Wikivoyage:Quick contribution guide
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This page in a nutshell: This guide provides suggestions for making your first contribution to this wiki. In general it is best to start out by adding or updating a listing for your favorite attraction, restaurant, or bar rather than trying to create a new article or make formatting changes to an existing article. |
You can make a valuable contribution to Wikivoyage in just five minutes. However, before you start, be aware that the Wikivoyage copyleft allows your contributions to be used elsewhere, edited by others, and even copied or sold as long as you are given proper attribution. Please contribute!
- What to add. Choose any attraction, park, view, bar, pub or restaurant that you are enthusiastic about and would like to share information about. It should be somewhere you know and have visited, but it doesn't matter if you have been there while travelling, or if it is in your local area. You don't have to be an expert. Your experience and perspective is valuable to others like you.
- How to describe it. Decide what type of person would like to visit, and what are the features that would make them want to visit. Everybody has different interests, from birdwatching to adventure sports, from quiet country pub to the latest urban beats. Help travellers find what they like. If you like it, what are your interests that make you like it? If you know the best way to get there, or the best time to experience it, add that too. Don't use I, me, us, or we in the description. Don't hesitate to use you, though, when addressing the reader.
- Find the right article. Wikivoyage articles are named after the geographical location. Select the best article based on where the attraction is. If it is outside of a town, you might have to place it where travellers would normally stay when visiting it.
- Find the right section. See for sights. Do for activities. Drink for nightlife, pubs and bars, Eat for restaurants, cafes, and fast food. Learn more in Where you can stick it and standard article sections guide.
- Add your entry. If you aren't familiar with editing a wiki, you can just click "add listing" next to the appropriate section heading to add a new entry, or "edit" next to an existing listing to edit that entry. You will then see a dialog box with fields like "name", "address" and "content" for your new entry. Just fill out the name, hours, description, etc and then click "Submit" to save your changes.
- All done. That's it for now. Your information is now in the guide for all to see, in less than five minutes.
Avoid
editIf you only have five minutes try to avoid:
- Changing section headings – even if you don't like them. Wikivoyage uses a standard template for each article. You are welcome to suggest changes, but count on spending more than five minutes convincing us to change them.
- Creating a new article. If you only have five minutes, use it wisely by adding content and not creating new articles – it's because our regional structure can take a little more than five minutes to come to terms with. So just find the closest or best fit, and add your content there.
- Writing about culture. Wikivoyage articles often have Respect or Understand sections, which attract extensive contributions on culture. However, your five minutes is best spent adding practical advice and suggestions, and letting the traveller discover the culture for themselves when they get there.
- Writing about things you don't like. Don't waste your five minutes on Wikivoyage telling travellers about places they don't want to go; sharing your insight into somewhere travellers would want to go is infinitely more valuable!
- Encyclopedic or promotional language. Writing that something is fantastic or the best can be meaningless to a reader who may have different interests to you. Remember to think of why you like something and write it in the normal words you would use. Don't adopt the tone of a tourism board, or a neutral point of view just because you are writing in a guide. Your natural conversational tone and your genuine interest in what you are describing is what we are hoping to capture!
Moving forward
editIf you want to get more involved, or learn more about Wikivoyage you could start by reading the manual of style, and the help files which will give you an in-depth description, or by looking at some of our star articles.