Wikivoyage:Business listings reliability Expedition

The Reliability Expedition is a Wikivoyage Expedition to find ways to improve the reliability of information on Wikivoyage.

Rationale

Content on Wikivoyage comes from a variety of sources, and it is not always clear in an article where information came from, whether it is up-to-date, or whether the party that added the information did so to share travel information or for promotional purposes. The goal of this expedition is to help develop some additional guidelines, policies, and methods for ensuring quality data on Wikivoyage and providing travelers with some information on how reliable data may be.

Goals

The reliability expedition has the following goals:

• To improve existing site documentation to make it easier to determine what is appropriate content.
• To improve communication with contributors to make it easier for them to add valuable content to Wikivoyage.
• To brainstorm and implement ways to convey a sense of reliability to end users for information being presented in Wikivoyage guides.

Documentation

The status quo

Currently documentation on how to add valuable content is spread amongst many sources and does not necessarily make it easy for new contributors to figure out how to add useful contributions, nor does it make it easy for editors to provide a single reference to send new users. Some of this documentation includes:

• Welcome documentation:
  • Project:Welcome, newcomers
  • Project:Welcome, business owners
  • Project:Welcome, tourism professionals
• Project:Don't tout

Improvements

TBD

Communication

Status quo

It can be head-splittingly difficult to get the attention of new users. Current methods that are used include:

• MediaWiki: namespace messaging such as the ever-so-subtle MediaWiki:Uploadtext.
• Article talk pages.
• User talk pages.
• Edit summaries.

Providing some consistency in how users are contacted and brainstorming improvements should make it easier to help new users make better contributions.

Documentation on this subject includes:

• Project:Welcome message
• Project:Tourist bureau Expedition

Improvements

TBD

Articles

Status quo

The goal of Wikivoyage is to develop useful travel guides. However, when an unscrupulous hotel chain adds descriptions of their properties that helpfully describe the establishments as "a traveler's dream, located next to all major attractions" Wikivoyage is doing a disservice to travelers by providing misinformation.

There are a number of tools and processes in place currently to help with reliability, including:

• Project:Article status - A higher status generally indicates better quality information, although not always.
• Project:Docents - Docents tend to watch over articles and can answer questions.
• Project:Wikivoyage Press - Articles that are used for Wikivoyage Press books tend to be frequently reviewed by the book editors.
• Template:Title-icons - Used to display icons for star status, could be used for other reliability-related communication.

Improvements

TBD

Action plan

TBD