouldn't, which begets the question of why we allow the ones we do, which in turn could raise questions of potential conflicts of interest, etc, etc. Not that attitudes can't change as the community grows and matures, but the role of curating trip planning sites is something we've been very reluctant to take on. PerryPlanet (talk) 19:18, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

While I'm not excited about lists like this one that seem to always eventually turn into long, spammy lists, we've used travel topics in the past as a way to have a place to dump external links that we don't want in "normal" travel articles, so insofar as this travel topic is mainly just a list of links to travel routers I think that's an acceptable way to make travelers aware of these services while at the same time keeping them out of "normal" articles. I agree that lists like this one are mostly impossible to curate, but also understand that some people want this sort of information. For the reasoning why these types of links are typically discouraged, WV:XL spells out the reasons why we generally don't want to have to subjectively examine links to determine "value", and why the current policy on linking to these sorts of services from standard articles is discouraged. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:21, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

y0 hear me out piippöl! IMO (in my opinion, not International Maritime Organization, an interesting org also in travelling context btw when it comes to ocean liner travel as IMO numbers are permanent per vessel whereas the names of vessels come and go as the marketing dept of the current owner sees fit) the article is only to serve as a central repository of coverage areas of various traveler routers i.e. a list article for keeping track of the overall picture and a single mention in the location served will suffice to make travelling consumers adequately informed of the excellent traveller routers there are out there. Jukeboksi (talk) 19:44, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

This article could be useful if it said how to make the best use of these travel planners. For instance, some planners will happily direct you to a point 200 yards from your destination which is normally fine, but not if there is a river in the way with no bridge! I would also suggest that commercial sites (rather than government / transport authority ones) are only listed when the info is not available from non-commercial ones. AlasdairW (talk) 20:47, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Since links to this have been popping up all over my watchlist, my interest has piqued. It seems the article as it stands does not serve any purpose except to shunt travellers from destination articles, to here, and then straight off Wikivoyage as quickly as possible to another website. There is a need for links to select relevant journey planners on destination articles (I myself have added listings for Traveline from UK-related articles), but why is there a need for a long list of very localised and possibly unreliable journey planner links for the whole world all on one page? Like Ikan Kekek, I have never heard of the term "traveler router", and nor has anyone else on the internet. Suffice to say it's either not a common English term, or it doesn't exist at all. Regards, --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 22:25, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

VfD discussion

Traveler routers

• Delete. A combination of Wikipedia-like encyclopedic content and excessive (red) off-topic internal links (we're going to have an article on timetables?), plus a very long list of links that violates external links#what not to link to, WV:Avoid long lists, WV:Links to Wikipedia. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:22, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

• Delete. I suppose this topic could conceivably be within our scope, but certainly not in anything like its present format. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:59, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
• Delete. More a WIkipedia article. But maybe worth first going through the list of links and see if any would be useful on specific destination pages. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:24, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
• Not sure. The reality is that organising travel these days a good airline router/comparison site is the first place you go to. Especially for independent travellers, that are the kind we are catering too. But obviously this listy article would isn't right in its present form. --Inas (talk) 06:45, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Can you think of a way to deal with this topic without making a link farm or opening the article up to touters? It seems to me, the place to discuss airline comparison sites would be in the relevant article in the Flying series, as part of the preparation for air travel. I'm having trouble imagining a good Wikivoyage article about airline comparison sites themselves, but I'd love your thoughts on how we could make one. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:04, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

• Delete. There is no Wikipedia article on "traveler routers", because the term doesn't exist. Paraphrasing what I wrote on the talk page, the Wikivoyage article doesn't seem to serve any purpose except to shunt readers straight off WV as quickly as possible to another website. External links to journey / trip planners (including those which may be listed on the traveler router article but are not known about on the relevant destination pages - definitely worth checking) should be put into existing destination articles. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:56, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
• Strong keep No more WV:Links to Wikipedia. WV:Avoid long lists not relevant since this is a list for keeping track of coverage with the main yield to consumer when each service is written as a {{listing}} in the article on entity the service covers. Cursor is currently in France and following countries and their municipalities have not yet been added an item: France, Israel, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.

To the terminology question: looking at Wikipedia one can derive that journey planner is originally a travel agentures tool and they are often geared at making money for the agenture and the service providers they have contracts with. In the early 2000s few successful implementations for local traffic, London and Helsinki chose to use term journey planner even though it was a loaded word. Some fanboys then proceeded to write a bunch of statements of no particular informational value in w:Journey Planner and w:Intermodal Journey Planner (yes, with the caps). In new areas of service the language is new, and evolving. Doesn't w:public transport route planner sound a tad bit clunky and is not expecting the eventual concert of traveler routers, navigation apps and even car navigators (IoT) negotiating with the traveler routers to achieve traveler goals.

Only negative I see coming for this is the manual work of keeping the list and the list items in sync manually. Compared to the amount of trouble I went to compile and sort this list in its entirety is not much trouble and I can do it if deletionists just stop trying to stop me.

To be asking the right questions we should have a semantic database instead of lists of arbitrary length. In this kind of arrangement the database could contain for example information and URL for all the available language versions. Traveler routers are really useful to the traveler and if you delete this you are doing the traveling consumer a big disservice and not really solving or improving anything in Wikivoayge. Except maybe blind adherence to rules and regulations. Jukeboksi (talk) 11:23, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

My friend, Votes for deletion is about enforcing rules, not changing them. If you want to change the rules, you should discuss that in policy pages - notably including Wikivoyage talk:External links - but Vfd is not a policy page. I'm totally fine with any of this content being in your userspace, but your line of argumentation about "deletionists" and trying to radically change rules after creating several articles that, at least in their current forms, are radically in violation of the current consensus of what a Wikivoyage article should look like - and continuing to create more such articles and add more links to the ones you were working on when you were warned about this - is not a good way to try to persuade anyone. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:26, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

• Delete. Someone in the discussion page for this article made the good point that it could be useful if it explained how to make the best use of travel planners, but to create that and bring this article in line with existing policy would require gutting the existing article of all content and essentially building a new article from scratch (and since "traveler router" appears to be a term the author has created, judging from the explanation above, there isn't even really a strong argument to be made for redirecting the existing article to something else). PerryPlanet (talk) 16:12, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
• Comment I don't have strong opinions about keeping or deleting these three articles, but if there is a consensus to delete them I'd instead suggest a move to userspace (example: User:Jukeboksi/Traveler routers). That would allow further development without the external link concerns raised for a mainspace article. User:Jukeboksi is obviously enthusiastic about these subjects, so it would be a shame to delete something that might otherwise be developed into something useful. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:51, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

This seemed a reasonable meet-you-half-way solution so I moved the list parts to User:Jukeboksi/lists/Traveler routers and will go through it and add each service to the article on the area served if not already there. Jukeboksi (talk) 16:51, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for working to find a compromise. However, I'm not enthusiastic about the proposal to "go through it and add each service to the article on the area served if not already there" since it isn't clear that these travel router links should be included in Wikivoyage at all per WV:XL#What not to link to. There are likely to be dozens or even hundreds of these services available in a country like the USA, so including such links in that article would not be appropriate for the reasons outlined in the external links policy (basically: primary links only, since collaboratively determining whether a link merits inclusion isn't something Wikivoyage wants to spend time debating). -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:03, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

User:Ryan: There aren't many in USA since Googel Transit has taken nearly all the turf. Jukeboksi (talk) 14:59, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete per arguments raised above. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:00, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
• Comment This could be worth keeping if it said how to use these journey planers and gave common pitfalls to avoid. Whilst such advice is probably obvious to most regular travellers, I think that some readers could find it useful. I recently read of a couple who had booked a flight online from Birmingham to Las Vegas - it was only when they tried to check in at the airport in Birmingham (England) did they discover that the flight was leaving from Birmingham (Alabama). AlasdairW (talk) 23:37, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
• Outcome: Userfied to User:Jukeboksi/Traveler routers. Powers ^(talk) 00:37, 26 May 2016 (UTC)