Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2014

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Happy New Year

Hello fellow Wikivoyagers, Happy New Year 2014! --Danapit (talk) 13:44, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Dana. Wishing you a very happy and prosperous new year and warm greetings to everyone from cold Karachi. --Saqib (talk) 14:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As you know Finnish I shall say Kiitoksia ja hyvää uutta vuotta sinullekin, Danapit! And happy new year to everyone from a surprisingly warm Helsinki (+5°C and rain, usually we have negative degrees centigrade and snow at the new year). Thanks for the fireworks, Saqib! Ps. At WP's "Did you know" I ran into the article about Scottish new year's traditions and the etymology of the name of the celebration... ϒpsilon (talk) 16:53, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And New Year's is also a day to plan/dream about things you're going to do the next year. Doesn't the New Year's celebrations from around the world with fireworks lighting up world famous landmarks (just think about Sydney's amazing fireworks) just make you wanna go to those places :)? ϒpsilon (talk) 19:41, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Right Ypsi. Karachi recently started to attract people from other parts of the country on NYE due to its great NYE celebration at Port Grand and Dubai attracts people from many Gulf countries on NYE for great NYE celebration. --Saqib (talk) 20:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Happy new year everyone! 2013 was really the first year of the new WV community and it think it bodes well for what can be achieved in 2014. Andrewssi2 (talk) 19:37, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year everyone! Here's to a fantastic 2014! :) --Nick ^talk 02:50, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Very much success and health in 1914. --RolandUnger (talk) 08:38, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year from Japan! In 2014 let's all contribute a lot of content, that's really what makes Wikivoyage better in the end :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year all! Kaldari (talk) 08:03, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Fatal exception of type MWException

When I'm trying to save articles, reload pages and click edit I've been getting stuff like this for the last couple of minutes: [babeee3a] 2014-01-02 18:16:08: Fatal exception of type MWException. Are the servers suffering from a hangover after partying too hard on New Year's or what? :) (let's see if I can post this at all) ϒpsilon (talk) 18:20, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've filed Bugzilla: 59221. See also w:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Commons down. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:33, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Should be mostly back now. --Rs chen 7754 19:45, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Few Wikimedia projects projects were broken for about 1 hour and 45 minutes due to localization cache update issues but its fixed now. --Saqib (talk) 19:47, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Discover

The most recent entry on the "Discover" section of the Main Page reads: "Nicosia is the world's last divided capital." Given the status of Jerusalem and our policy of political neutrality, I think we should stay away from contentious statements like that.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:15, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You're right. --118.93.244.91 22:37, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree as well. Pashley (talk) 23:04, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Matter of fact, our Israel article says Jerusalem's status is not recognized by the United Nations. I have nevertheless changed the sentence in Discover now - as well as in the article itself. ϒpsilon (talk) 05:27, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, neither does the UN recognize the division of Cyprus, the Turkish occupation of the northern part of the island, or the division of Nicosia between two nations. The Turkish Cypriot nation is, to my knowledge, recognized by only one other country in the world - Turkey. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:29, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In my estimation, the status of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and the status of Palestine and Northern Cyprus as independent nations are all contentious political issues that, per policy, we should avoid taking sides on. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:20, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We do not take sides in how things should be, but we do recognize conditions as they are. Jerusalem is capital of Israel and Nicosia is divided between Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus. Those are facts. If the facts change, we will edit our articles accordingly. I'd like to hear more from you about what you mean in regard to the status of Palestine. Palestine is recognized as an independent country by most of the world, but not by Israel, and it does not control a large portion of the territory it claims. How do you suggest Palestine be described in this guide, for the benefit of travelers? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:23, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Ikan: Certainly there's a de facto reality in any geopolitical scenario that may not match up with the opinions some people may have about how things should be. And certainly sometimes it's necessary to broach the subject of sensitive political disputes for the benefit of travellers, which we usually do with disclaimerboxes that include text emphasizing that nothing in the article should be construed as a statement for or against either side. We do a fine job of that in our article on Palestine (and, for that matter, on Northern Cyprus) so, to answer your question, I have no problem with how they're handled here.

My original post was intended only to say that, unless absolutely necessary, it would be best for us to avoid bringing these things up at all - and needless to say, I don't think that a randomly selected blurb from a randomly selected article on the "Discover" feature constitutes "absolute necessity". Naturally, Wikivoyage does not want to offend anyone on any side of any political argument if we can help it, and while useful, disclaimerboxes aren't a foolproof method of avoiding controversy. And my subsequent comment that you address immediately above was intended as a response to Ypsilon, that just because the UN denies that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel does not mean the point is moot. Rather, the question of what is the "rightful" capital of Israel is itself a contentious political issue, and another reason why the choice of blurb for Nicosia was less than ideal. Again, my opinion is that the parameters within which it's appropriate even to broach the subject should be as limited as possible.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:15, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We are basically in agreement, though the Israel article needs some editing, now that the West Bank has been removed from it. One issue, though, is whether to rename the Palestinian territories article to Palestine. I would welcome the participation of anyone in the discussion on that topic at Talk:Palestinian territories. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:26, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For that matter, can we rename Northwest Territories to "Bob"? K7L (talk) 16:02, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that's just silly. :-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:52, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikivoyage's Top 10 Countries for 2014" ?

Some guides are launching such pages on the web in a bid to attract clicks surfing on the New-Year event. Should we do that to? If yes, we have to be fast or keep it for 2015. I am sure not sure what the criteria should be for "top" destinations. Maybe just our 10 best articles? Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:38, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm thinking of having a list which display the most popular articles. An example is here. There're few MW extensions for this purpose but would this benefit us? --Saqib (talk) 13:52, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The latter proposal is infinitely better than the former for a myriad of reasons. I support having "Most popular articles" (of the past hour or day) displayed somewhere prominently. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:53, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To get this extension installed on this wiki, we need some local support. Can we've some please? --Saqib (talk) 15:14, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a cool idea. Does this Wikinews extension count the viewers just once or does it count how many times the page is loaded? If someone is working on an article and frequently saves it, the article will get a high view count even if there's just a one person "viewing" it, especially if the list is about the most popular articles of the last hour. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:33, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with PrinceGloria here. As a WMF site, we're first and foremost a trusted source of accurate, unbiased information. There are subtle but important differences between our goals and those of a Lonely Planet or a National Geographic Traveller or what-have-you. Plus, our own policy forbids touting and overly promotional-sounding language, so we have to walk a very fine line when it comes to stuff like this. Providing resources to readers regarding which are our most popular articles would likely fit into those parameters, so long as we do it in a way that avoids the appearance of "marketing" those destinations to our readers (that probably precludes any overly prominent links on the Main Page); anything beyond that seems questionable. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If that rationale would really be followed so strictly, how could we have a DotM? It's basically the same thing, right? We highlight articles. Sure, for the moment we rather highlight based on our guide quality than on the destinations, but that's just because we don't have a huge number of excellent guides yet. A reader doesn't see that difference. For me, inspirational stuff is exactly what I miss at WV, as a traveller. I love our Thailand guides, for example, and its destination coverage beats that of LP, in my recent experience. Yet, I would buy a LP again, for their "picks" and "highlights" and suggested itineraries, which I always use to build my own travels around. (Okay, and their English maps instead of Thai ones, but that's a different story ;-)). Despite all the time I spend on this website, I still browse to those others and buy those NG travel magazines to be blown away by stories and make up a wishlist. If we would use "most popular", we'd end up with the standard picks and articles one of us has recently been working on constantly, instead of new discoveries or hidden treasures. I think we can win it in the wordings, though. "Top destinations" is a tricky term, I can see that. But I don't think highlighting things necessarily compromises our non-touting policy or strive for accurate information, if we're clear and clever in choosing the words. JuliasTravels (talk) 16:28, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Good point Julia and I guess I'm very much inclined to drop this idea now. --Saqib (talk) 16:33, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We do have stuff in the 'F' column of the table at Wikivoyage:World cities/Large that indicates the most popular destinations. It is objectively sourced, taken from a Forbes article based on a report from Mastercard. Could we find ways to improve that (are there other sources?) and/or to make it more prominently available, perhaps as a travel topic? Pashley (talk) 18:56, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage - The Difficult Second Year

I think this project is great, I really do. It hosts a wealth of fantastic information and is populated by a community of kind, highly motivated editors.

That being said, however, my liking for Wikivoyage does mean that I sometimes feel that it's necessary to highlight difficulties that the site's going through.

At present, it feels just a little like the site is stagnating; that we've lost some of the verve and vigour that shone from Wikivoyage when it launched on WMF servers almost a year ago. More than ever, we seem keener and keener to argue at length about every issue, whilst 'consensus' continues to elude us. Over the past few months many discussions on the site have degenerated to the point of personal attacks, whilst we seem less inclined than ever to plunge forward and many people who do so are admonished for following the project's mantra.

For these reasons (and others) we seem, if anything, to be losing editors - certainly not what Wikivoyage needs. Indeed, what we really need to do is make a concerted advertising effort, bringing in contributors both from other WMF projects and beyond. Whether they wish simply to improve the article on their home town or fling themselves into the discussions that proliferate behind-the-scenes, we should be welcoming (and dragging) them in with open arms (closed ones if we're dragging).

When I looked back at this discussion from last August, it made me quite sad to see that lots of people's excellent ideas and important priorities have simply passed us by (I believe Ryan's list of policy priorities is particularly important). It would be great to recapture some of that optimism and put it back into improving the site.

What then can we do? Personally, I would suggest two things that I feel need to be done as a matter of urgency:

As difficult and unpleasant as it may be, I really feel that we need to sort out our understanding of consensus. At present, too many comparatively minor issues become unending battles, distracting us from the larger issues facing this site.
Get more editors. This is far harder to achieve than it is to type, but quite simply, we need more people to work on the site in every way. There are many varied methods we could go about trying to do this: use our social media presence to greater effect; advertise on other WMF sites; target tourism and travel groups and forums around the web; engage with the press; launch some sort of large-scale campaign (perhaps on Reddit?). Whatever we do, we need to do it soon: at present there aren't enough of us to really look at more than a couple of issues at a time, so new ideas (whether acclaimed or condemned) simply fall by the wayside and large swathes of our articles are untouched for years.

This is not one of the doom-laden prophecies that has been posted in the pub in the past - I still believe that Wikivoyage has a very bright future; it just needs a nudge in the right direction. By no means am I saying that nothing has been accomplished here, but simply that more progress is needed to keep the site functioning as it should. With that in mind perhaps we could, at some point, have a large Wikivoyage 'AGM' at some point (maybe on IRC or similar)?

I'm sorry that this is a bit of a negative post, but I write with confidence that Wikivoyage and its community will grow and prosper.

If we're lucky, maybe one day I'll stop talking about My Voyage. :) --Nick ^talk 00:03, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your very thoughtful (and thought provoking) commentary, Nick, it's much appreciated! --118.93.235.201 02:52, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever my pessimism about Wikivoyage's future comes creeping back, I consider our competition, Wikitravel, a site that is increasingly useless to travellers. In a short time, WT will be nothing more than a mishmash of touting, unreverted vandalism, and hopelessly outdated information from before the fork. Meanwhile, we have a small but active community that's actively at work improving our product - true, there may not be enough hands on deck to do enough work in that regard, but our counterparts aren't even treading water. Given all that, any advantage WT may currently have in terms of site traffic, I see as being quite temporary.

This is not to say that the issues WV faces now should be ignored or downplayed, but looking at the big picture does tend to put things into perspective a bit.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:28, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that Wikitravel still gets ten times the number of eyeballs each day is really the Elephant in the room and no distractions about sockpuppets or weird Australian IP editors should ever divert us from our primary task right now: search engine optimisation and PR! --118.93.244.91 22:41, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

http://wikitravel.org/en/Special:RecentChanges

Wish for wt to disappear in one hand, and poop in the other, and see which one fills up first.

Talking about wt as "competition" is so tired. It's been a year. We're here, they're there, and they aren't going anywhere. Like it or not, they get more edits than we do. They have tons more visitors. The site is curated by a staff of admins and they do a good job of manually sifting spam.

Who cares? I'm not here to try SEO tricks that have never proven effective (and frankly sound very 90s). I'm here to write a travel guide. If we all focused on this, we'd all be better off. Nyadgy (talk) 22:56, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder how seriously your comments should be taken given that you have a grand total of three user contributions, two of which are the creation of your user page and of your user talk page. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:02, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Which ones would you prefer to leave out? The links to stats pages? Find factual fault or quit the ad hominem attacks. Nyadgy (talk) 23:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's rather sad that we cannot indefinitely block accounts created like this just to troll. --Rs chen 7754 18:27, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia indefbans vandalism-only accounts. Trolling is a form of vandalism, or close enough, anyway. If that's not a part of Wikivoyage's policy, it ought to be. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:53, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Trolling is not vandalism. Just ignore trolls. They want you to respond. Don't play their game. Nurg (talk) 00:25, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Our primary purpose is to write a travel guide. SEO is an important task, as is differentiating our guide from whatever else is out there, but it will never nominally be our primary task. We need to fill gaps in our existing geographic coverage and update our content to differentiate ourselves from the seemingly infinite quantity of outdated data on the web. Once a page reaches 'usable' status, then one can start looking to propose a sibling project or external site link to our content. K7L (talk) 17:01, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've started a discussion that addresses Nick's first point about consensus at Wikivoyage talk:Consensus#Wikivoyage:Consensus/Draft. Feedback would be appreciated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:28, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage Graphic from Oxford University

The Oxford Internet Institute (part of the university) has produced this lovely graphic which shows the spread of articles by language version. 'This graphic depicts the geographic focus of four major languages of the Wikivoyage project; one of the world's most popular crowd-sourced travel guides'. If you scroll down on the above link, the creators also present their findings about how different areas are represented by the project. --Nick ^talk 21:50, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Nick: Regarding the last thing you mentioned, I seem to recall a proposal a while back to improve en:'s coverage of certain geographic areas by translating content from more comprehensive articles in other language versions. This should definitely be a big help in assessing what we have to work with. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:08, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On a completely different topic, I'm astounded that they don't consider fr: to be one of our "four major languages". It's certainly larger than es:. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:11, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They did not take the four biggest languages, but the biggest two, and Italian because it is "geographically concentrated" i.e. most native speakers live in Italy and Spanish because it is "dispersed" - spoken in Spain and South America. They were interested whether people were writing about their home town or somewhere that was in a country that spoke a foreign language. AlasdairW (talk) 23:31, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Nick - very enlightening! I do find it counter-intuitive that the German language version should have both relatively and absolutely better coverage of the "Middle East and North Africa"... --118.93nzp (talk) 03:09, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And this is why the English Wikivoyage too would benefit from putting POIs in WikiData :-) We would clearly benefit hugely for Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Turkey, Spain, Egypt, but also for all other (maintaining listing details in several languages means some duplicated effort). Nicolas1981 (talk) 15:43, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a list of articles that exist in another language, but don't exist in English? In case there is none, would many people here be interested in such a list and translate from languages they understand? Nicolas1981 (talk) 15:43, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would be interested in lists of French and German articles that don't exist in English, and also a list of articles that are bigger in other languages. I have already used a German article to improve one English article, discussed above.

I know that there is a map with (almost) all the articles in English shown - does this exist for other languages? If such maps exist it would be useful to link them from the main page. AlasdairW (talk) 21:17, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC that OSM slippy map was created by WV.de and does exist in other languages; just replace 'en' with 'fr' or 'de' or whatever in the URL. K7L (talk) 21:33, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A map of articles that exist in X but not in Y would probably be the most useful. Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:05, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bot transforming articles from German Wikivoyage?

I just translated Wiedensahl from German, doing nothing else than what a bot could possibly perform.

The result is small (don't expect too much for a 1031-inhabitants village), but I think it is a good start, and definitely better than nothing.

What do you think? Is it worth transforming like this, or worthless? Nicolas1981 (talk) 17:11, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This particular article had no banner nor pics. Banner would of course be included, and pics can be included as well, with no caption. A problem is with POI names. Often the POI name would need to be translated, for instance "Museum im alten Pfarrhaus". I think that the bot should only translate for instance 10 articles, wait until these 10 articles have been polished by a human, then generate another 10, etc. Nicolas1981 (talk) 17:21, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I presume that "Hauptstrasse" is ",rue Principale" is "Main Street" is "High Street". If the "translations" are from text in the local language for a specific destination, and if they use a Western Euro character set, I suppose it's OK to leave them as-is initially - but we should probably avoid taking a French-language article about Germany (for instance) as "1, rue Hauptstrasse, Une ville allemande" dumped into en: is a little too non-English, non-German. K7L (talk) 17:56, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Such a bot could be useful. However, we would still need someone to translate anything that is actually not in English (descriptions, POI names, the whole of the understand and stay safe sections and so on). Should we have the bot bring over that content too and have lots of non-English text in the guides or have the person who comes to polish the article to locate the right listing in German, copy and translate the text?

BTW are they really writing stuff like "rue Hauptstrasse" (Street Main Street) in French? What use is there to write an extra "Street" or "Rue" or whatever after or before an address that is in Latin characters to begin with? ϒpsilon (talk) 20:09, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They'd be more likely to replace than duplicate, "810, rue Montréal" vs. "810 Montreal St." for instance. The proper noun is usually left alone, so "rue Maisonneuve" becomes "Maisonneuve St." and not "Newhouse Street". A few other keywords change, like "poste" instead of "ext" for a telephone PBX extension number. The use of anything as ugly as "123, rue Bank Street" normally is only done in City of Ottawa publications which like to say things deux fois twice. K7L (talk) 21:00, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is it really in the traveller's best interest to translate street names in our articles? I picture someone headed for, say, Paris' Holocaust memorial searching frantically for "Geoffroy L'Asnier Street" while passing obliviously by street signs that say "rue Geoffroy-L'Asnier". I've travelled with enough Anglo monolinguals to realize that's not a farfetched hypothetical. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:57, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, it is really silly (I'd even say idiotic) to translate street names into English, because you will really have no use of those names when at the destination. Also, names of point of interest might be useful to tell the traveler what it's about, but often the English name won't appear on street signs of maps (but often on the POI's website and brochures). For names in non-Latin characters - say for the square and eponymous subway station Sennaya Plochad in St Petersburg - it is useful to have an English translation or transcription as many people cannot read Cyrillic letters, but it's even more important to have "Сенная Плошад" written out in the article, because that's what you'll be looking for once there. ϒpsilon (talk) 22:16, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One thing to watch: if importing an existing article from WV in another language, that article may already contain translated street names. fr:Ottawa and fr:Toronto use "rue" while fr:Londres (London) uses "Street". de:Paris sometimes uses "rue" but more often the likes of "Place Charles de Gaulle, sehenswerter Platz, auf dem der Arc de Triomphe steht." There's also the added wrinkle that the destination city itself may be multilingual or at least bilingual. If the source WV is in the destination's local language, this is manageable. If it's in a third country's language, it's unlikely a robot will be able to avoid a trilingual mess. K7L (talk) 22:36, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It appears you have done only a partial translation of https://de.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wiedensahl . That is really fine, although I am guessing your proposed bot will only be converting listings across with the basic information? You should add the translation template, e.g: {{translate|nl|Den Haag}}, at the beginning as well so that they can be tracked for further human translation afterwards. (I hope you don't mind, however I just added this to your article to illustrate) Andrewssi2 (talk) 15:09, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have just started Great Bernera, which is using de:Great Bernera as a starting point. Using Google's Chrome browser to read the German article, some text came straight from the wiki text in the German article, some from the English translation of the article (I cannot get translate to work in an edit box). This is an island in Scotland that I visited a long time ago, so I don't expect there to be any major translation problems when I have finished. I doubt that the conversion of articles from one language to another could be something that a bot could get very far with, but there may be specific elements that a bot would be good at - like converting listings from the vcard format used in german to our listing format.

It might be useful to have a template to add to the talk page of the article which was translated (the original one in German) to thank the creators of the article and to let them know so that they can join in if they feel able and willing. AlasdairW (talk) 00:04, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

AlasdairW, I created such a template for translated English discussion pages last week: Template:Translated Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:38, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I did ask about such a template a couple of months ago, in this case I used the edit summary - but I will add the template. What I am wondering about is a template to have in all languages - something like {{Translated_To|en|12 January 2014}} which would result in text saying something like "Thanks for creating this article. Some (or all) of this page has been translated to English. If you wish you can see the translated article here." I was thinking that it would a) be nice to thank the creators of the original article b) one of them might pop over and read and correct the translation. c) some of the future changes might be made here as well. AlasdairW (talk) 23:05, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, actually it would be nice to have the same template in reverse! (i.e. This English article was translated into Romanian on 3rd December 2013) .

In any case I can take a look at creating the German template you suggested. (I never really got active on the German site, but it should be a straightforward task) Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:58, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

FYI: Working on this here Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:59, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And finished over lunch break :) Template and example Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:11, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would be careful about mass-creating bot articles: for example, something like "Berlin is a city in Germany." as the entirety of an article does not do much good. --Rs chen 7754 05:31, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree. Perhaps rather than a bot, it would be better to have a tool that could create a skeleton article and suck in the listings information (such as name, address, longitude, latitude, phone number, website, etc) that would accelerate the manual translation effort. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:48, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Birthday Celebrations

15th January (just 2 days away!) marks Wikivoyage's first birthday on WMF servers. As we didn't celebrate the project's shared 10th birthday last year, do we have any ideas as to how we could celebrate this milestone? --Nick ^talk 20:02, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If someone could prepare an appropriate site notice that would be a minimum, and if anyone is in contact with the WMF marketing teams a mention in the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages would also be great. I'm sure others will have additional suggestions - thanks for bringing up this milestone. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:07, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello dear Wikivoyage, wishing you a very Happy Birthday and best of luck, but no fresh cake this year. Maybe next time? LOL! --Saqib (talk) 20:49, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would prefer to frame this as an anniversary rather than a birthday. We were not born last January; that merely marked our official launch under this new partnership. Powers ^(talk) 20:53, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I do agree with you that it's important for us to make that clear, but for outsiders the concept of a birthday is a lot easier to communicate than that of the anniversary of the project's move to WMF servers; saying 'anniversary' alone invites the question 'of what?' Perhaps we could just say 'it's our birthday' and not mention how old we are (we're either 10 or 1). --Nick ^talk 21:41, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've changed the design of my banner below accordingly.... --Nick ^talk 03:20, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As it's now started turning the 15th in some parts of the world, I'm going to plunge forward and change the site notice. If anyone has any objections, I'll gladly change it. :) --Nick ^talk 11:53, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The idea that an anniversary is a more difficult concept to communicate than a birthday is absurd. But I guess I'll just add this to the ever-growing list of my opinions that gain no traction here. Powers ^(talk) 15:19, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That seems a tad unfair, Powers. Your opinions are always welcomed and considered seriously; the ongoing search for a suitable banner for United States of America comes as a result of your objections and opinion - you're not being ignored. Above, I merely meant that 'Birthday' rather than the 'Anniversary of our move to the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation' sounds, to outsiders, like a much more momentous occasion - without a lengthy explanation, the latter could seem a simple technical change that does not warrant celebration. When we're going to have to announce this in 140 characters, brevity and simple concepts are valuable. I am not denying WV's heritage or that many of the contributors on here have been working on the project for a great many years but, for English-speaking people unfamiliar with the workings of the site, Wikivoyage was new a year ago tomorrow. As we didn't celebrate with WT last July, it seems a shame not to designate a day as WV's birthday. How we brand this day in future years is up to the community - anniversary, birthday or independence day - but let's use this day, whatever it is, to reflect on how far we've come and what more we can do. --Nick ^talk 15:35, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly and vociferously disagree with your assessment. Calling it an anniversary in no way overcomplicates the situation. I don't see why you have to change anything about the wording except to replace the word "birthday" with "anniversary". All that stuff about "lengthy explanation" is no more necessary when you use the word anniversary than when you use the word birthday, with the added benefit of not being blatantly false. (Wikivoyage was in absolutely no sense born in January 2013.) Powers ^(talk) 19:26, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Far be it for me to hop into a disagreement straight off the pitch, but I do feel that "birthday" is more friendly and less coldly professional than the ambiguous "anniversary." And there must be those who consider this particular incarnation of this project to have been born-- or reborn-- one year ago. It seems the right choice to me. Happy birthday indeed, and thank you much for making me feel at home. Not much of a joiner, and all, but I shall give it the old college try. Alhens (talk) 23:27, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Other celebrations

Any ideas for other things we could do to celebrate? This Signpost report promises a 'large public party'! Maybe create a page of highlights from the last year? --Nick ^talk 21:48, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Birthday, Wikivoyage!

The 15th January marks Wikivoyage's first year on the Wikimedia Foundation's servers. Let's take this opportunity to celebrate some of the things we've accomplished in the last year, your favourite parts of the site and what you'd like to see happen in the next year. --Nick ^talk 11:53, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've serious plans to travel around Pakistan this year to gather plenty of information for our guides and I beleieve I would able to bring few more Pakistani destination articles to guide status before our next anniversary. --Saqib (talk) 12:14, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy birthday! Seriously we can be proud, Wikivoyage is way better than it use to be last year! Banners and dynamic maps are some of the most visible examples. Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:43, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A Happy Birthday from me, too. So after the tenth birthday and the seventh we celebrate now our first one in the Wikimedia movement. Wow! A lot of work was done by the community. I think for instance about the integration of 35,000 images to Wikimedia Commons and the importation of interwiki links to Wikidata. We started with seven language branches, now there are 15, and we are waiting for the Chinese branch. I like to thank all the authors and readers for their efforts and their interest in Wikivoyage. Keep it up! --RolandUnger (talk) 16:52, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Birthday and a Happy New Year! :D. Ps. two hours ago the banner was the same size as a page banner but now it's huge?? Is it just me who notices it? ϒpsilon (talk) 17:47, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's still appearing at the right size for me... any chance you could post a screenshot on my talk page? :) --Nick ^talk 17:59, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Chinese Wikivoyage actually opened today, though the content ~~has not been imported~~: zh.wikivoyage.org. --Rs chen 7754 00:20, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, User:SPQRobin is importing as we speak. --Rs chen 7754 00:26, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Birthday --Azoma (talk) 00:38, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy 7'th birthday and the first ond as a WMF sister project. Thanks for all the work you guys have done here. -- Der Fussi 05:53, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy birthday Wikivoyage. Just recently crossed over from Wikitravel after learning about the fork and the rationale behind it. --Larkly (talk) 08:14, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Larkly: What was your user name at Wikitravel? You might like to use the same one here and have the accounts joined so that your previous contribution history there will be recognised. Wikivoyage:User account migration explains further... --118.93nzp (talk) 00:06, 16 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy belated birthday, Wikivoyage. And welcome, Larkly. We're glad to have you on board. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:27, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Request for comment on Commons: Should Wikimedia support MP4 video?

I apologize for this message being only in English. Please translate it if needed to help your community.

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks community guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. This digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC.

Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).

However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.

We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not to support MP4. Our Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.

Please join this RfC -- and share your advice.

All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.

You are also welcome to join tomorrow's Office hours chat on IRC, this Thursday, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members.

We look forward to a constructive discussion with you, so we can make a more informed decision together on this important topic. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 06:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WT attribution

We usually use Template:Wikipedia for attribution purpose when we copy paste content from WP so I was wondering if its possible to create a similar template for Wikitravel as well and then add that template to talk pages of the articles where WT attribution appears in footers. This way, we can lose the WT attribution in the footers. Ignore this post if the same has been discussed before. --Saqib (talk) 11:56, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If the consensus is that it's not possible or advisable to lose the footers completely without the green light from WMF Legal, then the same would probably be true for any other manner of disturbing the status quo, including replacing the footers with templates. If, on the other hand, we want to take that legal risk, I would say let's not bother with half-measures and let's just eliminate all attribution (other than edit summaries marked with WT-en) entirely. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:59, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, such a template might be useful for copying over any post-fork WT content we might want to add to WV, though given the state of affairs at WT these days I would imagine that wouldn't happen too often. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:08, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, I don't think developing specific templates for individual sources (especially non-Wikmedia) is a great idea. I think we should try to treat all sources more or less equal, and provide sufficient attribution in the edit history whenever possible. If we really do need a template of any kind, it would be better if it was somehow generic and could be used for any source. As for a template replacing the disclaimer, the search engine effect for such an article would be limited anyway, as it would still have a hyperlink. Better to just leave it until that dreaded disclaimer is gone. JuliasTravels (talk) 21:24, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to the WMF Terms of Use, it is sufficient to provide attribution in the edit summaries. However, Wikitravel may have imposed extra requirements. Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the Terms of Use on the date that the content was copied to Wikivoyage? Edge3 (talk) 23:22, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WT changed their requirements after the move, now requesting a hyperlink (although other parts of their terms seem unclear in that). At the time of the move it explicitly stated "For this reason, we ask that you also link back to the original Wikitravel article, allowing your readers to update it. This is just a request; it's not part of the license requirements". JuliasTravels (talk) 23:40, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WT content is under the CC-SA license, so any extra requirements that IB tries to impose would violate the CC-SA and essentially revoke their right to all existing content on the site ("no additional restrictions" per ) Regarding the original question about attribution, since they have already resorted to litigation in the past I would suggest that we continue our stance of discouraging copying from them, and err on the side of caution regarding any changes to existing articles that were imported from WT content. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:31, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WT's terms of use during the move were awfully ambiguous... which is a good thing for us. I don't think we are required to provide a hyperlink in the disclaimer. Edge3 (talk) 00:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One of the stated goals of the project has always been the ability to print a destination guide to be carried as tourist baggage. The absence of a requirement for a hyperlink is therefore no accident. K7L (talk) 03:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So perhaps we can remove the hyperlink, but keep the URL? We could do something like the following, but with the hyperlink disabled: "This article is based on ... text from the article "United States" (http://wikitravel.org/en/United_States) on Wikitravel ...." The Creative Commons guidelines state that we should include at least a URL. Edge3 (talk) 03:51, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pub cleaning

This page has become rather unwieldy, so I have moved some old discussions (around 2 months or older) to their relevant locations. Can someone quickly review and confirm that I'm doing it right?

I got the impression from the guidelines at the top that the Travellers' Pub archive should be the last place that conversations should be moved, although looking at the archive page it seems most conversations end up here?

Additionally the guidelines say one month or older can be swept, although I think applying a 2 months or older rule for the purposes of my specific exercise now will help a lot. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:51, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Automatic article generation from en.wv to fr.wv

Hi all!

I wrote a script to transform English Wikivoyage articles into French Wikivoyage articles. Here is the result: https://fr.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Aarhus&oldid=193198

What gets generated:

Banner
Small intro
Infobox
Dynamic map
All listings
Breadcrumb
Images, in the sections they belong to.

I still need to automatically link with Wikidata. Integration in the article creation page would be a killer feature, but would require way more development effort. Open source of course, feel free to port it to perform German->English and French->English transformations :-) Feedback and ideas are very welcome! Nicolas1981 (talk) 15:36, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. There must be a way to put this behind a simple web interface and put it on a tool server somewhere, much like https://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py asks for an en.Wikipedia article name and converts all the <ref> tags to a templated form, dumping the result in an edit box. Not sure how we'd handle the fields in fr:modèle:listing that are missing in en:'s {{listing}} like "téléphone mobile", "wikipédia", "facebook" - the extra telephone numbers might need to move to be part of the description in en:. I suppose wget -O - "https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Aarhus&action=edit" could also be replaced by action=raw or the API at https://fr.wikivoyage.org/w/api.php in order to return just the wiki text without any stray MediaWiki user interface bits? K7L (talk) 16:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nice. I would use that on articles that exist in German but not in English. As previously mentioned, it would be good to also add a Template and Category to such pages in order to track the basic conversations and ensure that they are quickly followed up with translation work. Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:51, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks K7L for the tip, fixed! It is open source, so please anyone put it on toolserver or anywhere you want :-) Andrewssi2: Yes there seems to be such a template on fr too, I will try to use it. Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:38, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The goal of this endeavour is also to better understand what we can share between languages via Wikidata. Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Conservative dogma

Some have written that our work is guided by what is best from the traveller's perspective and this might even be called our Prime Directive.

There are features of the MediaWiki software and HTML that few know about (never mind bother to use) that can be, nevertheless, helpful for travellers.

An example would be the
<abbr title="(explanatory text)">(localised term)</abbr>
construction.
This construction means that the prose flow is not unnecessarily interrupted by explanations in brackets. An example of usage would be: "Nelson's CBD is compact and sheltered from rain." where prose that is universally understandable for Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans offers mouse tip instant clarification for Poms, etc.

Previously our consensus policy has always been that, since this is a wiki, you can use any feature of the English language or the software that is useful to travellers unless it has been specifically forbidden by a consensual policy.

Is that essential wiki freedom threatened by the changes Ryan is canvassing for? --118.93nzp (talk) 22:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just for some context, is there any previous discussion around not using <abbr title="(explanatory text)">(localised term)</abbr> ? (or similar) Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:46, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not that I'm aware of.

However, I'm also unaware of discussions seeking to prohibit the use of foreign characters in foreign words such as the Spanish eñe in El Niño or the stress mark in Bogotá or the macron in Māori or the cedilla in Eskişehir.

I really don't wish us to arrive at a position where every "innovation" requires a prior permission. Fair enough if somebody introduces a neologism (for us) and there is then a considered consensus to ban the innovation. However, just because a few high profile editors "don't like it", should not mean a blanket prohibition until and unless there is a real and documented consensus for that prohibition.

Consensus should not imply stasis. --118.93nzp (talk) 23:58, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I personally haven't observed foreign characters being suppressed. It would be hard for me to work with Germany articles without them. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:32, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The rules regarding diacritics are that we try to avoid them. Namely, if there is a defined and relatively commonly used English name for a city/town/region/country/etc then it should be given preference over any foreign forms. The reason is simple: English Wikivoyage is written in English. Actually, a lot of arguments (mostly from Europeans) have been against English names. For example, Bogota actually uses the diacritic, even though I it shouldn't since English-language maps and most references do not use it. Looking at the non-debate about it, I think User:Globe-trotter's assertion that there is "no obvious English name" is false. It should be Bogota without the diacritic. It's a world capital and it has a well-established English name. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 10:24, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was unaware we had a policy regarding diacritics, but if the rule ChubbyWimbus cites is accurate, I take issue with it. As one of many possible pitfalls that I could cite, there are many cases where a diacritic fundamentally changes the pronunciation of a word (e.g. "n" vs. "ñ") which may lead to confusion as tourists mispronounce place names, for example, to taxi drivers. Also, as Andrewssi2 hinted at, they're often indispensable for disambiguation purposes. I feel we should take at least a neutral, and possibly a pro-diacritic, stance. I'm not sure what policy talk page I should start the discussion on, but I'd like to. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 10:58, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think in many cases people make a bigger deal out of the differences than actually exist in order to insert diacritics. I've yet to meet a Spanish-speaker who is so dim that they could not figure out that Bogota is Bogotá. Even if there are Spanish-speakers who can't comprehend, it doesn't matter, because the English-language Wikivoyage is not meant for Spanish-speakers; it's meant for English-speakers. The guides should include the local spelling (or characters) at the top of the page anyway, so even if there is a big difference, such as English versus Korean, you could point at the characters if for some reason you needed to reference a city name to a Korean and they couldn't understand you. The same can be done for Spanish. Taxi drivers of all people should be pretty used to strange pronunciations by foreigners. Many taxi drivers themselves are foreigners who don't pronounce the names correctly.

That policy is really only meant to make sure that we are doing our best to use English whenever possible. When it's not possible, diacritics are permitted. There have been discussions about various towns that resulted in keeping or inserting diacritics. I could not myself support a "pro-diacritic" stance. I do believe that the English-language version needs to be firm that we use English names. Diacritics should only be used when there really isn't English to use or the English. I appologize for not being good at locating discussions, but they pop up all over the place. I can't keep track... ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:27, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Policies related to diacritics in article names are mostly covered at Wikivoyage:Article naming conventions#Examples. In the case of Bogota / Bogotá, the former may meet the "commonly used English name" criteria since the latter isn't heavily used in English-language maps and literature, although in cases where the diacritic and non-diacritic versions are equally common we use the local name (for example São Paulo). -- Ryan • (talk) •

A foreign name with the accents missing is still a foreign name. We do need a redirect from the title with diacritics missing as someone might be trying to access WV from a device (such as a mobile) where they are missing or more difficult to input, but inherently "café" "piñata" "maître d'hôtel" and other non-English words in English don't magically become English just because someone forgot an accent or two. Leaving an accent off Montreal/West Island is acceptable (as there's a well-known anglophone minority in that part of Montréal which does routinely strip off the accent and pronounce accordingly) but Bogotà is a Spanish-language name no matter how its misspelled. Nothing English about it.

The awkward part is when a place has two names in different foreign languages, like Chornobyl/Chernobyl (transliterated, Ukraine/Russian) or Gdansk/Danzig (Polish/German). The choice of which to use becomes political. K7L (talk) 16:18, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that the English "Bogota" and the Spanish "Bogotà" are spelled the same save for a single diacritic mark in no way means that there is no English name for the city. Certainly not all cities have English names, but Bogota does. Powers ^(talk) 19:01, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK, the <abbr> is not a Mediawiki feature, and its implementation is browser-dependent. I'm not sure if it's widely understood, so I'd be reluctant to expand its use too much. Powers ^(talk) 19:01, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is indeed HTML and I agree it's browser dependent, Powers. [For example, this element is not supported by Mickysoft's Internet Explorer prior to IE7 although Safari has always supported it and Chrome from 2.0 or earlier, Firefox (Gecko) from 1.0 (1.7) or earlier and Opera from 1.3 or earlier]. Although the helpful "tooltip" behaviour is common in modern graphic browsers, you can not rely on it, especially from the accessibility perspective. Some speech-based browsers may give the user optional access to title attribute values, but they tend to ignore them by default. Moreover, people using a graphic browser without a mouse, or with serious difficulties in using a mouse due to a motor function disability probably cannot invoke the "tooltips". And, of course, the explanation of the abbreviation or acronym will not normally be visible in the print version. However, we don't eschew images just because a percentage of our readers can't see them and I think this is yet another instance where the decision can be left to the individual editor and article. My basic point is that I do not wish intolerance to spread and for everything that is not compulsory to be forbidden. --118.93nzp (talk) 20:41, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

BTW the city's name is Bogotá in Spanish. À is used in Italian and French (couldn't resist playing nitpicker this time :D), ϒpsilon (talk) 19:14, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Bogota" is not a misspelling of "Bogotà". It's just like ボゴタ, ቦጎታ, etc. They are foreign language names for the city that are all "correct" names in their respective languages. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 07:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@ChubbyWimbus: ϒpsilon was pointing out the difference between à and á :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:27, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And I see I copy and pasted the wrong one above. lol I can't type with the diacritics. Ugh, an annoyance all-around. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:01, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I just set keyboard as "US International" in regional settings; type voil`a and voilà the diacritic accent appears. That doesn't fix the problem between keyboard and chair... I don't know any foreign languages and make enough of a mess of text in my own country. K7L (talk) 16:28, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Moving section images to Wikidata?

Hi all,

I realized that all languages have pretty much the same sections (eat, sleep, etc) and we all try to find images relevant to each section (pics of food in Eat, etc). Most often zero, one or two pictures, placed at the beginning of the section.

Wikidata can help! Let's define for each destination a small list of Commons picture filenames for each section, each with a localized legend for each language. It is obviously more complex than what we already do for banners.

Before proposing this idea on Wikidata, better discuss it here and find out what would work best. Thoughts? Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:07, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Quite often the WV discusses the best banner to use in an article, and those discussions can be quite long and difficult between native English speakers.

If we do centralize this kind of thing in Wikidata, then would it not be problematic for such a discussion to take place between the different communities? Effectively would you not exclude any non-fluent English speakers from the conversation about what appears on their community's article? Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:15, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pertinent point, Andrew; Wikidata seems quite tantalising in this respect...--118.93nzp (talk) 03:19, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion at USA is interesting, needed, and would happen even if there were no Wikidata.

In all languages, most sections have zero image, and would benefit from any. 99.9% of the section images would not generate any controversy. For the remaining 0.1%, you will always be able to remove the Wikidata template and put hard-coded images like we do now. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:36, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't that risk someone slipping in the naughty (according to some super users) relative image sizing of "upright"? After all, most other WMF projects do use the useful features in MediaWiki software... --118.93nzp (talk) 06:46, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If it is a 'soft' template that can be used or removed by each WV language site it should be OK. Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:44, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it might make sense to ask some editors from smaller WV language sites how they feel. I could well imagine that the German one, which is larger, might have more concerns because they are able to do tasks and discussions on their own, while smaller ones (like Dutch and Polish) might like to take any help they can get for the time being? I don't know though. JuliasTravels (talk) 12:03, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe Nicolas1981 means that these templates are optional. For example, my past translations of German articles actually often use the original German images anyway. If I wanted to use different images in the English version then (I believe) I am completely free to do so.

That said, I do wonder if people might regard this as a harbinger of the standardization of content throughout WV language versions? That would surely raise concerns. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:13, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I understand, my point was rather that the primary reason to put any of this in Wikidata in the first place is to help smaller language versions, or am I misunderstanding? JuliasTravels (talk) 12:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the main goal is to help smaller wikivoyagers. But English Wikivoyage might benefit from more editors, similarly to what happens for banners (local people create banners that really express the feeling of the towns they know well). Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:19, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if this will work, as usually the length of an article will differ greatly from one language to another - with the most detail being in the local language or the language with the most Wikivoyageurs. The rare exceptions are fully-translated pages like Lac-Mégantic (en/fr) where the same entire set of listings has made the round-trip unabridged through some attempt at a translation. What may be an appropriate number of images for a lengthy, detailed article is likely excessive for a short stub. K7L (talk) 16:25, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You are right, that might feel void in empty sections. And I am not sure whether Lua for instance can detect the length of a section to adjust the number of images to display. Note: Sizes of the see/do/buy/eat/sleep sections will not vary too much between languages, when POIs are in Wikidata. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:19, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(this is a comment from a smaller language version) I don't see the point of this proposal. Images are used to illustrate the content. If some language version has little content, why would it need all images from a star-quality English or German article? Moreover, images need captions, but an English caption makes no sense in Polish Wikivoyage. One can think of writing a bot facilitating image transfer, just like the transfer of listings discussed recently, but this should be always done under human control. And this does not have to involve Wikidata. --Alexander (talk) 18:18, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry that I don't see much benefit in this. Images are are the one feature of an article that can easily be transferred from one language to another without understanding a word of the article - just click on the image to see the image page from where you can copy the title. AlasdairW (talk) 22:30, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Clicking and copy-pasting is easy, yes. A few months ago we were manually copy-pasting banners back and forth between languages, and it was even easier. But it is not sustainable for 15,000 articles. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:19, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How do you propose to enter this template into the 15,000 articles? Would it be a bot? What criteria would you use to determine if the template should be used or not? Thanks! Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:34, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, a bot would add the templates (for instance {{images_see}} in section See) to each section that does not have any images yet. The hardest would be to develop a legend editor (a bit like the listing editor, but with just one textfield, and potentially showing the legend in other languages for reference). Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:57, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure about this. One issue is the handling of fair use images; I realize that there has been some debate over the use of them, but there are legitimate uses of them, and they cannot be uploaded to Commons and must be handled locally... --Rs chen 7754 09:07, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

When I do translations right now, I just reuse the same images, and have not run into trouble so far... Anyway, any potentially unusable image would be left after the template. When trying to insert an image in Wikidata, Wikidata could even check whether its license is OK, thus an advantage over non-Wikidata image copy. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:22, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The decision of where to place images may still need to be made manually because differences in article length and the absence of {{Info Ville}} on en: do affect how much free space is on a page (and where). K7L (talk) 16:36, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nicolas1981. I just wanted to say that I think it is really great that you provide lots of ideas for enhancing WV and investigating ways in which we could leverage WikiData to our advantage. Although the reception on this thread for the image idea has not been so enthusiatic, I do hope nevertheless to see more of your ideas. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:35, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GAC application includes a "Wikivoyage contest"

The Venezuelan proto-chapter is applying for funding, part of which would be for said contest (see "Number 1"). One can only presume they mean it to be for the Spanish WV. This suggests an opportunity for the en.WV community to identify WMF affiliates that could be interested in collaborating in the development and/or implementation of such a contest. Tony (talk) 08:19, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Tony - and may we wish you a belated Happy New Year! --118.93nzp (talk) 08:25, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the tip Tony! I think that promoting the idea of taking picture specifically for Wikivoyage is a good idea, as this kind of pictures (atmosphere, activities, crowds, more lively, I don't know) is difficult to find on Commons. When I upload a picture of a building on Commons, I think "Let's take the pic orthogonally so that every detail is visible" but for Wikivoyage it would be "Let's take the pic with a subjective angle, when the ice vendor passes by and children play with birds". Unlike Wikipedia we usually try to make people want to go there. Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:14, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WLM (and GLAM stuff) is one of the few things chapters are uniquely good at doing; this extends by analogy to involvement in a possible Wikivoyage competition. Perhaps it would work well for this community, via chosen reps, to make a joint applicant via the GAC with one of the chapters that covers an area you feel has a lot of scope for improvement on en.WV (and perhaps the other WVs, especially where the predominant language of a chosen area is that of another WV. Things to work out initially would be the scope (as Nicolas points out), and the extent to which there's already a track-record for WLM (more than 50 countries participated in the most recent WLM comp). You'd need funding for transport and associated costs of visiting the photographic sites, possibly for cameras and tripods, if that's a problem in the area, and for prizes and a local ceremony. You'd need to consider whether videos could be part of it (I have no idea, but some cultural displays like dance, parades, might lend themselves to vid (do you have vids on WV?) WV could contribute guidelines for what is needed and what type of images are appropriate for this site (as opposed to the WPs, for example). Copyright issues like freedom of panorama would need to be determined in short-listing chapters that could be approached. Tony (talk) 12:39, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a big endeavour... the good thing about a voyage wiki is that some of us travel there at some point, for personal pleasure, often with a camera. So if contest there is, it will probably be different from WLM contests. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:16, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Template asking to avoid too much politics on discussion pages

I noticed there was a disclaimer box on the Talk:Croatia page asking people not to get too involved with politics on a sensitive article. I created a template from it and used the same text verbatim:

This is not a political forum; please restrict all discussion here to discussion about how best to improve the Switzerland article. Off topic debates, political rants, nonsense poetry, etc. will all be removed as it is added. This is a travel guide and political disputes are utterly irrelevant except insofar as they directly bear upon the experience of a traveller. See Wikivoyage:Be fair#Political disputes for further guidelines.

Please note that this is only for a few sensitive discussion pages and NOT main articles.

If anyone wants to help improve the text then please feel free to jump in. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:43, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, worldwide travel is not something that takes place in a vacuum... we do have to acknowledge the political situation on the ground as it affects the traveller. To ignore the political situation in North Korea or to neglect to mention that Syria is a war zone would be foolhardy, even if it becomes WV:NCO at times. K7L (talk) 02:15, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't suggesting to remove politics completely ("asking people not to get too involved with politics"). Just a reminder to contributors of the scope of WV.

As I said I just used the original text (not mine) and therefore please amend to a wording that is appropriate for WV. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:23, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Of course we will continue to tell it how it is from a traveller's perspective, but this template may be a useful gentle reminder for some discussion pages... However, I do think a more practically useful template would be to specify which language variety the article is written in (or should be corrected to) for those destinations where it is not obvious such as Israel or Belize or the BVI... --118.93nzp (talk) 02:26, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks 118.93nzp. It is indeed a gentle reminder, and not a directive. Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:18, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think the purpose of the template is/should be trying to keep the discussion related to Wikivoyage and the Wikivoyage article, rather than adding some off-topic rant about a country's politics or culture. --Rs chen 7754 18:54, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe it is good to highlight the fact that each and all of the most paramount and pressing problems of Wikivoyage can be remedying by adding more templates to talk pages. PrinceGloria (talk) 20:19, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Template for discussion pages to indicate English language variant

To my knowledge, all WV articles use either a Commonwealth (British) or an American style of English. This determination appears to be largely based on that country's historical links either with Britain or the United States, with commonwealth English being the default if no clear association can be identified.

From time to time new contributors do come onto WV, see red when they encounter American spellings and we then have to spend some time to explain and clean up.

118.93nzp has asked (I'm extrapolating his comment) whether we could have a template that could be placed on a country's discussion page that indicated what form of English should be used?

Would such a template be useful? Especially for 'grey areas' such as China and Israel? Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:35, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just a wee note of correction: articles currently should default to US English if there is no obvious connection to another variety (such as Australian, Canadian, Indian, etc).

[The two compromises/concessions that were conceded by the US-centric camp many moons ago to arrive at this state of affairs were

1) the rare US English spellings of "traveller" and "travelling" were to be used everywhere in preference to "traveler" and "traveling" and

2) dates default to dd Mmm yyyy (eg: 22 May 2014) in a similar style to that visible in the time stamp of everyone's signature here.] --118.93nzp (talk) 04:41, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm aware, the preference for "traveller" is an affectation and only applies to project space. Powers ^(talk) 13:24, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If even that small point is ambiguous, then we should probably move the discussion to another part of WV. Any suggestion where? Andrewssi2 (talk) 14:23, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not everything needs to be spelled out in exacting detail. Our community's philosophy has long been that spelling and grammar and other niggling details are subservient to, and far less important than, generating good, readable, and useful travel content. That this is a "small point" means that its ambiguity is just not that important. Powers ^(talk) 15:29, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's sorely tempting to banish the word "kilometer" from Wikivoyage. It's not in common US usage as they still use miles and it's incorrect in any other country as "metre" is the unit of length and "meter" a measuring device. K7L (talk) 15:46, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I thoroughly agree. In most places I substitute its universally known symbolisation of km. Likewise for meter as a unit of measurement where m is universally understood. Except for the historic compromise, Powers is correct in his general summation. However, it's always amazing how much heat and energy those who profess a deep disinterest and scorn for these small matters of abbreviation and grammar often expend on obstructing and thwarting those who spend much of their time copy-editing these trivia; not everyone can be a Dickens or a Melville... --118.93nzp (talk) 16:59, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think for most countries the language variety has been agreed upon, or not? So a template would mostly serve to instruct people which version to use? We shouldn't forget that for many people who contribute here, English is a second or third or (in my case) fourth language. As natural as the distinction between varieties of English is for native speakers, it's a good lot less so for many others. I like consistency and I'm perfectly fine with rules about which variety is preferred on which articles, but I do think we need to be very forgiving when people use the wrong version and thoughtful about the wordings we use when instructing a particular one in a template or otherwise. What we want to do is discourage "correcting" of one version to the other, we don't want to discourage people to contribute when they're not sure about spellings. I know I'm not always consistent and in all honestly, I get confused about the meters and metres, centres and centers, travel(l)ers, sizable and sizeables and all the rest. I'm very happy with the copy-editors who fix my mistakes way faster than I could look them up. But I'm even happier with the general understanding that these are details compared to our goal of creating good travel info ;-) JuliasTravels (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

George Bernard Shaw once said: 'England and America are two countries divided by a common language' - this is so true for English speakers throughout the world. I think we are educated enough to be aware of variations in spelling and context but not become too involved or intense about them. I only take light notice of such words as I speak 4 different languages. The travel article is the thing to be concerned with more. We could always add a separate page listing common variations for those who can't figure out such things. The wiki editor also makes one aware of variations by underscoring such words... (biased toward US style English)... Just a thought on the subject. Matroc (talk) 00:12, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that's your browser marking misspelled words, not the wiki software. =) Powers ^(talk) 00:47, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting point from Powers. If I edit in British English then the my browser marks some words with a nice red underline. Although this isn't a problem for me, I can't help but feel that it would work against ESL contributors. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:03, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, so you speak English? Jolly well old chap, give this a try... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-english-dictionary/ :) K7L (talk) 04:37, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know I should have said browser ;) - Spell checking in Firefox since version 2.0 -- I have the correct dictionary installed and selected, check-spelling selected and correct language selected. There are separate dictionaries such as English/United States, English/United Kingdom etc. - Glad to "awaken the sleeper"(s)_Dune - Happy New Year! - Matroc (talk) 06:39, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So, actually a template could point the user to that dictionary? (For Mozilla ppl) Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:02, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Templates could point to anything, but I'd say such general external links (indeed several, for different browsers) don't belong on every talk page. When working extensively on a particular article one may change it, but we can hardly ask from editors that they keep changing their dictionaries for every tiny addition they make. I think I'd prefer to not make a big deal out of it on talk pages and rather point people to relevant policy pages and discussions when they use the "non-preferred" version too much. But maybe you should indicate what kind of text you imagine on such a template, so we're talking about the same thing? JuliasTravels (talk) 08:22, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is obvious now that there isn't a groundswell of WV'ers crying out for this feature, so I think that I'll just consider it discussed for now and let it go. :) Andrewssi2 (talk) 09:32, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many listings use wrong templates (eg. See is a Eat)

Dear all,

I have noticed that MANY listings use the wrong template, for instance {{See}} for a restaurant. Is there ANY case where this is intended? Is there ANY situation where a listing in "Eat" is intendedly not {{Eat}}, or where a {{Eat}} is not in section "Eat"?

Thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:15, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A listing in any of the six sections See, Do, Buy, Eat, Drink, Sleep should always have the corresponding type (see, do, buy, eat, drink, sleep). Wrong templates there are likely mistakes or the result of moving an item ("British pub" from Eat to Drink, for instance). A listing in any other named section could be anything - particularly in itineraries, where the section headers are in geographic order instead of attraction/activity/food/lodging categories. K7L (talk) 04:58, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Is there any tool to fix or at least detect these problems? Is anyone working on creating such a tool? Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:08, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not all listings are in template form yet and many are still using asterisk (*) bullet points. http://tools.wmflabs.org/catscan2/catscan2.php can help us find those articles (or at least narrow them down) that still have no template listings for 'see', 'do', 'eat' and 'sleep'. Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:00, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I guess all not-so-developed-yet articles would be false positive though. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:41, 24 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think that it is possible, but unlikely that a cafe might be listed inside a see listing. I am thinking of a large paying attraction like a theme park or zoo, which has places to eat inside. Because you have to pay to go into the park, they probably should not appear in the main Eat section, but we might want an eat symbol to show on the map, and to mention them in the section about the park. AlasdairW (talk) 23:51, 24 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Good point, but in that case where the point of interest will probably appear in run-on prose, it might be best to use the {{marker}} template so that the intrusive, little, grey "edit" text does not interrupt the prose but the appropriate symbol still appears on the map? --61.29.8.41 00:12, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Another expedition? Rescue Expedition?

I don't know if this has been discussed before but in-case if it is, I doubt it has been addressed. Sometimes our important articles (especially those that are at guide status and previously featured on the main page) become outdated and less developed than formerly, but is that sufficient and a good decision to demote them from being a guide status article? Not at all! If a featured guide status article become obsolete, the article must be improved and properly addressed rather than simply demoting it. In-fact, featured article don't deserve to be demoted, after-all, a lot of efforts has been put on it once upon a time.

Actually, I've myself demoting few featured article recently that were having the issues of style, formatting and outdating. I believe it wasn't fair but it was seems to me in the best interests of WV. After all, our mission is "complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide." and an outdated or poorly formatted article with a previously featured symbol on top right will gave a bad impression to our users and readers.

So, I don't know if we need another expedition to address this very important issue. After-all, we've already so many expeditions on-wiki and mostly are rather inactive. So, if we've a good support for starting such expedition or we've another solution, that would be great and I'm ready to do my part as a map-maker. That's the only I could do. I'm not been to places, who articles has been demoted except Dubai thats why I don't know about what content to add to rescue an article nor I'm good with formatting and improving the style. And at last, I would say rescue an article — rescue the WV's standard. --Saqib (talk) 17:33, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I support this effort. I don't know how much use I'd be in gathering updated information, but I can definitely pitch in on style and formatting problems. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:08, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dubai article was featured as DotM in early 2008, but later the article become very outdated thus I had to demote it last year. Dubai is world's 7th most visited cities so definitely its important that the its article should be at guide status. Recently, the article has been districtified (Thanks to our now-retired editor Jan who initiated the districtification discussion) and lately, Nurg has visited Dubai and contributed significantly to Dubai and its districts. I've lived for many years in Dubai (in-fact still living) and I think that the article is very much close to gain its guide status back which I snatched from it last year. Concerning the Dubai map, its lack a map but I better wait and not do the map right now since the "Discussion on defining district borders for Dubai is in progress.". --Saqib (talk) 21:02, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This issue surely deserves some attention. But I do think you're right about expeditions in general. Also, as Andre says, it's not always easy to fix content if you don't know the place, so I'm not sure an expedition is the ideal way (although I don't know what is, a template maybe?). Even if you can find people willing to join, none of them may know the particular places. Can you give a couple of examples of previous feature articles that you've demoted and need rescue? JuliasTravels (talk) 21:12, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You're right and that's why I said in my post that either an expedition or a solution will be need. OMG! I found plenty of previously featured DotM articles (leave aside OtBP and FTT) and all demoted: Perhentian Islands, Guatemala City, New Orleans, Melbourne, Expo 2005, Edinburgh, Kuala Lumpur, Budapest, La Paz, Taipei, Pattaya, Boracay, Death Valley National Park, Tashkent, Falkland Islands (outline) and Elsinore (outline although questionable). I only demoted 2 or 3 but I don't know who demoted the rest of them. --Saqib (talk) 22:01, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Edinburgh was demoted in September 2010, with the comment at the time being "sorry, cannot by guide with districts being outline". I am not sure that was a valid reason, and today only one district Edinburgh/East is outline. Maybe some others would like to have a look and change it back if they agree. AlasdairW (talk) 23:36, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was demoted by one of our admin User:ClausHansen and although the article and its district articles are quite detailed but they haven't changed much since what they were back in September '10 so it would be better if someone who knows the place best will look into the articles and then decided whether to keep it at usable status or promote it back to guide. --Saqib (talk) 00:02, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One might also find articles in need of attention by looking at Wikivoyage:World cities/Large, which has the world's 100 biggest cities, or checking UNESCO World Heritage List. The Large list can be sorted in various ways to reveal more; e.g. sorting on the F column shows that about half of the 20 most visited cities have articles still at Outline status. Pashley (talk) 22:15, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure all of those have been demoted, Saqib. In earlier years the requirements for featured articles weren't what they are now. I suppose some of them never made it to what we now call guide status in the first place ;-) JuliasTravels (talk) 22:21, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Julia. You're right. That same thing is currently going on at Italian WV for instance. Their current DotM is at outline status by English WV standard. And even though, if articles were previously featured on the main page without having at guide status, I think we should work on to bring them at guide status or otherwise, if we can't bring a previously featured article back to guide status, simply remove the featured icon from that article. In-fact, Wikipedia is doing the same. They simply demote the article (which is once used to be featured article if the article become outdated) and remove the featured article icon appearing on top right of the article. Wikipedia do not compromise on quality then why we? --Saqib (talk) 22:38, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that's not really a good comparison: Wikipedia's featured articles are what we call star articles. We do have a "demote"-option for star articles as well, in which case an article loses the star icon. Removing the previously-featured icon here would be strange I think: it's just part of history. Nonetheless, it's good that you're raising attention to the issue, and it would be nice if some of those articles could be polished up to meet our current standards :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 22:53, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Okay but can I compare our guide articles with Wikipedia's "Good articles"? They demote their good articles as well and remove the icon. Anyway, I'm not in favour as well of having icons removed from our articles that were previously featured. I raised this issue to rescue those article, not to remove the icons. I hope a solution will be provided and this issue will be addressed. --Saqib (talk) 23:02, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To JuliasTravels: Saqib was right in correcting his analogy: Star articles on Wikivoyage are analogous to "Good articles" on Wikipedia, rather than "Featured articles". However, I think it's important to note that up to now, Saqib has been speaking about Guide articles. As you mentioned, anyone who comes across a Star article they don't feel is up to snuff anymore has to nominate the article for de-starring, which has to be deliberated on in much the same way as promoting an article to Star status. Usually, the very act of nominating an article for de-starring is enough to impel the community to make the necessary changes. However, Guide articles are pretty good too, and unlike Star articles, they can be demoted unilaterally without consultation. I think it's totally worthwhile to explore ways to prevent them being demoted, and I think that an expedition - provided we can sustain interest in it over the long term; a tall order, I admit - is as good a way as any of tackling the problem. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, Andre, that comparison would be accurate and indeed the "usable" or "guide" status of the article can be changed without much issue. However, all of the examples he gives are already not at guide status - some because they've been demoted since, others because they were never guides. So it's not really a matter of demoting or not. Our "previously featured icon" says nothing about guide or usable: it only says the article was once featured on the main page. And that part remains true all the same, even when we would now consider such an article unsuited. (This to clarify my comment: the icon question is not the main problem of course).

So what we mostly have, is articles that we once featured on the main page but are not guide quality. I think Saqib is quite right that many of those articles deserve some kind of priority due to being previous features, but the same is true for some others, like "most visited destinations", "most requested articles on our site" etc. I have nothing against an expedition, I just think we all know how hard it is to keep one active, most of all when it's about content. Just brainstorming.. would it be a good idea to come up with a broader list/expedition of "high priority" articles that need polishing up? So most visited, previous features, key articles in making a whole region usable or something like that? If the scope is somewhat wider, it might be easier for people to join the effort. We might also pick a collaboration of the month out of them. Just a thought. JuliasTravels (talk) 12:18, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid too that an expedition might die. Maybe reviving CotM will be good idea and rather than nominations, just put the list of articles that were previously featured but now at usable status and work on those as we used to do previously. See Wikivoyage_talk:Collaboration_of_the_month#Outdated.2C_again. --Saqib (talk) 15:12, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion is died as I was expecting without any outcome or conclusion. I think it was a wastage of time to raise this issue at first. Anyways. Andrew, this page says "featured article on WP are star article or destination of the month on WV" and nothing says about WP's good articles but you said above our star articles are analogous to WP's Good articles. I think its bette to solve this matter first. WP's featured articles are their best work whereas our star articles as WV's best work. If our star articles are analogous to WP's good articles, then it means our best work is analogous to WP's (not best) work. Confusion! --Saqib (talk) 12:45, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I think it's terrific that you've made that offer to help with drawing static maps, Saqib. Although our new dynamic maps offer many advantages for those who are on-line (and the development of {{mapmask}} may extend it's usefulness to show the districts and regions that we ourselves create) they'll probably always be inferior to those readers wishing a hard copy (or those offline, of course).

I've been away for while, so can I use this opportunity to comment how sad I was to see your admin tools removed for an "offence" that had nothing whatsoever with abusing admin tools? Eventually our public visibility will increase with search engines (even if we do keep shooting ourselves in the foot with our lack of active SEO) and then it will be "all hands to the pump" to stem the flood of spambots. In the time I've been away I've already noticed an increase in the number of spambot accounts being created when I look in "Recent changes".

One thing that does seem sadly lacking here is an awareness of how awful most of our articles actually appear at certain common screen sizes and resolutions. I'll post some screenshots later when I get home and gain access to faster speeds, but there are many visual aberrations that need correcting. I think much of this aesthetic "blindness" is caused by may of our most frequent contributors working principally with wikitext differences on large screens rather than examining final results. --61.29.8.41 23:25, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Now that you said in favour of dynamic maps here, I wish this discussion won't derails. I prefer to talk here over the subject and nothing else. --Saqib (talk) 23:44, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia used to have a "Collaboration of the Week" or "Collaboration of the Month", but both of those projects are now inactive. Now it's Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement. I think we should consider a similar expedition, where we identify our highest priority pages and improve them to our current standards. Edge3 (talk) 14:05, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion is going to die so thought of giving an update here. Dubai article has been rescued and probably back at guide status now. --Saqib (talk) 13:11, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indicator of featured articles

On a related note: would it be possible to add a star to the list of interwiki links when an article is featured in one way or another – star, DoTM, or guide status, depending on the traditions of each language version? Basically, two questions in one: i) How to implement this? ii) Do we need this mechanism? It could facilitate translation of good content... --Alexander (talk) 08:55, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Very good idea. I'm not an expert in graphic design and such, but a simple way to indicate this is to use a sign consisting of a recognized 2-letter linguistic abbreviation, such as "RU" for a previous feature on Russian Wikivoyage. Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:39, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pardon me but I didn't got it. Alexander, are you saying that we should add an icon on top right of an article (star, DotM or at guide status) if the same article is star, DotM or guide on other WV language editions? OR are you suggesting that we add icon on article when the same article is featured, star or guide on other WV editions but the same article is either at outline or usable status on this edition of WV? --Saqib (talk) 14:49, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I mean same system as in Wikipedia. We have a list of interwikis in the left panel. If an article is featured, say, in Polish Wikivoyage, it receives a star against the link "Polish" in all other languages. --Alexander (talk) 14:54, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh okay, thats a good idea but having a star (as in WP) is more than enough rather than abbreviation icons. --Saqib (talk) 15:05, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't recall seeing this kind of indication on Wikipedia. If someone could post a link to a relevant article, that would be helpful. Ikan Kekek (talk) 15:09, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

~~I didn't understand. Sorry! --Saqib (talk) 15:14, 26 January 2014 (UTC)~~[reply]

Ikan, here is an example of such a WP article; look at the languages section on the left side. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:23, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the indicators regarding feature and good articles on wp en show up on creators user pages at the top right hand corner and they almost every time look a really horrible mess, however if it is an unassuming marker like as indicated like Ypsilon has indicated - it should be encouraged and used - unobtrusive but informative. sats (talk) 15:30, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alexander, I think we will have to create a template such as this and then manually add the template to desired articles. --Saqib (talk) 15:33, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is rather about changes to Common.css. The template itself is not necessary, because we already have stars and DoTMs reflected in {{pagebanner}}. The question is whether this special "id" for featured articles will work on Wikivoyage. One has to try... --Alexander (talk) 15:50, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the link, Ypsilon. It seems like a no-brainer to just add the star symbol to the sidebar in the way the Wikipedia article does. But another symbol would have to be used if we want to show that the article had been featured on the front page of another language version. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How about a laurel wreath, to indicate that in this and that language, the article has been specially recognized in some way. Nicolas1981 (talk) 16:25, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I see one major problem. The mechanism of featured articles in Wikipedia requires that an appropriate template is added to each language version. Of course, this never happens. An implementation through Wikidata is needed... --Alexander (talk) 16:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That is in the works, and will hopefully be done soon. --Rs chen 7754 18:33, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Our banners are being re-used outside Wikivoyage :-)

Our banners are being put to good use by other projects :-)

See Reasonator: http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q350 The banner is from Wikivoyage.

With Wikidata, your contributions benefit to more people than ever, even in a ways you would never have imagined when contributing. Nicolas1981 (talk) 16:13, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One more image for each article?

Wikidata has a "image" field for each city/place. The image is used by Wikipedia infoboxes, for instance see the upper-right image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge . These images always show a nice view of the city or one of its most famous landmark, in fair weather.

How about reusing this image in Wikivoyage?

Maybe 1% of our articles have enough (or even too many) images, but 99% of our articles are in desperate need of more images.

So: the drawback would be that we will have to adjust for a few articles, but the gain is so huge it is really worth it, I think.

What do you think about it? Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:50, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've held my tongue about it up to now, but I am extremely skeptical of the one-size-fits-all, assembly-line approach to our content that Wikidata has engendered in a growing number of our users. We've already used Wikidata to standardize the decision of which pagebanner we use for the same destination on all language versions that currently use them, seemingly without stopping to consider that en: is thereby pre-empting discussions on all other language versions which, if they had taken place, may very well have resulted in a different consensus on which image to use. We've talked about moving listings to Wikidata, seemingly without stopping to consider that some attractions may be relevant to some language communities and not to others. We're also talking about standardizing section images across language versions, seemingly without a thought as to whether other Wikivoyage communities might prefer a different alternative.

I say "seemingly" because, although I haven't heard anything to indicate that there's a mechanism in MediaWiki that allows individual communities to deviate from the preset selections on Wikidata if they prefer, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. If I'm wrong about this, I apologize and retract this statement.

I think Wikidata can certainly be a valuable tool in some cases, but if we don't seriously circumscribe the range of scenarios where we use it, my fear is that Wikivoyage will turn into McDonald's, where all the originality is standardized and automated out of the product and the author's role is reduced to little more than transcribing information into a preset template. Instead, I want Wikivoyage to be a gourmet haute-cuisine restaurant, where talented authors create exciting articles to entice readers in ways that are artful and a little bit different (and hopefully better) than what can be found elsewhere. I want to write; I don't want to do data entry. And I certainly don't want to presume to tell de:, fr:, it:, etc. what's best for them.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:22, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliantly written and analysed, AndreCarrotflower! Bravo! --150.101.89.130 08:55, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In cases where an article doesn't have a lead image I would be in favor of plugging in whatever wikidata has on the theory that it would be better to include an image automatically than not have one. I think Andre's fears of turning over too much control to wikidata are something to be aware of, but we should also be making an effort to consolidate data that doesn't change across language versions to make maintenance easier. I also think using wikidata to set a "base" data set for things like banners is a net positive - a new language version can launch with banners on all articles, and override as desired, for example. Hopefully the wikidata interface will eventually evolve to the point where we can view an article on English Wikivoyage and have a tab or other UI element that allows us to see all data that comes from (and is available for use from) wikidata for that article so that we can easily pick and choose what to include, but that day is probably a few years off. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:39, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As an administrator and oversighter on Wikidata, I of course support the use of its data wherever it is effective.

However, I'm not convinced that this particular use is effective; on an implementation level I'm not sure that it is possible, for one. --Rs chen 7754 03:57, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of images, how about we look at data that is not subjective and equally applicable between languages and communities?

How about climate data? Is it a compelling use case to centralize the monthly rainfall, temperature and humidity levels of a location in WikiData? Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:32, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Now there's a good idea! Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:03, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't even say I'm against Wikidata being used for things that are more subjective, if and only if there's an easy way to opt-out in each individual instance. I remember a few months ago a Wikidata glitch led to the pagebanner for Syracuse (Italy) being used for Syracuse (New York). It was fixed easily enough, but the lingering problem is that if there's a way for anyone who stumbles upon the perfect image to use as a new pagebanner for either of those articles to put it in place without navigating a tortured, sluggish interwiki bureaucracy, I have yet to figure it out. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:15, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We all strive to make gourmet haute-cuisine for all articles here. But it will take years. Meanwhile, how about making sure all destinations are at least palatable?

Quality: Wikidata's image field is better than McDonald-level :-)

Implementability: Got implemented today on French Wikipedia.

Edit wars: More disputes will probably arise between en.wv members trying to find 20,000 new suitable images, that if starting with Wikidata's already-curated set.

Catering to different communities: Just my opinion, but I see our goal as universal. There are more cultural differences between some English-speaking communities than between some Spanish-speaking communities. For instance, religion is probably a bigger cultural difference than language, yet nobody would not even consider splitting Wikivoyage into religious groups. Let's face it, if the whole world had only 1 language, then there would be only 1 Wikivoyage... which means that having several Wikivoyages is a technical necessity, not a higher goal. Why export this technical necessity to non-language realms?

"en: is pre-empting": For what I have seen, other languages are happy to collaborate, and simply override Wikidata values when it does not fit (yes, opting-out is easy).

Cheers! :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:33, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many of the lead city images on Wikipedia (only some of which are encoded in Wikidata) are montages (ex: File:Boston Montage.jpg), which violate our image policy. Powers ^(talk) 14:54, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a solid counter-argument indeed! I don't know whether such montages are OK on Wikipedia actually, the closest policy I could find is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Collages_and_montages and it says "If a gallery would serve as well as a collage or montage, the gallery should be preferred". In fact, I could have fun writing a small algorithm that recognizes whether an image is a montage or not :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 16:14, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pages without lead pictures often mean pages without much content of any kind, so putting a picture on such articles really doesn't matter so much. Generally, with content comes pictures either uploaded from the person adding the content or someone (still likely the one adding the content) will likely search for pictures when the article has enough content to hold them. Articles with no or little content do not bother me if they lack a picture. I like the pictures to be organically added. Having no pictures can inspire contributors to upload their own new images as well. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 16:40, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I share the concerns of LtPowers, ChubbyWimbus and others. I think a personal, organic approach is better here. Our empty articles are not going to actually benefit from showing the reader the same lead image they will see as soon as they inevitably click over to Wikipedia to find some actual information. Texugo (talk) 17:59, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Empty See and Do sections in country articles

Have you noticed that the either See or Do or both are empty in quite a few country or "area comparable with country" articles (like Jersey), particularly in those places that don't get many visitors. In my opinion these are the most important sections, so it's a shame that they are empty (especially See). It would perhaps be too much to call together an expedition, but if you spot such an article, feel free to fill those sections with a few sentences. If there are UNESCO world heritage sites in the country those sites are obvious candidates. You can of course also click on cities and other destinations to see if there's anything interesting in their See and Do sections that could be mentioned in the country article. ϒpsilon (talk) 05:35, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A content priority indeed! A few people (including me) have been working actively on country see sections as part of the Wikivoyage:Country surgeon Expedition. Unfortunately, although almost everyone agreed it was important and a bunch of people signed up, only a few found the time to really contribute. And then there was so much going on with the move. I'm glad you brought it back to attention :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 10:20, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dynamic map problems

Why are none of the dynamic maps visible now, unless clicked on? I hope everyone else is having the same problem. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:02, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There were some stability issues with the internal page frame and the 'plug was pulled'. There are hopes this can be resolved within the next couple of weeks. Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:15, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I hope so. It's a pretty bad problem. Thanks for the explanation. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:25, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is a bad problem. I'd like to give the guys a chance to fix it without any pressure in the first instance, although afterwards we need a discussion around the technical support for the Dynamic Maps and how stability can be addressed.Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:05, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be working fine in French Wikivoyage. I have raised it with the map guys here. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:26, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Birthday and congratulations

Yesterday we celebrated our 7th birthday. On December 10, 2006 we started Wikivoyage with the German branch. One year later, the Italian one started. And we got a nice birthday present from Google: The central Wikivoyage home page has now a PageRank of 7, and the English main page a PageRank of 6. Now, if that is not enough to keep thinking positive. --RolandUnger (talk) 09:36, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Congrats and well done. --Saqib (talk) 09:51, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Great news! Congratulations, and many thanks to the German community for initiating this project! --Alexander (talk) 09:55, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Birthday! And thank you very much for all you've done to welcome those of us from other language communities! Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:10, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Happy ♥ birthday to you dear Wikivoyage --Walta (talk) 00:22, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Happy 7th birthday Wikivoyage! --Sonusmarty (talk) 23:23, 7 February 2014 (UTC)Sonusmarty[reply]

4x4 abbreviations

It seems we have a split usage on voyage in relation to the 4WD and 4X4 (and their variations with and without caps, 4wd, 4x4, etc) - as consistent usage might help, is there any indication of why or why not one might trump the other? or is it as found - about 50/50...

One only hopes there is some good reason for usages one way or the other sats (talk) 06:12, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Although both are understandable for most native English speakers, I prefer 4x4 because

1) it's more immediately understandable for most users of English as a secondary language

2) it's less noticeable when the the case flip flops in the way you noticed

3) it's a short step to be able to write something like "2x4 vehicles can also successfully negotiate this road in the dry season..." --150.101.89.130 08:42, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It wasnt a personal question or asking for your personal opinion, If it was I would have gone to your talk page - I am interested what other editors of voyage actually think as it involves a large number of articles - and others might be interested (or not) as well. sats (talk) 09:44, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

First of all: I know very little of cars. I think both words are easy enough to understand, also for non-native speaker. I always thought they were just two words for the same thing, but Wikipedia makes a difference in definitions:

Four-by-four (4x4) refers to the general class of vehicles. The first figure is normally the total wheels (more precisely, axle ends, which may have multiple wheels), and the second, the number that are powered.
Four wheel drive (4WD) refers to vehicles that have a transfer case, not a differential, between the front and rear axles, meaning that the front and rear drive shafts will be locked together when engaged.

If that is true, 4x4 is clearly the better choice for me when writing, as I wouldn't know the difference when I see such a vehicle. It seems smart to have that general term as a preference. However, it seems a bit silly to tell people who do know their cars which word to use. JuliasTravels (talk) 10:31, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I do know a moderate amount about cars. I think the WP text quoted above is seriously wrong.

To me, "Four-wheel drive" or "4wd" is the general term for a vehicle that sends power to all four wheels; the term contrasts with "front-wheel drive" or "rear-wheel drive". This is the term we should use in almost all cases.

Contrary to WP, calling something "4wd" has absolutely nothing to do with whether a transfer case, a diff or a torque converter is used to distribute the power.

To me, "Four by four" or "4x4" is more a description of vehicle type, albeit rather an imprecise one; it implies something along the lines of a light truck with 4wd and some off-road capability. There are a number of vehicles — notably various Audi and Subaru models — that are 4wd but that I wouldn't call 4x4 because they are insufficiently truck-like. Pashley (talk) 22:29, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This has gone no-where in s month, any further suggestions, as voyage still has the 2 uses and no convention or agreed resoltuion on this matter - and the inconsistency shows, if you look at this particular issue... sats (talk) 10:57, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to consensus building

Anyone who is interested in potential modifications to our consensus-building process, please consider commenting at Wikivoyage talk:Consensus#Wikivoyage:Consensus/Draft. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:42, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright problem!

Please take a look at a post I wrote on the talk page of the article about the island of Nevis. Invertzoo (talk) 00:14, 5 February 2014 (UTC) Copied from: Wikivoyage_talk:Community_portal#Copyright_problem.21 --Nick ^talk 00:34, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Nick, although I think the protocol is fairly straightforward for dealing with Copyright violations? What is your question/intent for reposting on the pub? Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was just moving Invertzoo's original post as it had been placed on the community portal talk page, which isn't where I think she intended it to go. I've asked Invertzoo to highlight the specific parts that she believes are copyvios. --Nick ^talk 02:43, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK thanks, understood. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:08, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, although the (mostly basic) information is comparable, I'm not finding a lot of verbatim texts so easily, but I should look further. The strange part here is that the user who is pointing to this copyright gradually wrote most of the article his/herself, about a year ago. I'm not sure if he/she has been told by TA to stop also posting things elsewhere (which would be questionable, since their terms of use include a noninclusive license) or that he/she's forgotten they wrote it.. I'll ask on her talk page too, but it seems to me this user has claimed and holds (co)ownership and uploaded under our cc license? JuliasTravels (talk) 10:06, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello again, I believe this was my error. I was tired when I posted my note and I had not realized that I was the one who originally wrote virtually all of the text, so I mistaken thought that it had been copied from TripAdvisor articles which myself and a friend had written some years before. I will check again, but probably everything is just fine. Sorry to raise an alarm unnecessarily. Invertzoo (talk) 14:23, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, good that the info can stay and lots of thanks for your contributions! Now that we have pub attention for Nevis, maybe some of our great banner people can whip up a somewhat more colorful banner? :-) Suitable pictures are hard to come by for it, and the ones we have are mostly from StKitts, but there are a few on Commons and I added one there that I found on Flickr and has at least a bit of Nevis. Would that work? JuliasTravels (talk) 16:24, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Can the copyright tag be removed from Saint Kitts as well? Texugo (talk) 16:25, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Check the banner, but it won't be very nice because of the low quality of this photo. --Alexander (talk) 19:44, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks! I figured, but in any case it's more inspiring than the grey default banner for a sunny destination like this :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 08:18, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to Joachim

for helping to get our dynamic maps up and running again! --118.93nzp (talk) 00:25, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely! Thanks Joachim! :) --Nick ^talk 21:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A belated thank you from me as well! There is no other person who missed them more than I did... But they're back again, just like a long lost friend, and they melt the tears awaaaaaayyyyy....

Funnily enough tho, I now seem to have issues with displaying them in Firefox on Mac OS, but not under Windows (same Firefox). Weeeeeird. Good to have them back anyway, Joachim, you and Torty made Wikivoyage really valuable and worth expanding further! PrinceGloria (talk) 18:21, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Markers and numbers

I asked a question in Template_talk:Marker#Manipulating_the_numbers_on_the_markers, our POI Map expert Joachim has been editing today but has been too busy (?) to reply or something so I'll play newbie and ask it in the pub where everyone can see it. **

I'd like to know if it's possible to force a marker to have a specific number. I plan to mark out important stations on the Trans-Siberian Railway on a dynamic map (trying to make a really stylish Featured travel topic of it :)). The railway forks into three separate lines in Siberia and I like the numbers to be continuous on all three forks. For instance (click here to "get the picture"), there's a junction at marker 17 and after that one track goes east to Vladivostok with the next station being Chita and another south to Beijing with the next station being Naushki. I'd like both stations to be labeled nr. 18.

If I put in a Heading 2 and start adding the first 17 points from Moscow with the same coordinates they will be hidden in the map - but not in the text.

And if I continue from Vladivostok in the same section, Naushki will be nr. 23... ϒpsilon (talk) 17:20, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a somewhat weird solution: add all your stations from 1 to 17 to the Trans-Mongolian section. Then comment them out. Then the numbering should start from 18 in this section. I hope it works-) --Alexander (talk) 17:31, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

** Yes, I get many requests from all language versions. But the actual reason is that the notification system is unreliable. Since you called my sign, I should have received a notification. That did not happen in 3 or 4 cases in the last times. And perhaps even more cases that I never noticed. - Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 17:44, 3 February 2014 (UTC) (My actual answer will follow shortly.)[reply]

Thanks for the idea, Alexander. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work. Hope Joachim will have a solution, otherwise I'll have to start the numbering anew and that'll probably look a bit awkward on the map. ϒpsilon (talk) 18:01, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A manipulation of marker numbers is not provided. I think because of some changes in the script, unfortunately, the proposal of Alexander no longer works well. - I suggest to choose markers in a different color for the secondary lines. You can used these types: . The numbering will start at 1 in each new section, except for for type=listing (other.png). -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 18:28, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Schade. :( OK, I guess this is the best solution. Thanks. ϒpsilon (talk) 18:37, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While we are at that, perhaps there is a solution to a different dilemma - sometimes there are two or three different POIs in the same place. E.g. there is a historic palace or castle (See), within which there is an unrelated museum (Do, or another See), e.g. of natural history, which merits a separate POI, and there is also a good restaurant in same building (Eat), and sometimes even a hotel on location (Sleep). Same with railway stations that double as shopping centres and also have a tourist information point. It would be worthwhile to refer to them separately in different places across the article, but there is no point in creating several overlapping markers on the map that would only make it all less legible. Is there a possibility to invoke a marker already placed in the article again in the text, to display the same number and symbol? PrinceGloria (talk) 18:57, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's not possible, and it is not clear how to implement this feature. The listings are numbered according to their order in the article, one after another, and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the listing and its number. So you basically need a script that goes through the article two times. In the first run, it makes a table and assigns the number to each listing. In the second run, it looks for a specific listing, reads it number, and copies it, as necessary. Complicated... --Alexander (talk) 19:48, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps a bit repetitive, but not really complicated, as you just explained. If there is a table stored somewhere that matches POIs (using what as index? the "name" field combined with the "type" field? only "name"? something else) with numbers and shapes, it can easily become a reference table that matches one set of template references with particular POI-objects, and then the POI-objects with the graphic displayed on screen. Doesn't seem complicated with regard to that, there may be some issue with implementation I cannot forsee, but complexity as such does not seem to be a problem. PrinceGloria (talk) 19:55, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Previously, I have offered two methods related to overlapping markers: Clustering and spiderfier . Both methods were rejected by the community. Therefore, I now suggest a simple manual process. -- The zoom level 16 (1:8000) is similar to a printed city map. There should be no overlapping markers, also in view of a later paper printout. In this zoom level easily modify the coordinates so that the markers appear side by side. This works without additional software. Click on the dynamic map at the desired point. A popup window appears: "You clicked the map at lat = 52.15382 | long = 9.97044". With Copy & Paste the coordinates of the listings can be corrected. - Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 07:00, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I personally think that Spiderfier would be great if tooltips appeared when hovering each of the "spider feet" with the mouse. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:38, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimania 2013 Presentation Video

It looks like DerFussi and Travel Doc James's excellent presentation about WV from last year's Wikimania has now been posted online. Well worth a watch and also a reminder of some things that we still need to do! --Nick ^talk 02:12, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Patrolling

Edits that I have marked as patrolled are still marked with !, does anyone know why? --ClausHansen (talk) 14:14, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. Seems to be working fine here. When you mark it, do you get the little javascript pop-up saying it has been marked as patrolled? If not, I suppose it could be a javascript problem with your browser. Texugo (talk) 14:22, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It works for single edits, but it appears that it is not possible to mark multiple edits as patrolled with one click, is that how it is supposed to work?, --ClausHansen (talk) 16:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikivoyage talk:Recent changes patrol#Patrolling problem. There is a bugzilla report open on this issue - adding a vote to the bug might help it get resolved more quickly. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:47, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Looking for something useful to do?

Download the latest listings.csv file
Open the CSV file in LibreOffice/Excel/spreadsheet program
Sort by phone, or by latitude, or by longitude, or by url, or by image (it takes time because the file is big)
Check the values towards the beginning and towards the end. There are a lot of malformed values, with various erroneous characters, for instance a phone number starting with underscore, etc.
Fix any erroneous value directly in Wikivoyage, using the article name from the first column.
When you are done, try sorting by another column and fix again :-)

Thanks a lot! Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:44, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nicholas, I know we don't have direct access to the WV database but in the commercial world this approach is called a data cleansing activity. Such strategies attempt to fix 95% of issues automatically with simple algorithms and the remaining 'fall outs' can be done manually.

We can create and edit listings using a dialog box, that (I assume) has a corresponding API behind it. Would it not be better to leverage this API (perhaps with a bot) and try and fix things automatically first?

I'm not familiar with this API, although I'd be happy to learn if you felt this could be a worthwhile strategy. Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:58, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed a few items using the list. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:11, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a huge understatement - I've noticed the tremendous number of great (non-content) edits you've been making - with that level of modesty you must be a Brit! --118.93nzp (talk) 09:49, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, if you notice something that would better be fixed by a writing script (more than 200 items maybe?) then please write what is the pattern and what it should be changed to. When sorting the columns and looking at the end of beginning, you usually get the "less-than-200" occasional typos etc. An example of something that would require a script is the coordinates in hours/minutes/seconds instead of a decimal number. Nicolas1981 (talk) 16:52, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How to grow Wikivoyage

Hi folks, I've been looking at different initiatives like the search expedition page and various projects to grow articles, and discussions like the one above that Nick started. I'd like to start an open conversation about ideas for growing Wikivoyage: getting more editors, increasing the quality of articles, raising our profile in search rankings, etc. I'm asking both as a community member/editor and as a WMF Board of Trustees member who is interested in the health of all of our projects; we all want this project to be successful. Share your thoughts! Thanks, -- Phoebe (talk) 22:19, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Phoebe! The first and foremost answer is quite simple: free a few hours time of the WMF legal department to review the dreaded footer on every page, with hyperlink to Wikitravel. Virtually everyone agrees that it's likely a major factor in our bad search engine visibility, and almost everyone agrees that we are probably overzealous in terms of attribution, since the full histories have been imported and the Wikitravel terms of use explicitly did not require a hyperlink at the time of the fork. However, as the footer has been created with help of the legal team, the community does not feel able to remove the hyperlink without a green light from the legal department. If you could get that ball rolling, you'd make many of us very happy indeed. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:27, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aha, thanks, I wasn't aware of that issue. Can you point me to where it's been discussed before? That would be great. And more ideas both specific and general would be lovely! -- Phoebe (talk) 22:36, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Phoebe! Thanks for asking! If you found the above discussion interesting, a similar, longer one took place a few months ago that you might also be interested in seeing (another faintly apocalyptic opening from me, I'm afraid :) ). I absolutely agree with JuliasTravels that removing the hyperlink citation would be a major achievement for the project, but there are other things (beyond the Search Expedition) that we've attempted to do.

The Tourism Bureau Expedition aimed to liaise with tourism bureaux around the world and engage them in both the creation and publicity guides on this site. Whilst we did have some success (I can only speak for the cases that I'm familiar with, but Manchester's tourist board seemed genuinely interested and sent me several emails, whilst the London/City of London bureau actively edited), we have been somewhat hampered by our low readership and unreliable (and disappointing?) statistics which are required to attract such important partners. It's something of a vicious circle.

We've also greatly increased our presence on social media and we now have active Facebook and Twitter accounts, that hopefully draw people in, though such an influx is difficult to quantify (but thanks for your recent tweets!).

Finally, we've also seen the simple improvement of content as a way to improve our readership. This (we hope) differentiates us from other wiki-based travel guides (important for SEO), but also hopefully makes us a better site for the traveller overall - quality will out! We've developed many expeditions to this end, but unfortunately (here comes that vicious circle once again) we don't really have enough editors to keep more than a couple running at peak efficiency at once, so they tend to come in waves.

I'm sure I've forgotten many other things that have been tried on here, but hopefully this will give you a taste of what has already been considered to help improve the site's reader(and editor)-ship. I'll post again soon once I've thought of some new ideas to help make Wikivoyage bigger and better. I'm sorry if this post is a little incoherent - it's 3AM here!

Thanks for getting in touch! :) --Nick ^talk 02:51, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Phoebe: I think Wikivoyage faces the same issues as many of the other smaller Wikimedia projects, namely that we would benefit greatly from more visibility and thus more regular editors. Improving our search engine ranking is one way to get there, but if the WMF Board can think of other ways to promote its smaller projects then that would be huge - our biggest traffic week was by far when a banner ran on Wikipedia promoting the new site, so perhaps there would be a way to make the links between projects more prominent. Another option might be for WMF to extend the outreach that has been done with classrooms and local groups to encourage their participation, and I'm sure there are other outreach efforts that could be considered.

Another area where WMF might help would be in finding ways to facilitate collaboration between projects - often there are initiatives that would help multiple projects, but people are unaware of them. Also, in some cases we have concerns that are not specific to Wikivoyage, and it would be nice to raise those concerns with other projects and hopefully help make them a higher priority (example: #Patrolling). I don't know if that could be handled by having a staff member who could act as a community coordinator, or making it easier to collaborate on meta, or what form that would take, but I think it would help every project that WMF oversees.

In the mean time, while we have ten years of documentation and processes in place, we're working to make Wikivoyage friendlier and easier to use, although given the constraints imposed by collaborative development it can be a slow process to change. I'm hopeful for the future, grateful for everything WMF has done already (the past year is MUCH improved over what we had before!), and like Nick very much appreciate the fact that you got in touch! -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:27, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, @Phoebe: for not including the links. The Wikitravel hyperlink issue has been discussed at several places and times, including on meta. Geoffbrigham responded there on behalf of the legal team and pointed out that they can only give legal advice to WMF itself. Unfortunately, he qualifies the issue as a "detail" and suggests we focus on creating content. We all get that, especially considering the work load that team probably has (and we focus on content a lot too!), but I'm afraid he's not understanding the huge impact of the issue on the community and site. There's a bugzilla request for it; I suppose if we could ask WMF to remove the link for us, it should be fine for Legal to advise? If it would make reviewing easier, I'd be happy to write up a summary of the issue as a start, and the rationale we have for thinking the link probably doesn't need to be there. Of course the others are right: any help on other ways to increase visibility are all most welcome too. It's just that the few Legal hours are a relatively simple thing that could go a really long way :-)

One other link you might be able to make (in time) is with chapters. As far as contacting tourism bureaus goes, I think if any chapters are interested, they would be in a great position to do so. As Nick said, however, it's only interesting for them to work with us when we're more visible. In any case, it's nice of you to take an interest. JuliasTravels (talk) 20:27, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Improving search engine visibility via Wikipedia and Commons

WP and Commons are full of millions of items which have geolocations, each of which is related to some nearby Wikivoyage landmark or page. How can we best use this to drive visibility of WV? Are there currently bots and scripts that insert links to WV where appropriate? ` Sj (talk) 22:46, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm interested to know more about this. Since WP has a much higher search visibility, it would be great to have a link on a WP article page to take interested travelers to the corresponding WV page. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:50, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata can make this very easy, if we can find which template to add the link to. The infobox would be perfect technically, but maybe it is not the best place. As a remainder, here is something that seems to work:

{{sister|project=voyage
|text=[[Wikivoyage]] has travel information related to: '''''[[voy:Paris|Paris]]'''''
}}

Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:41, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Newspapers

Some countries where the English language does not predominate do, nevertheless, have locally produced (as opposed to foreign publications like the International Herald Tribune) national newspapers in English. Is it unhelpful to mention them in country articles and, if not, where should they be mentioned - in the "Connect" section?

Some examples:

Algeria: Algeria Daily
Argentina: Buenos Aires Herald
Bhutan: Kuensel
Cambodia: Phnom Penh Post
Cameroon: the Cameroon Daily Journal
China: China Daily
Cuba: Granma Internacional
Czech Republic: Transitions Online, The Prague Post
Denmark: Copenhagen Post
Egypt: Al-Ahram Weekly, Daily News
Ethiopia: Fortune, The Reporter
France: Le Monde diplomatique has an English language version
Georgia: Georgian Times
Greece: Kathimerini
Israel: Jerusalem Post
Japan: Daily Yomiuri
Jordan: Jordan Times
South Korea: Korean Times. The Korea Herald
Latvia: Baltic Times
Lebanon: Lebanon Daily Star
Libya: Libya Herald
Malaysia: The Star, Daily Express, Borneo Bulletin
Mongolia: UB Post
Norway: Norway Post
Pakistan: The Nation, Dawn, Daily Times, The Daily Mail,
Poland: Warsaw Voice
Romania: Nine O'Clock
Russia: St. Petersburg Times, Moscow News, Moscow Times, Pravda's English edition
Slovak Republic: The Slovak Spectator
Taiwan: The China Post, Taipei Times
Thailand: Bangkok Post
Ukraine: Kiev Post
Yemen: Yemen Times --118.93nzp (talk) 03:31, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's a good idea. By the way, the main English-language newspaper in Malaysia is the New Straits Times, which is associated with UMNO, the senior coalition partner of the Malaysian Federal government since 1969. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:17, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, that's almost precisely why I didn't mention this government mouthpiece. Do you think it would be a good idea to amend Wikivoyage:Country article template#Connect accordingly, then? --118.93nzp (talk) 04:34, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd mention it, anyway. The Star is, or at least used to be associated with the MCA, the major Chinese coalition partner. Any time you're dealing with an illiberal democracy, still less an authoritarian regime, you can count on all or at least most mass-circulation newspapers either openly or tacitly being government mouthpieces. In the case of Malaysia, the PAS Islamist opposition party has a newspaper in English, so include them if you like, but I would not adopt a political litmus test of excluding government mouthpieces. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:44, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that was just an illustrative list, not an exhaustive or definitive one. It'll be up to the usual interaction between editors which ones are listed or not. I just wondered whether there was some general sentiment not to mention newspapers or radio stations that might be interesting or informative to a visiting traveller - or to gauge general crime levels/locations or recent developments before they visit (where they have an online presence too)... --118.93nzp (talk) 05:20, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's a good idea. And since you bring up radio stations, FM or AM frequencies that broadcast BBC, US Armed Forces Radio, or indeed English-language services of non-Anglophone countries (e.g., English-language Deutsche Welle or NHK) are good to list in relevant city, region, or national articles, depending on signal coverage. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I also think this would be a good idea. I often look for English-language papers when I travel, and knowing whether there is one or not is useful -- Phoebe (talk) 06:01, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So, in the "Connect" section - or somewhere else? --118.93nzp (talk) 06:27, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the Buffalo guide, media are in the "Cope" section. I guess the idea is that "Connect" is specifically for personal communications, rather than mass media reception. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:34, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That early in my tenure at Wikitravel/Wikivoyage, I can almost guarantee you that I was mimicking Powers' setup on Rochester (New York). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:31, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Credit where it's due, then, but would you go along with my attempt at understanding the reason for putting mass media info in "Cope," rather than "Connect"? Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:43, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose so, but I'm hoping Powers will see himself mentioned here and weigh in decisively. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:55, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@LtPowers:

It's not often that we use a country template to create a new article, so it may be that this has been overlooked - or, the vast country US (as opposed to British or French) experience of having few national newspapers may have meant that this was overlooked.

The advice at Wikivoyage:Where you can stick it#N is unequivocal where local or city media are concerned, but my question relates specifically to the country or regional level. Wikivoyage:Country article templates don't currently have a "Cope" section (and Wikivoyage:Region article templates currently have neither a "Cope" section nor a "Connect" section) - are you suggesting that we create one, just for this sort of thing? --118.93nzp (talk) 08:25, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Connect" was originally "Contact", which did infer personal communications. It was renamed as it tended to fill with "contact the local CVB for travel info," which was not its intent.

There's a broader question of what to do with local entities not in the local majority language which aren't part of a tourist food/lodging/attraction category but might happen to be of use to same-language travellers. For instance, a cultural centre or expatriate community; "le Centre Frontenac" is in fr:Kingston (Ontario) under "Understand" ("Comprendre") as it could be a valid source of French-language info to Wikivoyageurs in that language, even though it primarily serves a local francophone minority. K7L (talk) 18:19, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed; I don't know the reason why newspapers were put in Cope, but that's where they were put. I can surmise that it's because people turn to newspapers to learn news and check the weather forecast and generally undertake their daily lives, rather than a method of communication with people. You can read the original discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Where you can stick it#bloated Understand-ing, where it appears that newspapers were in Understand until cacahuate suggested moving them to Cope. It's true that country-level articles don't usually need Cope sections (though I can see some counter-arguments for that); in the case of national newspapers, I'd suggest either creating a Cope section (which is allowed per Wikivoyage:Article templates/Sections), or using Understand or Contact. Powers ^(talk) 18:36, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Was that a typo @LtPowers:? Did you mean to say I'd suggest either creating a Cope section (which is allowed per Wikivoyage:Article templates/Sections), or using Understand or Connect (my underlining added for clarity) ? --118.93.237.217 02:48, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Generic or "unclassified destination" article template needed?

Copied from Talk:Nevis to achieve a wider hearing by --118.93nzp (talk) 06:24, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think this article could use a sleep section. Since the island as a whole is rather undeveloped we might not need individual "town" articles, but ideally we should have listings for hotels and restaurants at some point. I'd say this is one of those places where it would probably be fine to include individual listings in the region article, or not? JuliasTravels (talk) 19:00, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh I definitely agree with you. This should be treated as a city article. It would be pointless to have it really be a region which includes a single city article that contains the majority of what there is to say about the island. I have redirected the pointless Charleston article here for that reason. Texugo (talk) 19:07, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree with both of you.

Would it be useful to have a "small islands template" that we could use instead of "small city" or "region" for articles like Ukulhas, etc? --118.93nzp (talk) 22:57, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think if any additional template is created, it should rather be a more general one. I've been trying to find good ways to deal with this repeatedly, for vast, undeveloped regions, for islands and for smaller developed rural areas with only 1 or 2 listings per settlement. The problem is quite similar really. There's not a huge amount of consistency between this kind of destinations now: some are put in a city article, some in a region one, some just collects listings in the usual sections, others have sections per "settlement". Which is more useful depends on the case, so maybe we shouldn't really be looking for a template but rather for a more general understanding of how to work with such places, and that we can be a bit creative with listings in region articles and such. JuliasTravels (talk) 09:22, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Newly detected: Malformed emails

Here is a new list of 211 malformed email addresses. I filtered out the most common mistakes, which might be fixed by a script, so these 211 must be done manually, thanks a lot!

I also updated the list of malformed latitudes/longitudes, thanks to all we have fixed many, but there are still a lot to fix :-)

Nicolas1981 (talk) 17:17, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Consulates in country articles

I agree with the advice that consulates should be listed in detail in the city destination guide that contains them.

But shouldn't our country articles also contain a sub-section in the "Cope" section pointing towards those containing cities?

I'm thinking particularly of those countries that have a relatively small or new capital and most of the consulates have remained in a larger or older city (eg, Rangoon still has the consular facilities in Burma rather than the new and much smaller capital of Naypyidaw)... --118.93nzp (talk) 01:30, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, definitely. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've made a start with my own country of New Zealand then and begun to beef up the list for Wellington with Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown to follow before I quit. --118.93nzp (talk) 08:26, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a good idea. There are plenty of other cases where some info in the country article is needed. For example, in China there are three or four major cities with many consulates but a few countries, mainly from Southeast Asia, have consulates in Xiamen or Kunming. This sort of information can be quite useful to a traveller doing a multi-country trip and needing visas. Pashley (talk) 14:35, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Two email addresses for the same listing?

Is it OK to have several email addresses in the listings field? If yes, how should they be separated? The current template output does not seem to support several addresses, 1@e.com,2@e.com results in a "1@e.com," mailto: link.

Our documentation says "email: an email address" so I guess having several is not allowed?

Nicolas1981 (talk) 18:13, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that we've ever discussed the issue of multiple emails, but we frequently get listings with multiple phone numbers - see Wikivoyage talk:Listings#Multiple phone numbers for one of several threads on the subject. I believe consensus was to use only one entry per template field since that way the link works when clicked, and in general there should be no need for multiple values. If there really is a need for a second email then my recommendation would be to mention it in the listing content section, but most often I would guess the second email would be superfluous. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:26, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree that to add a second e-mail address in the "email" field of a templated listing is both superfluous and wrong (since it breaks the automatic "mail-to" functionality). I agree that needful instances should be inside the prose of the "content" field instead. Any second or oddball or non machine-diallable phone number (such as those containing letter mnemonics such as 1 800 MESSED-UP) should go in the "phoneextra" field shouldn't they? And, by the way, that field is still not being shown in listings... --118.93nzp (talk) 01:30, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting @118.93nzp I did not know about phonextra! I agree it should be used, so that our dial links work correctly. Currently we 5000 invalid fax, 25000 invalid phones, 800 invalid tollfree (listed here) Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:09, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a neat list of yours that would have kept me busy for months if I wasn't going to honour my offer to User:Wrh2... --118.93nzp (talk) 03:25, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@118.93nzp On the contrary I think you should take this great opportunity to take a break from politics and concentrate on 100% listing gnoming :-) How about fixing the backlog of invalid emails and erroneous "*" characters? These two can not be automated, so fixing them would be a major achievement! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:19, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A tempting suggestion, Nicolas.

Are you able to fix the listing machinery first, so that it then displays to our readers whatever is in the phoneextra field?

An example is this section: where currently the additional contact number of +64 3 477-3123 for Dr Sergio Gian Salis, the Honorary Consular Agent for Italy is not displayed, but instead "hidden" in our code. --118.93nzp (talk) 04:56, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll try to see for phoneextra! But that does not prevent you from starting with emails and stars :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:31, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nahhhh, I'm seeing too many floating stars before my eyeballs already and email addresses are too much work to check. Phone numbers is where I have some interest and where I can do that easily as an IP without too much argy-bargy. --118.93nzp (talk) 07:42, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Phone numbers? Like you want: User:Nicolas1981/Syntax_checks/Page2 Looking forward to be impressed :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:10, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that multiple phone #'s and email addresses should be super difficult using the existing template parameters:

multiple phone numbers and multiple emails can be entered using the existing phone and/or email parameters - a decided upon unique separator character would be needed. ie. phone = +7 812 230-64-31,+7 812 230-64-32,+7 812 230-64-31 where comma is the separator for example.
Modify Listing template to call a Scribunto module for handling the phone and email parameter. Some of the functionality would still be used for these 2 parameters.
Create a Lua module that would be called from the Listing template (This module would have functions for handling multiple phones and email addresses). Matroc (talk) 05:10, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Rough Coding Examples for my discussion above.... Matroc (talk) 12:12, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There shouldn't really be the need for multiple email addresses and if there is, it means that you can really just click on an email addrees to send an email to them as you will also need to email the other address as well, which then emails that it's more copy and pasting the email addresses rather than just clicking on them. A Lua modlu ecould be done which counts the number of @'s and if it's not 1, it adds the page to a tracking category. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:31, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The German vCard template uses up to three email address fields. In the past we had no tools like Lua to get the separate addresses from a comma-separated list to combine them with a mailto link. In future comma-separated lists should not be a problem. --RolandUnger (talk) 10:10, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What would constitute a real need for listing more than one email? Already, listing multiple phone number is unnecessary clutter in most cases. I'd hate to facilitate more of that without demonstrating a real need for it. Texugo (talk) 10:19, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple telephone numbers are valid if one's a hôtel and the other a restaurant in the hotel, as one example (we try to avoid duplicate listings as "eat" and "sleep" if the rest of the contact info's the same). I'm hesitant about multiple e-mails as I'm hesitant about publishing e-mail addresses at all; we're just signing these onto a heap of spam lists by including them, so should be omitting them unless they're the venue's only on-line presence (with no web site). K7L (talk) 17:05, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage in Wikimania 2014

This year I'm planning to attend Wikimania in London and hoping to do a presentation on Wikivoyage. Stefan said he won't be able to attend Wikimania this year but he'll help us with preparing a presentation. Dr will be also in the conference and has agreed to do a presentation and I think Nick may join us as well. Is anyone else planning to attend Wikimania this year? Any ideas and suggestions will be appreciated! --Saqib (talk) 13:13, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was interesting to see last year's video that Nick recently pointed us to. I thought it relevant that the first question from the audience was basically 'why WikiVoyage'?

A presentation that would help market our goals better within the WikiMedia organization would be great. Ideally we want to interest Wikipedians sufficiently that they would start contributing to WV after the conference. (I did not observe this happening after Hong Kong) Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm open to hear what community suggest and we can change the theme of our presentation. I've recently wrote Wikivoyage:About#Why Wikivoyage. Did you noticed? --Saqib (talk) 08:34, 12 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually no, I didn't notice. I'll maybe put some comments over there rather than derail your question here though!

We do get Wikipedia people from time to time, such as User:Sbmeirow who is obviously experienced at wiki editing and can help make a great contributions. I'd just like to see a one slide 'advert' for Wikivoyage to encourage more people like him to come have a look and perhaps contribute. Andrewssi2 (talk) 09:02, 12 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Saqib is right. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend. RolandUnger ist going to attend. But, of course. I am going to help with creating the presentation. -- Der Fussi 12:51, 12 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew, feel free to drop suggestions for the presentation here. I know its too early to talk on presentation but to get our presentation proposal accepted, we've to discuss on what to present in the presentation. Currently, I've in my mind to present about the progress, developments and improvements made in Wikivoyage after the migration as well what are our future plans but as you said, we need to further publicise the project among the Wikimedia community. I think we better change the subject of our presentation to something which focus more on "Why Wikivoyage". --Saqib (talk) 14:34, 12 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nice that you're going. I think the best idea is to draw up a proposal for your presentation, and let people comment and add to that. I also think before you come up with a theme and content, you should decide what your goals are and what audience you want to inspire. If you're looking to draw in Wikipedians, you need another presentation than when you want to address third parties who have no idea what Wikivoyage is. Keep in mind that last year Wikivoyage was all new, but now we're one of the projects and many Wikipedians roughly know what we're about and probably looked around once or twice. They need convincing rather than a presentation, I guess. But again, I'm not sure what you want to accomplish :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 17:09, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly speaking Julias, at first I really didn't want to do the presentation and that's why I first talked with Stefan whether he's going to do the presentation this year again but he said he've no plans to attend the conference, presentation aside. Then, I talked with User:Andyrom75 (last year attendee) whether he'll be going to attend the conference again this year but he said No as well. Then I talked with Nick and Nick said he's not sure whether he'll be able to attend the Wikimania this year and then I decided to do the presentation because I think a presentation is something we definitely need on such an important occasion, and keep doing at-least until WV community not grow. I'm glad Dr. has agreed to do the presentation and I still wish if Nick or someone else pop-up and I become the audience. Frankly speaking but I'm shy with these things. Now back to topic, at first I had in my mind to do a presentation on the progress of the project as I said in the proposal page but after Andrew message above, I think this is not a good idea and just a wastage of such a good opportunity so I've decided to change the topic/theme of the presentation to something which focus more on publicising the WV especially among the Wikimedian community. Wikimania is in August so we have a long time to start working on a presentation but I just want to make sure with the community if the community is agree with my proposed theme and topic of the presentation or something else so we make our proposal accordingly because Deadline for submitting proposal is March 31st. Now answer to your question what my goal is: obviously my audience is Wikipedians and goal is to encourage and motivate more new editors to join the WV. You said " They need convincing rather than a presentation", are you suggesting that we should arrange a talk, a discussion with them? --Saqib (talk) 19:30, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As per my last year experience I can tell you that there's no need of creating fancy stuff because the basic need is to let them know that voy exists; in fact most of them didn't! The most dumb thing that I've noticed in HK was the official brochure where the disclaimer said: "based on a Wikitravel article" :-DDD Take also into account that one third of the people that where in the room for the voy presentation, have been brought there by me. I hope that this year things have changed, but maybe not. --Andyrom75 (talk) 20:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why don't we create a travel guide for the Wikimania conference? It could be a simple flyer that gets handed out at the door, with brief descriptions of the venue and key attractions in the area. A presentation isn't necessary, and you probably shouldn't force yourself into something that you're uncomfortable with. There are many other ways to represent our project -- handing out flyers is one way, and talking to small groups is another way. Focus on what motivates you to be a part of the Wikivoyage community. As long as you're showing your passion for the project, others will be more inclined to join us. Edge3 (talk) 19:57, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Edge3, we already have a travel guide for the event: Wikimania_2014_London_Guidebook and AFAIU the idea was to give it to participants in some form. But I'm not sure if it would be necessary to print it out as that'd mean a whole lot of paper and ink. ϒpsilon (talk) 20:04, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Previously, I was actually thinking of something like you just suggested that make prints of Wikimania 2014 London Guidebook and give them to attendees but as YPSI said, the fact is most of the attendees will have tablets and smartphones and obviously they'll prefer to use our guide article in digital format on their devices rather than carrying paper or flyers. Btw, WV merchandising is a good idea and Stefan have some plan about it. BTW, I'm thinking of a presentation which can tell the difference between Wikipedia and Wikivoyage in a funny manner and also focus on why should one contribute to Wikivoyage rather than WP but this can hurt some Wikipedians but not if the presentation is in funny manner through funny images in the presentation. --Saqib (talk) 20:13, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You may also want to talk with other language Wikivoyages too, and see if they have any ideas. --Rs chen 7754 00:37, 16 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Image: vs. File:

I notice that Auto Wiki Browser is taking valid uses of Image: in articles and changing them to File:, for instance , leaving vague edit summaries like "clean up" or "typos fixed".

Image: is valid and was the original MediaWiki default. File: was introduced in the software somewhere around MW 1.6 on the assumption that a rare few files might be audio or multimedia, perhaps file:recorded-walking-tour.ogg or something. As WV articles specifically must be usable in their print form, we currently don't attach MP3/OGG or other non-images to our destinations as a matter of policy, so all of our files are indeed images.

Is it possible to turn this unneeded substitution of File: for Image: off? K7L (talk) 17:36, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Image:" is nothing but an alias included for backward compatibility. I think we should be using "File:" consistently, though I don't know if I'd bother editing a page if that's the only change. Powers ^(talk) 18:12, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As LtPowers notes, "Image:" is just an alias and has no special significance. My understanding is that it is now recommended to use "File:" instead - see for example w:Wikipedia:Images: "Images are classified as files and use the prefix of File: or the deprecated prefix of Image:". -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:30, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Basically per LtPowers; I don't think mass editing pages for the sole purpose of changing Image to File is a good thing, and clutters page histories. --Rs chen 7754 03:28, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Unless I'm mistaken AWB treats the Image:→File: conversion as a minor fix, and thus individuals using AWB would be prompted to save that change only if there are more substantial changes required (such as typo fixes). -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:01, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would also say that this is (mildly) confusing for new users. Turning off 'Image' would yield a minor useability enhancement for the site as a whole. Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:05, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty sure we can't turn it off... --Rs chen 7754 08:15, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How so? The links are to images. K7L (talk) 04:20, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Because it is not clear to a new user which they should use. Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:35, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

By now all Wikipedia editors are used to "File:". While it's not a big deal, sticking to "File:" makes our wikicode more standard, and thus a little bit more outsiders-friendly. It also makes bot-writing a bit easier, for instance all of my scripts understand "File:" but not "Image:". Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:41, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A bot or script will need to recognise both as both are built into the MediaWiki software and neither is going away. K7L (talk) 15:02, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If it were a perfect world! My scripts are far from perfect :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:05, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

UUTP

Looking at Special:WantedPages, the #1 "wanted" page, with 127 red links (more than twice those of #2), is a page called "UUTP". This page was originally created by User:Alice as a redirect to one of her user subpages, subsequently speedy deleted by myself because we don't redirect from the main namespace into someone's personal user space. Apparently all of the existing red links were inserted first by Alice as part of her personal welcome message template, then by User:W. Frank, who ostensibly copied Alice's message and inserted it on user and IP talk pages as his own, which was then continued by User:118.93nzp and who copied the message from Frank and inserted it as his own. Since it is not actually a "wanted page", and since it is part of a controversial welcome message from a controversial trio(?), would anyone object if I run AWB on these pages to delink "UUTP"? I realize it would technically involve changing someone elses message text, but the alternative would be that we forever keep "UUTP" as our number one most wanted page of all time. What say we? Texugo (talk) 01:24, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the visible difference on a user's page? Just the removal of an instance of [[UUTP]] ? Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:41, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

From a random sampling, it looks like it's always linked with the words "your very own talk page". The only difference would be that those words would be changed to plain black text instead of red links. Texugo (talk) 01:49, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For reference, the intended target for such links is User:Alice/Kitchen/Using User Talk pages. Perhaps there is information there that could be merged to Wikivoyage:User page help and UUTP links could be replaced with links to that page instead. If that's considered inappropriate due to changing another user's posts to say something other than what was intended, we should just replace all UUTP links to point to Alice's subpage. Powers ^(talk) 02:29, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I still figure the easiest thing would be to simply de-link it, but if someone volunteers to merge stuff to Wikivoyage:User page help right now, that would be fine with me. I would prefer to avoid the second option if possible, as I don't think it's appropriate to be sending IPs and new users to an unofficial page in someone's user space, especially if it might encourage the IP or newbie to turn to such a problematic user as some kind of mentor. Texugo (talk) 12:13, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed wholeheartedly with Texugo. Delinking is the answer. If it's not policy, it shouldn't be presented to impressionable newbies as if it were, least of all by a problem user such as Alice/Frank/118. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:16, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Could be changed to Special:MyTalk but since most of these are on the users talk page, the link wouldn't be that useful, so best to unlink it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:54, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A related discussion is now taking place at Wikivoyage talk:Using MediaWiki templates#De-linking of redlinked templates. Texugo (talk) 15:06, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Universal Language Selector will be enabled by default again on this wiki by 21 February 2014

On January 21 2014 the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector (ULS) was disabled on this wiki. A new preference was added for logged-in users to turn on ULS. This was done to prevent slow loading of pages due to ULS webfonts, a behaviour that had been observed by the Wikimedia Technical Operations team on some wikis.

We are now ready to enable ULS again. The temporary preference to enable ULS will be removed. A new checkbox has been added to the Language Panel to enable/disable font delivery. This will be unchecked by default for this wiki, but can be selected at any time by the users to enable webfonts. This is an interim solution while we improve the feature of webfonts delivery.

You can read the announcement and the development plan for more information. Apologies for writing this message only in English. Thank you. Runa

Amendment to the Terms of Use

Hello all,

Please join a discussion about a proposed amendment to the Wikimedia Terms of Use regarding undisclosed paid editing and we encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please translate this statement if you can, and we welcome you to translate the proposed amendment and introduction. Please see the discussion on Meta Wiki for more information. Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) 22:00, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to ask the Wikivoyage community what they would think of this change, in light of the large Wiki-PR scandal and the effects of its fallout. Does the Wikivoyage community feel comfortable with a Wikimedia-wide policy requiring that a paid employee must disclose the source of his funding or the organization that he is affiliated with? If I remember correctly, some of Wikivoyage's important contributors are travel agencies, and this has the potential to affect certain policy pages around here, including Wikivoyage:Don't tout and Wikivoyage:Welcome, business owners. If it passes, and it's looking very likely the change will go through anyway, the latter page Wikivoyage:Welcome, business owners needs updating to include the new requirement. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 12:48, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I commented here. I think the idea behind the proposal is a good one, but as currently worded it sounds like it may do more harm than good. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:55, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've raised meta:Talk:Terms of use/Paid contributions amendment#This_isn't just about Wikipedia as an issue. Wikipedia bans original research, we don't. A local CVB might be able to contribute constructively, or might be doing more harm than good, but we need to deal with each on its merits. K7L (talk) 19:07, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Request for assistance: phone number formats for various countries

Per Wikivoyage talk:Phone numbers#Proposed replacement I've replaced the verbose and incomplete discussions about country-specific phone formats with a simpler, and hopefully more straightforward, table: Wikivoyage:Phone numbers#Country-specific examples. The "examples" column of that table is incomplete for many countries, so please add an example of a properly formatted phone number for any countries you are familiar with. Examples should be formatted as they would appear in Wikivoyage, so they should include the country code and have a hyphen in between number blocks that can be dialed locally, for example (in the USA) "+1 YYY XXX-XXXX" for a local number or "+1-8YY-XXX-XXXX" for a toll-free number. Thanks! -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an easy way to bulk import OpenStreetMap POI's?

I notice user:Mey2008 manually imported a good collection of individual co-ordinates into Oswego, a new article, with "see Mapnik layer". Presumably, this "Mapnik layer" is part of OSM; that project already has various points of interest (landmarks, hotels, restaurants) with names and co-ordinates as they appear on OSM's map of the city.

If this huge stack of geographical data already exists under some sort of free licence, would it be possible to automate its use? For instance, a new article is started not as a blank {{smallcity skeleton}} but as a list of the POI's already in OSM ready for Wikivoyagers to add description and detail to each. Another possibility would be for an automated process to match existing Wikivoyage listings to the OSM POI's to grab the co-ordinates.

How difficult would this be to implement? K7L (talk) 18:00, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can't speak to the technical difficulties, but if there are any pointers to the POI data (URL, etc) it would be hugely useful - it take a long time to look up that data when updating articles, so if there is an easier way to get it then I'd like to use it. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OSM typically has too many POIs for a given destination. While it would be nice to import addresses and coordinates from an external source, there is a huge risk of transforming Wikivoyage articles into endless lists of POIs without descriptions. In particular, this applies to hotels and restaurants. --Alexander (talk) 18:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That depends on what we do with the data. A tool operating under manual supervision would still leave the last word on what points to include with the human editor. A 'bot script which adds co-ordinates to existing POI's would also avoid creating "too many POI's" as it's just expanding existing listings. Neither would involve the w:user:Rambot-style mass creation of pages on every census-designated speck on the map. Either would be a step toward avoiding "reinventing the wheel" by allowing us not to have to manually generate co-ordinate and address data already in OSM. K7L (talk) 18:51, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've also noticed that one layer of the dynamic map has POIs marked out and wondered if they could be imported. Importing all POIs obviously wouldn't be very smart and just give us long lists a la Yellow Pages. The ideal interface would be having the POI's on the map and editors would be able add them to ("activate them" would maybe be a better term?) or remove them from the article by just clicking on them. ϒpsilon (talk) 19:52, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be supportive of a tool/method that made the manual import of a listing easier. Please also bear in mind that listings in OSM may no longer be current or even open, and we would want to dissuade the indiscriminate addition of listings. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:03, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Geomap the "OSM" button can be activated at top right. Then when you click on an icon in the map, OSM data is displayed. Good examples: restaurant "AKKU" or "Alte Münze". The feature is still in testing mode and needs to be optimized. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:25, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Joachim, you ARE a wizard! Danapit (talk) 06:44, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I click on "AKKU" and get the co-ordinates bot not the address nor the hours of operation you've added. If I look at the POI in nominatim.openstreetmap.org, the extra info is there. Is there any way to get {{listing}} (in whichever language) as one of the "copy templates" formats, with whatever data was attached to the original POI (node or way) tag? The original XML data (whatever's exported when clicking 'Export' on openstreetmap.org's standard map view) looks like:

 <node id="" visible="true" version="" changeset="" timestamp="" user="..." uid="" lat="43.6461730" lon="-79.3797376">
  <tag k="addr:city" v="Toronto"/>
  <tag k="addr:country" v="CA"/>
  <tag k="addr:housenumber" v="200"/>
  <tag k="addr:state" v="ON"/>
  <tag k="addr:street" v="Bay Street"/>
  <tag k="amenity" v="fast_food"/>
  <tag k="name" v="Harvey's"/>
  <tag k="operator" v="Cara"/>
  <tag k="wheelchair" v="yes"/>
 </node>

which should become {{eat|name=Harvey's |address=200 Bay Street |latitude=43.6461730 |longitude=-79.3797376 |description=Fast food}}. Often the OSM POI has little more than a name, type ("amenity" or "tourism" with subtype) and co-ordinates, but we should use what's there. K7L (talk) 14:08, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Please click first on the button "OSM" at top right! All information should appear. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk)

Looks better, but I seem to get the "eat" template for every POI (instead of "drink", "buy"...) and the street address isn't copied to the template. K7L (talk) 16:46, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As I said above: the feature "OSM data" is still in test mode and must be optimized. I am concerned licensing issues (ODbL). This must be sure before I continue working on it.-- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 17:13, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have the same concern about the licenses compatibility. I know that it is not possible to import data from Wikipedia to OSM (I wanted to batch import train station names, and after discussion in the OSM list it may not be allowed in some countries, so I did nto). Does someone have some information/analysis about that? Currently Wikivoyage provides a tool to select coordinates from OSM/Mapnik, and I don't know if it is ok (the license stuff is quite complicated!). - Fabimaru (talk) 18:35, 2 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to copyright a pair of co-ordinates? Usually there has to be some creative input to qualify as a copyrightable work. K7L (talk) 23:53, 2 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Coordinates are calculated using OSM tiles (CC BY-SA license). I see no problems here. My question concerns importing of the other data from OSM database (ODbL license). -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 05:18, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Under the EU laws the publicly accessible databases are protected even if they contain non-creative work (city names, coordinates), you cannot harvest data without having the consent. Well, I guess that the OSM foundation will not sue the WP foundation for that (but it would be nice to have an official statement). In Australia I think, a phone book company lost a law-suit against another one that retrieved the phone numbers because they are not creative work. So I don't have an answer, but I wanted to say that it is not as obvious that one could think, and maybe there are some other restrictions in other countries. Anyway, thank you for the information about the tiles, I am relieved! edit: concerning the license CC BY-SA, aren't the extracted coordinates a work derived from the tiles? in this case it would require that it is given the same license. edit 2: my bad, Wikipedia is also CC BY-SA - Fabimaru (talk) 07:00, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like reusing OSM POIs into Wikivoyage is OK: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/31250/can-i-export-osm-poi-metadata-to-wikivoyage-cc-by-sa-gfdl Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:25, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the link. What I understand is that it is not clear. Fabimaru (talk) 13:03, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. Wikivoyage is CC-BY-SA and has never been GFDL (unlike Wikipedia, which started with GNU's licence and switched much later) but the distinction between prose (Wikivoyage) and database (Wikidata) is one I hadn't anticipated. In any case, it looks like there would be substantial manual editing to usably get the OSM POI's into WV as they lack full descriptions and are often just (name, type, co-ordinates) with the civic address or telephone missing. OSM's Nominatim could get the street name for these, but as an approximation only. The decision of which POI's to import would also need to be manual. K7L (talk) 17:16, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bugs in interface for creating a new account

I'm a new user, having just created an account. There are some bugs in the web interface used for creating a new account. It says that the email address is optional, but if you don't put in an email address, it doesn't work. The resulting error message doesn't accurately explain the problem (which is a lack of an email address); it talks about cookies and says something vague about not being able to verify the source.--Bcrowell (talk) 18:34, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, Bcrowell.

I'm neither an administrator nor a programmer, but I'm sure someone who is both (like @Wrh2:) will probably take a look at this soon...

Thanks for creating an Apizaco‎ article! --118.93nzp (talk) 21:55, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably something to bring up at m:Wikimedia Forum, as it probably affects more than just the English Wikivoyage. --Rs chen 7754 22:40, 12 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Cannot recreate the problem - I just created a test account without email address and it went fine (Chrome 33). Which browser is this about? Is this still a problem? --Malyacko (talk) 18:04, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I had a problem creating my account yesterday. I wanted to use the same handle I use on other Wikimedia sites (The Photon), but I was told that that name is too similar to an existing account (The photon), which you can see from red link does not actually exist. El Photon (talk) 02:58, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here's my guess as to what happened. When you create an account now, the account is a Single-User Logon -- a global Wikimedia account. You can't create an account here just at Wikivoyage (see here that your El Photon account is an SUL account. Trying to create a global "The photon" or "The Photon" account won't work because both of those exist (as non-SUL accounts) on some wikis. What you should do is go to en.wikipedia (or another Wiki on which you have the "The Photon" account) and go to the page called 'Special:MergeAccount'. That will set your account up as an SUL and allow you to log on to any wiki with the same logon. Powers ^(talk) 16:04, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia blog article

FYI, there's a nice article on the Wikimedia blog today featuring Saqib. -- Ryan • (talk) • 08:22, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

+1. Saqib, I know I'm a thorn in your side sometimes (q.v. recent proceedings on dotm), but I do truly admire your tireless work. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 08:25, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great stuff Saqib! Thanks for your constant promotion of WV! Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:50, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh you guys found it. Thanks! --Saqib (talk) 14:34, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, very nice. It is good to see both the site being promoted and Saqib getting some well-deserved credit.

It raises a question, though. English-speaking locals are a great resource for the site — their knowledge and their perspectives complement what visitors can provide plus they can translate to and from local languages. We have some good ones for various places, but is there anything we should be doing to attract more? Pashley (talk) 15:53, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wonderful, Saqib! Danapit (talk) 21:32, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent article Saqib! I play chess with a friend from Pakistan and hope someday to visit him there... Matroc (talk) 04:04, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Really fantastic article! Great story, great photos. Godspeed on your journey! Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:30, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks everyone. --Saqib (talk) 15:17, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great job Saqib! Well done on raising the profile of both Pakistan and WV! --Nick ^talk 23:16, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Articles with ref tags

There are a number of pages which include <ref> tags which could do with changing into just links. For example Oxford (Ohio). Just wondering if someone could edit MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references and set it to the following so that these can be tracked into a category for easier finding and editing.

<code><ref></code> tags exist, but no <code><references/></code> tag was found[[Category:Articles with ref tags]]

Thanks. -- WOSlinker (talk) 22:25, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Users shouldn't be using the references tag either; maybe we shouldn't include it in the wording. Powers ^(talk) 01:18, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for adding the cat. I forgot to put the includeonly tags around the category. They should be added as well. Sorry. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:11, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

<code><ref></code> tags exist, but no <code><references/></code> tag was found<includeonly>[[Category:Articles with ref tags]]</includeonly>

Done. -- Ryan • (talk) • 07:19, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting WT attribution template

Hi, everyone. I want to delete that stupid template from User talk:Ikan Kekek, since anything having to do with my time at WT has already been archived. How do I delete the template from my user talk page? Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:29, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you recall, User:Pashley did this for us for the Talk:Iran page. I still don't know how he did it. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:49, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Delete the page. Then restore only those edits that were done after the migration. --Alexander (talk) 13:00, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, deleting a page and recreating it gets rid of the template. In general, this should be done only after a bit of thought; we do have both a legal and a moral obligation to give proper attribution. Pashley (talk) 13:14, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[Edit conflict]I have to delete the page? All the edits were done after the migration, every single one of them. The older edits (which are linked from the top of my user talk page) are archived. There's no simpler way to do this than for me to copy the entire contents of the page to a blank file, delete the page, then recreate the page and put the contents of the former page back? Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:16, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, who said anything about copy and paste? You can do a selective restore of just the edits after the migration. Powers ^(talk) 14:07, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In order to do that, I'd have to cut the contents, paste them elsewhere, then repeat the procedure. There should be a simpler way to delete templates from articles that no longer need them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:24, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not familiar with the WikiMedia software, although in IT solutions generally it would not surprise me if a full deletion was required to remove the template.

What should the process be? Can a user request this on a talk page and an individual admin ensures that there is no WT content before doing this?

Additionally if WT content is archived then how do we handle the lack of attribution on newly created archive pages? Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:36, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ikan, listen to what I'm saying. As an admin, you have the ability to selectively restore specific edits after deleting a page from the Wiki. See, for example, w:Wikipedia:Selective deletion. No copying and pasting required. Powers ^(talk) 02:08, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I tried it, and it proved too complicated (my first attempt didn't work), so I deleted my user talk page and recreated it. However, the WT attribution was also for some reason deleted from User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive, which I didn't intend to do, as it includes content from before the move. So what do we do now? Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:47, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Restore all the deleted edits on your talk page and then move your talk page to your archive page and then you can edit your archive page to just have the archived stuff that you want on it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:05, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand. You're saying if I restore the deleted edits, the WT attribution will reappear? Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:11, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't work - same as before the undeletion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:43, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your archive page doesn't have WT attribution because you created it after the migration. There is no User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive on WT to credit. On the other hand, your current talk page does have the WT attribution, because its history includes edits that go back before the migration.

One way to fix this is to archive your current talk page (to, say User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive 2) by moving it. This retains the edit history and replaces your talk page with a redirect. You can then edit your talk page to remove the redirect and start fresh (and include a link to the archive pages at the top). This should move the WT attribution to the Archive 2 subpage and leave your talk page without it.

A more complicated way to fix this would be to delete your talk page and then do a selective restore of just those edits that occurred after the migration. I don't know first-hand that this will work, though.

For complete thoroughness, I would suggest the following:

Delete your archive page.
Delete your talk page.
Do a selective restore from your talk page of only those edits that occurred before the migration.
Move the restored edits to an archive. Do not create (or delete after creation) the resulting redirect.
Do a selective restore from your talk page of the remaining edits.

-- Powers ^(talk) 18:45, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I understand your explanation, but I'm really confused, in that it would seem that User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive, since it includes edits from before the migration, is the one that should include the WT attribution, whereas User talk:Ikan Kekek should not, because I've archived those edits from before the migration. If what you're saying is that because there is no User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive at WT, there should be no WT attribution for that page, then should any of my user talk pages have any WT attribution at all? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:15, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What you seem to be missing is that the WT attribution is added programmatically. We don't have any way to add it after the fact, so pages created after the migration (which includes your archive page) can't have it. The system has no way of knowing that the posts you pasted into your archive page came from your main talk page, so there's no way it could show the WT attribution. If, instead, you moved your talk page to an archive name, the WT attribution should move with it. Powers ^(talk) 01:20, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If we would like to add the WT attribution to the relevant archive pages, can we just use a template (similar to {{swept}}) to basically achieve the same thing? Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well we could, but it's hardly necessary since the posts are all signed. I wasn't suggesting that it was necessary for Ikan to maintain that attribution notice, but rather explaining why the notice is on his talk page but not his archive page. Powers ^(talk) 18:16, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

More Stats

This site has a nice array of statistics relevant to Wikivoyage. It's nice to see that we appear to have hit 1,000,000 hits/month and that Reddit is so important to our social media presence (could a WV account be useful?). That being said, it also shows areas where we could improve and the work we still need to do. --Nick ^talk 19:54, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Related sites / External links

Hello, I come from Wikivoyage in Spanish. I created a module and a template for obtain the links to Wikipedia, Commons and Dmoz directly from Wikidata. We are going to include this template inside {{pagebanner}} and remove the old links. I leave the links in case anyone is interested. Módulo:EnlacesExternos. Plantilla:Enlaces externos. Regards, --Kizar (talk) 20:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And I would like to add that a similar module has been implemented a while ago in Ukranian and Russian Wikivoyage. It is sad that the summit page is dormant now. --Alexander (talk) 22:55, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like something we should implement. Nowadays I'm pretty busy, but I can take a look at this if nobody gets to it. --Rs chen 7754 02:11, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mobile Site Certificate Issue?

When browsing to to WV with an Android Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet, WV changes the mobile version of the web page, i.e. https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Talk:United_States_of_America

Recently it has been giving me an SSL connection error (Error code ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR)

Is anyone else experiencing this? It would not be great for many potential readers to be experiencing this. Andrewssi2 (talk) 15:01, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just for reference, I used the Samsung browser and Google Chrome. It seems to be the same issue on a Window Phone 8 device. (Changing the browser settings to 'Desktop mode' fixes it) Andrewssi2 (talk) 15:12, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No problems on Android 2.3 with stock and Dolphin browsers. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 15:25, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How about directly navigating to a mobile page such as https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/United_States_of_America from your desktop? Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:18, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Without any problems using Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome (Windows). - Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 05:58, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You are right. I just tried (remotely) from a computer I have in the United States and it is fine.

It seems that our mobile pages do not work when accessed from inside mainland China. Somewhat strange since the desktop version is fine. Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:08, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wts namespace

Special:WantedPages shows many links to non-existent pages in the Wts: namespace; that is Wikitravel Shared, their space for images & other stuff shared across language versions. That namespace has never existed here and I think anything that needed moving from the old site long since has been.

Is there some way to fiddle the software so that any link into that namespace, or even any link to any non-existent namespace, gets some more-or-less helpful error message if clicked and/or so such links do not show up on the "wanted" list? Pashley (talk) 01:26, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We use Wikimedia Commons now, but I think currently links to those pages ought to be delinked in favor of something else, like double quotes or bolding the links instead. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 03:57, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Making wts an alias for the Wikivoyage: namespace would take care of a lot of those. Powers ^(talk) 18:31, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Manually delinking such pages by fixing the links on source pages would be too much work; there are a few dozen of them including at least 10 with more than 10 links each. A bot could do it.

Creating Wts: pages here as redirects, mostly to Commons, is feasible but I'm not sure what policy says about inventing new namespaces.

Making wts an alias sounds good, though I am not certain how it could be done or how it would work out in practice. Pashley (talk) 18:57, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

IMO, the only significant objections to creating namespace alias are normally 1) possible conflicts with existing pagetitles, and 2) possible conflicts with interlanguage links, based off ISO's system. As we can see from Special:PrefixIndex/Wts which is only returning one entry which does not have the colon, there are no conflicts with existing pagetitles and it's highly unlikely there will be an actual location called Wts:Foo. SIL and Ethnologue reports also return null, so unless the ISO revise their codes to accommodate some new language it's unlikely to be used as an interlanguage code either. Technically feasible, but I haven't seen any objections to it so far. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 20:24, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think a namespace alias would work - some of these links should go to commons (Wts:Special:Upload), most don't really have a place to link to now (Wts:Main Page, Wts:Technical requests) - but if we can agree on a solution then it could easily be implemented using WV:AWB. I would suggest just surrounding existing wts links with "nowiki" (<nowiki>[[wts:Special:Upload]]</nowiki>) since these links are mostly obsolete. Would anyone prefer an alternate solution? -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:40, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still uncomfortable going through and changing old comments on talk pages. We shouldn't have done it when changing "Wikitravel" to "Wikivoyage", and we shouldn't do it now. If we set up an alias, the pages that are still redlinks can be created as redirects (soft or hard) to the correct location. If we don't want to set up an alias, then we should set up redirects as necessary. Powers ^(talk) 19:26, 10 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Call for project ideas: funding is available for community experiments

I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.

Do you have an idea for a project that could improve your community? Individual Engagement Grants from the Wikimedia Foundation help support individuals and small teams to organize experiments for 6 months. You can get funding to try out your idea for online community organizing, outreach, tool-building, or research to help make Wikivoyage better. In March, we’re looking for new project proposals.

Examples of past Individual Engagement Grant projects:

Organizing social media for Chinese Wikipedia ($350 for materials)
Improving gadgets for Visual Editor ($4500 for developers)
Coordinating access to reliable sources for Wikipedians ($7500 for project management, consultants and materials)
Building community and strategy for Wikisource (€10000 for organizing and travel)

Proposals are due by 31 March 2014. There are a number of ways to get involved!

Hope to have your participation,

--Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation 19:44, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Guys, is this something we could profit from? Think developing and sending out actual paper printed brochures to tourist offices inviting them to update their own town? Or find a developer who would be willing and able to fix fairly pressing tech issues, such as the dynamic maps that can't translate to English. Or develop other tech tools we could use? 08:19, 3 March 2014 (UTC) JuliasTravels (talk) 08:20, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your idea of brochuers sounds good but the question is who's willing to do the job and should we expect to receieve good response from the tourist offices when Wikivoyage:Tourism Bureau Expedition is died already. --Saqib (talk) 11:09, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was just thinking about asking Joachim whether he would consider trying out for a grant, since there's a proven track record and still a fair bit of potential goals to achieve like improved features and static map printing. Some funding may help in terms of support and motivation. Possibly in conjunction with the Wikivoyage EV association, User:DerFussi and User:RolandUnger as well.

Other than that, Building community and strategy for Wikisource is quite an interesting approach by another WMF project, although that would take some effort to get together. -- torty3 (talk) 11:50, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Page rank

en:Wikivoyages pagerank seems to have improved. to 6/10 (the same as WT). Not sure how recent this is. Or if it solved the issue with not showing up on google.

While German readership has increased English readership has not really changed. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:55, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nick provided this interesting link above but the data is so different from our own data German and English are nearly equally popular. And Italian less so. If we are getting the 1/7th of the traffic of WT that is not bad. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:04, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to me that Step 1 is getting our Google pagerank up. I don't think it's an unreasonable goal to get our pagerank above WT's, especially as their content stagnates and gets more and more tainted with spam. Imagine what that will do to the Google search results. As far as the differential in traffic between us and WT, we have to be patient and not get discouraged; it will come with time. We're headed in the right direction. And frankly, I'd rather the increase be gradual; thinking back to the temporary spike in traffic that accompanied the WMF launch, it was a bit much to adjust to all at once (at least speaking for myself). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:44, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There appears to be still a lot of links from Chinese WP to WT. Have fixed a few. A bot appears to pick up the site though? Do we have any Chinese editors who can help? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:10, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Any reason for linking to "en.wikivoyage.org" as an external URL instead of using an interwiki link (or a templated interwiki link) to [[wikivoyage: ? The external-style link gets that ugly "nofollow", which we don't want. K7L (talk) 04:44, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As there is a new http://zh.wikivoyage.org site, zh.wp should be linking there instead of en.voy. Maybe bring it up as a bot project for zh.voy people to discuss in their pub. -- torty3 (talk) 09:44, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Anyone have access to [www.comScore.com] data? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:35, 10 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I do not. But perhaps we can retire the notion that WikiT is "filling with spam that will eventually kill it"? This was predicted at the time of the fork. Didn't happen. It's been nearly 2 years. They've made due. There's no more spam there that I can see than there is here (at least after a day of housekeeping has passed). Spam is not what is going to kill them. Nor is a slew of "Google tricks" going to get us visitors. We pulled our one rabbit -- changing the WikiP links to point to us instead of them -- from the hat, and that's from whence our traffic comes. Nearly all of it. We are a clone of Wikitrav. Over time -- a long time -- some of that will shift. But there's no magic bullet. I agree with James: we're fortunate to have the one visitor in 7 that WikiT has. Google knows who was here first, and we shall never escape being beneath WT's boot until our CONTENT is unique in all the world.SpendrupsForAll (talk) 19:12, 10 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes unless we can convince google to adjust. Or really promote the site via social media. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:22, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Err... Convince Google to adjust? Why on earth would they choose to bend their own rules so as to favor a small free site over a large, established, popular ad-supported site that *makes google money*? Err... Good luck with that. SpendrupsForAll (talk) 01:33, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very good point, Paul.

I don't think any of your dividends are in too much danger while some of the movers and shakers here refuse to improve this site's search engine optimisation because they prefer to remain big fish in a small pond. --118.93nzp (talk) 05:46, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, welcome back. Not a good way for you to resume editing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google has that "Don't be evil" moto. With respect to SEO it has my full support as soon as we can show it works for already established articles. My attempts failed. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:55, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Leaving 118 aside for the moment, IMO SpendrupsForAll's remarks above call his intentions on Wikivoyage into question. If you think Wikitravel is the superior site, Spendrups, why are you not editing there rather than telling us (with evident glee) how inferior we are to our rivals? I would describe your comments as trolling (if not akin to the shenanigans IBobi pulled just after the WMF launch), and counsel you in future to contribute constructively or not at all. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:59, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You could very well be right that Spendrups intends to troll in this thread, but I'm not reading his comments as trolling, but as tough, straight talk. Aside from the remarks about the amount of spam in WT vs here, which I couldn't address because I haven't visited that site for a long time. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:05, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm puzzled. Where did SpendrupsForAll says that WT was superior, or WV inferior, and where's the glee? I thought s/he made very good points, including the point that it is content that will make the biggest difference. Andre, if you were influenced by the suggestion above about SpendrupsForAll's identity, well, I find it hard to give the suggestion any credence at all. Nurg (talk) 08:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't really matter what nay says say. We have not succeeded as quickly as I had hoped but we will. We have a site, we have independence, we have an actual CC BY SA license and we are part of a movement. We have competition. Should only make us work harder :-) And if these are editors coming from WT to poke us the best thing is simply not to feed them... Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:08, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the numbers again. If you look at pageviews WT 7.2M visits * 1.8 pages = 13M pageviews. WV 1M vists # 3.1 pages = 3.1 M pagviews means we are closer to 25% :-) congrats to all. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:12, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Additionally readership was up more than 60% percent for Feb and the previous numbers were for Jan. Mar is looking like less though. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:15, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To Nurg: I stand by my statement regarding SpendrupsForAll, and I furthermore reject your categorization of it in your edit summary as "odd". Firstly, Spendrups did indeed strongly imply in his comments that he finds Wikivoyage to be inferior to Wikitravel ("we're fortunate to have the one visitor in 7 that WikiT has") and/or a sort of pretender to their throne ("Google knows who was here first"; "We are a clone of Wikitrav"). Add that to his far more explicit statement about Wikitravel's superiority, his general trolling and provocation, and his uncanny familiarity with Wikivoyage goings-on for someone with so short an edit history, including precisely no mainspace contributions (as elucidated by Ikan Kekek) - a red flag for problem users on several occasions in the past - and a bigger picture emerges. In a case like this, I think it's wholly reasonable to call into question a user's good faith. You'll note that I did not propose Spendrups for a userban or take any administrative actions against him, but rather calmly asked him to avoid contributions that were antagonistic. Ours is a wiki that emphasizes civility in dealings between members of the community, and for good reason. We've had enough issues in the past with users who seemed to be interested in little other than stirring up trouble that we IMO should not shy away from taking people to task who engage in behavior like this. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 11:28, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And he states he is leaving Jan 31st 2014 . So Andre raises reasonable points. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:13, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

State of WT

Spendrups suggests "perhaps we can retire the notion that WikiT is "filling with spam that will eventually kill it"? This was predicted at the time of the fork. Didn't happen. It's been nearly 2 years. They've made due. There's no more spam there that I can see than there is here (at least after a day of housekeeping has passed)." Since I check WT from time to time, I think I can comment.

Looking at new pages, I often see lots of spam there vs almost none here. Currently, they only have two new spam pages, but 5-10 is typical and I have seen it over 20.

I left one really obvious spam page — no travel content, an odd title, and lots of dubious external links — alive some time back to see how long it would take for anyone else to notice. We are at nine months & counting.

We currently have one dead end page vs several hundred there, no double redirects vs nine, two orphaned pages vs several hundred, 40-odd unused files vs over a thousand.

I conclude that WT is not being properly maintained since more-or-less all the competent admins have left. This may not kill it, but there are definitely problems. Pashley (talk) 19:43, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I should have expected WT to be unsinkable. K7L (talk) 20:38, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WT links

Some have collected on EN Wikipedia and I have replaced them with Wikivoyage links. We need to make sure this is happening in other languages. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:51, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Can you provides some examples of where you have done this?

Additionally, although we are both part of WikiMedia, do we know that WP is OK with us doing this wholesale? (We already have the WikiVoyage template link for Wikipedia articles) Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:29, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a list of some of those changes -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:51, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There are still some WT templates on some languages of Wikipedia; https://ms.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Khas:Pautan_ke/Templat:Wikitravel&limit=200 is the most egregious (all of these need to be replaced with Wikivoyage templates before the old template can be nominated for deletion). It may be worth checking other Wikipedias where the template has already been removed from articles to ensure that the (now-unused) template is nominated for speedy deletion and doesn't find its way back into pages as spam. K7L (talk) 18:41, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting issue

There appears to be a formatting issue here Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:54, 12 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Can you be more specific? Powers ^(talk) 16:13, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry extra space here Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:35, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, not seeing it on my computer. System specs? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 09:51, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Captcha issue

I just now had an issue with Captchas. When I tried to submit a restaurant listing using the "add entry" interface, my response to the captcha (due to external links in the submission) was not accepted, and I was repeatedly asked to answer new captchas. When I pressed "Cancel" instead of "Submit" to try to get back to the new entry dialog, the page froze with the "Saving..." message showing. El Photon (talk) 03:04, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a bug with the listing module that should be tracked on Bugzilla. Powers ^(talk) 16:14, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Japanese Wikivoyage

This language seems like it is needed. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:45, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like we have it here in incubator . Are there plans to import all the old content? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:46, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If memory serves, when we were talking about forking, the Japanese Wikitravel community elected to stay with IB for some unfathomable reason. Go figure. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:06, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Japanese WT had basically one main contributor (Shoestring) carrying the project along with just a few others and he decided to stay. I may be mistaken, but I believe ALL of the former language versions (Japanese, Arabic, etc.) that existed were saved just the same as the English version. Would it not be restored if the language version existed? It may just be a matter of getting some trusted volunteer admins to oversee the project. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 07:19, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

XML and image dumps from all WT language versions were made available to Wikivoyage at the time of the initial fork. If needed I've still got copies, but someone else would need to do the work of getting things imported with proper attribution. -- Ryan • (talk) • 07:44, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May want to contact m:User:MF-Warburg if you have the dumps - the Incubator people have had difficulties getting them. (He is on vacation for a few more weeks though). --Rs chen 7754 16:40, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Email sent. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:49, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

User:Wrh2 - also see incubator:Incubator:Wikivoyage import. --Rs chen 7754 04:51, 14 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If we have to start from dumps, why not dump from live JP WT? I guess it is not that big. I used to write a tool for that: https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/OxygenPump Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:00, 14 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed optional changes to Terms of Use amendment

Hello all, in response to some community comments in the discussion on the amendment to the Terms of Use on undisclosed paid editing, we have prepared two optional changes. Please read about these optional changes on Meta wiki and share your comments. If you can (and this is a non english project), please translate this announcement. Thanks! Slaporte (WMF) 21:56, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Users are being forced to log out

Swept in from the pub

Wikimedia users (Meta included) are being forced to log out and log-in again due to a vulnerability discovered in the OpenSSL implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols.

Wikimedia Foundation servers have been affected, and had their OpenSSL version updated earlier today; as a precautionary measure, all user session tokens will be reset — which causes the loss of session and forces users to log-in again using new, secure tokens.

Wikimedia Foundation also recommends that users change the passwords they use to log-in to wikis. Read more. Jalexander (talk) 23:47, 8 April 2014 (UTC) (Many thanks to Odder for writing the text I stole here)[reply]

Wikibooks

Howdy!

Yesterday, I took a quick glance over on Wikibooks and noticed that they've got several travel guides and tourism topics that might do well to be integrated into our guides over here on WV. They don't have very many and they mostly haven't been edited for awhile, so I doubt they'll be missed particularly, though I have asked for the community's thoughts here. Naturally, the guides over there don't fit our templates, but I'd be more than happy to sift through them, merge them to their analogues and create new articles as necessary.

What do you think about this? Is it worthwhile? If nothing else, it should hopefully mark out WV as the clear repository for travel guides within the WMF family.

Nick ^talk 20:07, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great find! Yes, usable info should be merged into WV, and a friendly message left on each talk page suggesting where to find a more up-to-date guide and suggesting to join. Example: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Enjoy_Tokyo/Roppongi Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikibooks in general is not very active, but I'd prefer getting their okay before mass moving stuff over, so as not to step on any toes. --Rs chen 7754 08:55, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nick's message is great I think. I assume that if there's no answer in a week, the merge can be performed. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:25, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would flag down an admin too and make sure it gets noticed - QuiteUnusual comes highly recommended. --Rs chen 7754 09:28, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've pointed QuiteUnusual towards my post - thanks for the recommendation Rschen7754! If/when we're given the 'go-ahead', is there a more sophisticated way of moving the pages across beyond simple copy-and-paste? --Nick ^talk 00:16, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible to import entire page histories, but that will need assistance from developers and/or stewards. --Rs chen 7754 00:38, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is it preferable then just to copy the contents, linking to the remaining page history over on WB in the summary? --Nick ^talk 00:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think an import might still be a better option. Probably best to see what the result is at en.wikibooks and go from there. --Rs chen 7754 02:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Can't admins use Special:Import too? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 19:33, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For direct imports, in theory, but no upload sources have been defined, so the tool doesn't work. --Rs chen 7754 19:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A request on bugzilla should be able to get them added, if this will help in the future; it would just need a list of acceptable import sources. (If that goes ahead, I would suggest 'pedia as well as 'books, as the ability to just import templates and modules can be useful.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 15:11, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's correct, though I think we may need local consensus for this. --Rs chen 7754 07:11, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've nominated the pages to be moved here. --Nick ^talk 22:56, 5 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've made the completely unilateral call that this is the only book of Wikibooks' tourism category that we don't want - am I right? It doesn't seem to fit our remit really; I think it sits better in its current home. --Nick ^talk 04:38, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like our request will probably receive consensus soon, however, we've not yet decided where to put each book. I would suggest that both b:Hiking_in_the_Canadian_Rockies and b:Teaching Assistant in France Survival Guide could both survive as separate articles, whilst the rest should probably be merged with existing articles. Despite this, all of the nominated books would require some editing as they're split over several pages. With that in mind, I'd be happy for the books to be moved first to my userspace (making the job easier for whichever steward moves the pages) where they can be 'voyage-ified' and/or have their content distributed to existing pages. For attribution purposes, the pages could then be moved to Article name/Wikibooks. I'd be happy to undertake the bulk of this work myself. Is this acceptable? --Nick ^talk

Request for import submitted here. --Nick ^talk 22:51, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Import proposal

I propose that we have enwikipedia, meta, and enwikibooks added to the list of import sources at Special:Import. This section is for documenting that there is consensus to do this.

Note: this only gives us the technical ability to do imports, even if we rarely use the feature; it gives us the ability to do it just in case we ever need it again. --Rs chen 7754 03:58, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support, as proposer. --Rs chen 7754 03:58, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Support, since I can not work out why ever we wouldn't want to maximise our future choices. --118.93nzp (talk) 04:36, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems perfectly intuitive to support this, but first, I'd like someone to explain what the possible down side of this could be, because I don't see a down side. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support - A very useful tool, particularly when dealing with the above. --Nick ^talk 14:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The only possible drawback that I can imagine is the possibility of overzealous importing. Pretty weak, though. Powers ^(talk) 16:29, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is an admin-only tool, by the way - that should have been mentioned, my bad. --Rs chen 7754 23:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support. If there is no harm and a clear benefit then let's make this happen. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:31, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Note that the import was now done, but this may be helpful for the future (though not such a high priority). --Rs chen 7754 23:50, 9 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I would still be keen to see this happen! Please feel free to edit any of the imported articles:

--Nick ^talk 00:08, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is now bugzilla:63095. --Rs chen 7754 06:18, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And now live at Special:Import. --Rs chen 7754 23:19, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Tweaks to Special:Nearby

We increased the range for Nearby on Wikivoyage to make it more useful. The range is now 20km. Be sure to check out Special:Nearby ! Feedback welcomed! Jdlrobson (talk) 00:45, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was unaware that this service existed. What was the old range? Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:05, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have mw:Beta Features/Nearby Pages enabled in my special:preferences, it doesn't even have a chance in Hull of finding Ottawa. The same issue appears with other twin settlements like Prescott-Ogdensburg. A note on the talk page indicates it was recently broken, but it seems it never worked properly. Will the radius be changed on it too? K7L (talk) 01:38, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, the nearby pages beta feature is currently broken but it will be fixed on Thursday and should show locations within 20km. Whether is sufficient or not (the previous range was 10km) will remain to be seen.. Let us know if you think the range needs to be tweaked any further. Jdlrobson (talk) 03:07, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Given that what counts here on WV are city/town articles, and given the fact that the majority of cities are more than 20 km apart in most parts of the world, I'm not sure this feature will be very useful for us unless the range is set considerably higher, say 80 or 100km. Texugo (talk) 11:11, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe "find the five closest points" would make more sense than an arbitrary distance. A 100km radius in New York City would likely return Westchester, half of New Jersey and part of Connecticut. A 100km radius from Watertown (New York) would find Thousand Islands but miss Syracuse (New York) 73 miles away. A 100km radius around Port Menier, Anticosti would likely pick up nothing but static as Anticosti is 175km of provincial parkland. K7L (talk) 14:44, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, 20 km is too short in most cases, but the distance that is considered "nearby" is very relative to what region you're in. Limiting it to the 5-10 closest articles instead of by distance is an excellent idea if it's doable! Texugo (talk) 14:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

User:Texugo, User:K7L this seems like a good idea. I've started this thread on our mobile mailing list to see if we can tweak this even further. Jdlrobson (talk) 17:43, 20 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative: Dynamic Map

The "Destinations" layer (button: Destinations) of dynamic map shows according to the language versions all articles 150 to 1500 km around. The markers linked with the articles (examples: en.WV 150km, ru.WV 1500km. - Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:24, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed related site external links and small technical issue

Adding OpenStreetMap I'd like to bring three things to the community's attention. The first is most important: I'd like to think that OpenStreetMap is a good enough resource to include in the sidebar. It's also worthwhile for this free/open content community to support other such communities. The wikivoyage-ev map links don't work for me (presently at my parents' house using Firefox 28.x on Windows 8) but I can go to OSM's site and see things there.

As smaller issues, I'd like to suggest that we consider renaming references to the "Open Directory Project" as "DMOZ" per this discussion on en.wp. It's not incumbent upon en.voy to always do what en.wp does but it's worth being consistent between sister projects.

Finally, a small technical note: Pages which have Wikitravel histories have a small bug with generating links to history pages. Cf. https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Policies with https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory . The latter has Wikitravel history and in the footer at the bottom of the page, there is a link to the non-existent "https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory/w/index.php%3Ftitle%3DWikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory%26action%3Dhistory". What actually exists is "https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory&action=history". Should I submit this to bugzilla or can someone here fix this?

Thanks for your feedback. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:18, 20 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the credit extension changed and is now using MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits instead of MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work, and that the syntax is slightly different. I've made a few technical tweaks to get the history links correct again. For the record, since this is a touchy legal area, I made no changes beyond what was necessary to restore the existing functionality and did not touch the content at all. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:56, 20 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the small technical update, Wrh2.

Justin: Both your add OpenStreetMap to the sidebar and re-name to DMOZ proposals have obvious merit, Justin and I would support them both. --118.93nzp (talk) 03:42, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect mw:Extension:RelatedSites hard-codes the sidebar links into one of the server configuration files, so it'd be necessary to open a bugzilla: item to get these fixed. K7L (talk) 04:02, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage-ev map

Quote User:Koavf: "The wikivoyage-ev map links don't work for me ..." - The Wikivoyage-ev map is linked directly to OpenStreetMap, but also displays all the markers of Wikivoyage articles. What is wrong? Do you use a proxy server, which disguised your web address (known blocking reason)? What happens when you click this link? -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:07, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"The connection has timed out. The server at maps.wikivoyage-ev.org is taking too long to respond." I've been getting that message from all wikivoyage-ev links for several weeks now. If I use the URLs that start with tools.wmflabs.org/wikivoyage/w then it works. –Thatotherperson^talkcontribs 06:27, 22 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have changed all web requests to "//tools.wmflabs.org/wikivoyage/w/" (example). I hope the problem is solved now. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 04:34, 23 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Mey2008: For what it's worth, I'm on a different machine now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

With the WV.ev server there are problems depending of the browsers settings. Only http is supported, not https. The tools server supports both protocols. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:12, 23 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Travel websites with user-generated content

What are the current 3-5 most popular travel websites online specializing in presenting user-generated information and reviews of travel destinations? (I'm specifically referring to websites such as TripAdvisor.com that contain information, reviews and ratings about sites and businesses that can help travelers better assess ahead of time what the most popular and successful local attractions, hotels, pubs, restaurants, etc are within a certain area/town/city.) ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:53, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yelp dot com comes to my mind. And orbitz dot com (just hotels). ϒpsilon (talk) 18:10, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

TripAdvisor and Wikitravel are the top two AFAIK, though Yelp might be up there too; not everyone considers it a travel site, since its listings are not limited to travelers' amenities and locals seem to be the primary users. Powers ^(talk) 23:42, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is the list by Alexa Tripadvisor is way ahead of all others. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:11, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The subcategory for travel guides might be more useful: . Powers ^(talk) 23:14, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

IEG proposal

Hello! First I want to apologize for throwing this out nearly last minute. I needed to be absolutely certain I could commit the time. Anyway, I have put up a proposal at m:Grants:IEG/Promoting Wikivoyage. It is to promote Wikivoyage to the US and State Chamber of Commerces. Hopefully that can then be replicated in other countries. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 19:51, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You may want to look at Tourism Bureau Expedition and welcome, tourism professionals; local CVB's (convention and visitors bureaux) are well-placed to provide info and correct factual errors as they represent "boots on the ground" in every destination community, but at the same time a raw dump of existing CVB material could easily turn an entire destination page into a flood of promotional hype. Certainly Wikivoyage has identified a need to encourage CVB's to contribute constructively to the project - anything from removing listings when venues close their doors to fact-checking to linking to us once a usable/guide article exists for their respective destinations - but we have a limited number of people to pursue this initiative. *(CVB's may be separate entities from chambers of commerce in some communities.) K7L (talk) 02:41, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest you develop the "Measures of success" paragraph with measurable and verifiable goals. How about adding:

Establish dialog with at least 50 contacts, non-negative answer from at least 10. Verified by CCing all emails or logging GoToMeeting sessions.
Have at least 5 contacts produce content on Wikivoyage, with at least 2 having more than 5 commits or more than 1kilobyte of added text. Verified by establishing username identity in above-mentioned email conversations.

Good luck! Even if the grant does not succeed, it sounds like a very interesting thing to do :-) I will try to contact the CVBs of destinations I grew up in. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:50, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ideas! These both will work great and give me a jumping off point for developing some of the weak sections. Thanks!--Tbennert (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps a better metric would be factual accuracy, or the number of destinations actually improved from outline to usable or guide? Even Sodom and Gomorrah meets the one kilobyte test, although it contains enough marketing hype and outdated info to be worthless (except as a hypothetical example of what not to do). Conversely, fixing incorrect information in articles and removing venues which have closed doesn't necessarily lengthen a piece like fr:Lac-Mégantic. The Lac-Mégantic updates were useful to the traveller to determine what's still open after last summer's train wreck; at one point, worried visitors watching the destruction of the downtown on news broadcasts were cancelling trips to provincial parks twenty or thirty miles (30-50km) away. Quality, not quantity... please?

That said, our current coverage is very uneven in spots. New York (state) has solid coverage of Buffalo, Rochester and the Finger Lakes (where we have local users who've put in a massive effort), variable coverage of the middle of the state (Massena redlinked, Rome was started but never completed...), then extensive again in NYC. Keeping what information we have up-to-date is also a huge concern. CVB's in places our users haven't visited, where we have no one local, could fill a few gaps by contributing constructively to spot key destinations we've missed. K7L (talk) 13:00, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping those less traveled locations will be well served by the plan. I haven't quite figured out the mechanics, but I was hoping to do a special email for locations that are redlinks or just a name with sections.

Your concern for quality is understood. I've cleaned up plenty of promotional pages over the years. Honestly I think most of these groups will be quite comfortable following the format given. Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Pages containing blacklisted links

I created this category the other day because I noticed that something, presumably mediawiki itself, was populating it. However, I don't fully understand what's going on. For example:

Prague shows up on the list. I copied the text of the article and tried to put it in a new test page in my user space, and apparently what is triggering the filter is the text "airport-shuttle(dot)com". However, a) the full text of the link is http://www.prague-airport-shuttle(dot)com, which is apparently a legitimate link and which should not be triggering a spamfilter with only part of its main domain name anwyay, and b) the text "airport-shuttle(dot)com" doesn't even appear at Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist in the first place, so I don't know why it's triggering the filter
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area did contain a link which was listed at Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist. It appeared to be an actually valid listing under our external link guidelines, so I removed it from the blacklist, but the article still appears in the category anyway.

Anyone have more insight as to how this works? Texugo (talk) 15:04, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Answered part of the first point above: "airport-shuttle(dot)com" is listed on meta's blacklist, but it still raises the question, why is it triggering the filter with only a partial match, and what can we do about it? Texugo (talk) 15:12, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The first section of Wikivoyage:Spam filter has a bit more information about how all of the blacklists and whitelists work together, but updates to make things clearer would probably be useful. As to the airport shuttle link, all of the blacklist patterns are regular expressions, so the pattern just has to match something in the text, even if it's only a part of the full URL. If we need to override a Mediawiki blacklist entry we should be able to do so with MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:25, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is this new feature something that spiders through our articles only periodically? Is that why I can't get Glen Canyon National Recreation Area out of the category? and why the category has gradually grown from a couple of listings when I created it to 16 now? Texugo (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how the maintenance categories are generated - I know some of them are batch jobs that run at infrequent intervals, but maybe someone else can provide some insight. Have you tried re-editing the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area article so that it is re-parsed? And as a side note, the URL in question for that article is from a business that spammed a significant number of articles - see MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#invertsports dot com. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:09, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We could also ask to have the entry removed from the global blacklist (unlikely, as it was probably added due to a specific incidence of spamming), or have the "good" link added to the global whitelist (more likely, but not certain as they may question the propriety of any airport shuttle URL). Powers ^(talk) 17:47, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikistats for English Wikivoyage

I am publishing wikistats reports for February. I noticed some numbers for English Wikivoyage are significantly lower than before. A small reduction is normal, as Wikistats always regenerates all data from scratch from the latest dump, and some bad articles will have been deleted from the dumps. This time there is a rather big discrepancy. Compare columns A and C in first table at new report and old report. Both dropped significantly in newest release. Has there been a major cleanup? Erik Zachte (talk) 15:48, 30 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Empty articles which were just a {{smallcity skeleton}} and an attribution link to WT (with no actual content) were deleted, without prejudice to creation of actual articles for these places in future, to lose the WT attribution for SEO purposes. This is effectively a one-time operation as there are no plans to import empty skeletons from other travel wikis in future. See Wikivoyage talk:Deletion policy#Summary K7L (talk) 16:05, 30 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, Thanks Erik Zachte (talk) 16:10, 30 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to the default site typography coming soon

This week, the typography on Wikimedia sites will be updated for all readers and editors who use the default "Vector" skin. This change will involve new serif fonts for some headings, small tweaks to body content fonts, text size, text color, and spacing between elements. The schedule is:

April 1st: non-Wikipedia projects will see this change live
April 3rd: Wikipedias will see this change live

This change is very similar to the "Typography Update" Beta Feature that has been available on Wikimedia projects since November 2013. After several rounds of testing and with feedback from the community, this Beta Feature will be disabled and successful aspects enabled in the default site appearance. Users who are logged in may still choose to use another skin, or alter their personal CSS, if they prefer a different appearance. Local common CSS styles will also apply as normal, for issues with local styles and scripts that impact all users.

For more information:

Summary of changes and FAQ
Discussion page for feedback or questions
Post on blog.wikimedia.org

-- Steven Walling (Product Manager) on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation's User Experience Design team

New York Public Library Maps

The New York Public Library has just released its map collection under Creative Commons. Since our mid Atlantic state articles get a lot of editing, it may be interesting to see if some of the images could be used for historical context. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:16, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Header font change?

Is it just me, or did the font of our headers change to something more like Times New Roman? Texugo (talk) 18:57, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See #Changes to the default site typography coming soon. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:15, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, missed that. I have to say, I'm not a fan so far. Texugo (talk) 19:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just takes getting use to I guess, body text is also slightly different (lose approximately 10-14 chars per line, thus a few more turnovers). Matroc (talk) 05:48, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Could be changed back by adding some css code in Mediawiki:Common.css if you want. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked a question at Mediawiki about personal css changes. Hopefully it will be answered before the dung hits the fan when the change is rolled out on WP. Nurg (talk) 09:22, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The size difference I might be able get used to (though I'd prefer if it were reverted), but I think it looks ridiculously amateurish to have the body text in a typical sans serif font and the headers in a drastically more formal-looking serif one. It's a very poor aesthetic choice which completely contradicts standard typesetting wisdom and makes our content look bloggish. When I see something like in the above thread, where it has "New York Public Library" in the header, followed by the same text in a different font in the first line of the body text, it just serves to highlight what jarring contrast there is between the two fonts. I flatly dismiss any claim that this change provides any necessary improvement in readability, and I would definitely support changing the header font back to match the body text. This is so ugly that someone on meta even suggested it could be an April Fool's joke. Texugo (talk) 11:19, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Geez, and not only that, but now I noticed that while the page titles (H1) and H2 headers appear in the new serif font, all the H3 and H4 headers (of which we have many) still appear in the normal sans serif font like the body text, so now we have mixed header fonts as well (see the sample subheaders I've added above). This whole thing is horrid, very poorly thought out. Texugo (talk) 11:57, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a small change to MediaWiki:Vector.css. Let me know if it fixes the headers. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:18, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It does indeed fix the headers. I do hope nobody objects. Now we need to discuss whether we want to accept having this font size change pressed on us as well. Texugo (talk) 12:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The new font for the headers didn't/doesn't disturb me very much. But to be honest the supersized font looks obscene. First I thought something was wrong with my browser... ϒpsilon (talk) 13:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The font changes also seem to have affected the way the listing markers display: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ,5 . They now show the numbers very close to the bottom edge of the box, while they were more centered before. Texugo (talk) 18:22, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch. And what might our Greek colleagues think about the Y letter (Ypsilon) looking like a hand operated well pump? :/ ϒpsilon (talk) 19:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just for the record, I concur with the above - I'm not a fan of the changes. --Nick ^talk 19:24, 5 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest to revert all changes by adding this patch to Mediawiki:Vector.css. The new style is absolutely terrible. I don't know who proposed it, but I am itching to eliminate this person from the Wikimedia community. --Alexander (talk) 22:41, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We may want to wait a week or so to see if any fixes are applied to the core software before we add too many local workarounds that would then need to be rolled back - there seem to be enough concerns about the change that I would expect significant efforts to address them for all projects. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd encourage everyone to add your voices to the clamor at mw:Talk:Typography_refresh#serif_vs_sans_serif or one of the other threads on that page. Texugo (talk) 11:49, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've reverted the change to Vector.css. We have to give this time to settle before we start tinkering with a new feature. Powers ^(talk) 14:49, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For those interested in why a serif font was chosen, there is some reasoning here. Essentially, serif doesn't work well at smallish font sizes on screens, so sans-serif is used for body text... leading to the use of serif for header text for contrast. The usual typographical standard of serifs being used for body text doesn't apply because computer screens are different than printed text. Powers ^(talk) 14:56, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That does not explain it to me. Who decided that it just wasn't enough to have headers already in different sizes, in bold, and with a separator line under them, that there was this burning need for even more contrast, a need so great that it was worth sacrificing our aesthetic harmony to get it? I think it's trying to fix something that was never broken, and that the result is that headers now stand out too much, in an undesirable way, like sore thumbs. Texugo (talk) 15:00, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Powers that we shouldn't make site-wide reversions of the changes at this time. If anyone dislikes aspects of the changes and isn't bothered with trying to get used to them, you can go to personal Preferences and change your custom Vector CSS. For example, to revert the body text size:

#bodyContent {
	font-size: 0.8em !important;
}

Nurg (talk) 23:18, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't see anyone clamoring for these changes on this site. How about a reversion on this site, regardless of what other Mediawiki sites look like? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:44, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to be late to the conversation, I had a lot of Village Pumps to check. First off, thanks to any Wikivoyagers who might have tried the beta feature and/or given us feedback over the last five months. In terms of local overrides: I would agree with Nurg and Powers. Design changes always take time to get used to. Since we spent a lot of time testing these, gathering feedback from editors across all Wikimedia communities, and iterating, my only request is to let Wikivoyage as a whole try out the defaults for a little bit before making any site-wide change. If individual people don't like the change, you can of course opt-out. Let me know if you have any more questions, like why we chose serif headings etc. Steven (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for coming by, Steven. I don't recall seeing an announcement about this proposed change before it happened. I would request that in the future, when major Wikimedia-wide changes that will affect this site are under consideration, that someone please come to the Travellers' Pub while discussion is ongoing and inform us about them. That's happened at various times, but I don't think it happened this time. Another alternative would be to change other Wikis and not this one, if that's feasible. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:23, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Or, people could be proactive and pay attention to this sort of thing... by signing up for m:Global message delivery/Targets/Tech ambassadors. Simply put, there are over 750 Wikimedia wikis, and it just simply isn't possible to make WMF staff go to every single wiki. --Rs chen 7754 04:02, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am emphatically with User:Texugo above, "it looks ridiculously amateurish to have the body text in a typical sans serif font and the headers in a drastically more formal-looking serif one. It's a very poor aesthetic choice which completely contradicts standard typesetting wisdom". The change strikes me as quite obviously absurd. Pashley (talk) 00:31, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The new design should be an optional feature, and the old design should be used by default until all formatting issues are settled. The "opt-out" option that you suggest does not bring interline spacings back to normal. Please, provide us with a css-file that removes all changes compared to March 31. Then we may discuss which features of the new style make sense, but so far this new style is only plain ignorance of the community. --Alexander (talk) 07:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The header font, at least, is even not something I am willing to try to "get used to", and hiding it with my personal css is not the answer - I am embarrassed that that's how we are now presenting our guides to the world and I want it reverted. This whole initiative is screwing up something that wasn't broken, with no prior community consensus that there was a need. I fully support the suggestion of reverting everything to how it was on March 31 until/unless there is any local consensus for change. Texugo (talk) 11:14, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While I would agree that there are some issues with the typography refresh, I think some of the comments that this was somehow implemented without notification are out of line. The "beta" link that appears next to everyone's account preferences on every page has offered the typography refresh for several months, and there have been a few automated pub notifications alerting everyone that this change was coming. As User:Rschen7754 notes, it is impossible to interact individually with hundreds of wikis, so it is at least partially up to us to track global changes and weigh in before they are announced.

As to reverting things now, I strongly suggest we wait at least a short while for the major issues to be addressed before we try to "fix" the perceived shortcomings, since any time we create a Wikivoyage-specific customization that is one more thing that can interact badly with future upgrades, requiring extra work for us or causing us to miss out on new features. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:30, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I feel kind of like Arthur Dent being told he should have known his house would be demolished, since the demolition order for his home has been publicly available on file for months in a forgotten corner in the cellar of city hall. It just seems absurd that a change this big was not explicitly brought to our attention. Texugo (talk) 15:46, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback was first requested for the typography feature in November: Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2013 (additional)#Introducting Beta Features, and it has been discussed further on mailing lists and at meta. I agree that it would have been nice to have another notification about the typography changes prior to the one at the end of March, but to require local engagement would make it impossible to make global changes since doing so would require individual discussions on 700 different wikis.

Going forward, it would probably be good if people enabled the "beta" features to get advance notice when these types of changes are being tested, in which case you will automatically see them as soon as they are proposed for inclusion, giving you the chance to provide immediate feedback. If desired we can probably also set up a page that has pointers to places that people should monitor in order to keep track of global changes - would that be useful? -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is not our job to follow all technical developments across all Wikimedia projects. It is the job of the developers (and some of them are paid money, by the way) to make sure that their developments make sense and do not ruin existing content. Typography would be a perfect add-on if it is an option, but the unsolicited change in the default appearance of all wikis is very annoying. --Alexander (talk) 20:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See also w:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Font size and style for a discussion about the typography changes on Wikipedia. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:54, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I did actually turn on beta features when that was posted in the pub in November (and turned it right back off again when I saw what the typography did to the titles), but there was no indication that they weren't just features in development to be offered as options, when this one was in fact a set of fundamental changes to the global defaults that affected every page we have. Plenty of people in that wikipedia thread seem to feel the same way. Texugo (talk) 17:27, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not aware of any beta features that are being considered only as future options; if they were going to be optional, they wouldn't need to go through the beta test system. (The whole point of the beta test system is so that people can turn it on and off easily; if a feature is going to be an option in preferences, it can already be turned on and off easily.)

I certainly have some quibbles with some of the details of the new design but it's certainly not bad enough to take the drastic step of completely divorcing our design from that of other wikis. I am a bit concerned (if Steven is still reading) that the typography was chosen with an eye toward Wikipedia policies and style (neutrality, formality, reliability) rather than taking into account that other projects have different needs. Powers ^(talk) 18:17, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why keeping our design aligned with other wikis would be a concern. We've already veered way off that path with banners and horizontal TOCs, etc., and the font of our mainspace article titles is thus already unaffected by the changes. (And please please please don't suggest ruining our article titles with a serif font!) At any rate, we wouldn't be the only ones, as various versions of WP have already reverted. Texugo (talk) 18:41, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Consensus is one of the core policies of this wiki. There was no consensus to change fonts and other style issues. Therefore, all these changes must be reverted and discussed. --Alexander (talk) 20:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This was done by WMF, and was a technical decision outside of the purview of the consensus of this wiki. --Rs chen 7754 21:16, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They are breaking their own policies, and it is their problem, but I don't see why Wikivoyage should support this. --Alexander (talk) 21:31, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They are not. This kind of hyperbole is not helping your case. If we want to deviate from the default typography, that's what would require consensus. Powers ^(talk) 23:14, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What kind of policy justifies unilateral site-wide changes that were neither adequately announced nor properly discussed (via an RfC, for example)? --Alexander (talk) 21:14, 5 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The policy of "The WMF runs the servers and can do whatever they want". --Rs chen 7754 23:14, 5 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not to mention the fact that it was adequately announced and properly discussed. Powers ^(talk) 01:00, 6 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This confirms my statement that the change was done against existing policies and was not supported by the community. --Alexander (talk) 06:25, 6 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It does? How? Powers ^(talk) 00:14, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If "The WMF runs the servers and can do whatever they want" is the official policy, that would be really funny. I am tempted to go to Meta and ask when and how this policy was approved. --Alexander (talk) 06:03, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm aware, there's no community policy on any wiki that governs the default look-and-feel of the Mediawiki software. This was not a policy change at all. Powers ^(talk) 19:51, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How did you hide the page title from all articles?

We at the Hebrew Wikivoyage added the banners to all our articles a while ago but we haven't hidden all page titles from the top of the articles yet. Technically, how would this be done exactly? (I tried to do this by changing vector.css and common.css but it seems that this should be done in a different way). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We had to do it with Javascript, which isn't elegant but seemed to be the only option due to technical limitations. See MediaWiki:Common.js, specifically:

$(".topbanner").closest(".mw-body").children(".firstHeading").hide();

-- Ryan • (talk) • 15:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I added this code to Heb Voy and it does now hide all page titles from articles, nevertheless, it seems to me that this process is slightly longer at Heb Voy - meaning, you can see the page title on the top of each article for about 1.5 seconds before it is completly hidden - while in the Eng Voy articles, for me it seems the page titles be hidden immediately. (see an example of this delay for yourself at the article for Paris in Heb Voy) Any suggestions for how to reduce this delay? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 16:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Try moving the new code to the top of MediaWiki:Common.js - if it runs faster, that means that something else in your Javascript is running slowly and causing everything after it to run later in the page loading process. If you can figure out what is running slowly, you can defer the slow code by surrounding it with:

$(document).ready(function(e) {
    // put slow code here
});

If the problem isn't due to other code running slowly then further debugging would be needed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:43, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On second thought, it seems to me now that this same problem actually exists both in Heb Voy and Eng Voy (it take more or less the same amount of time to hide the page title from the Eng Voy article of Paris as it does for the Heb Voy article for Paris). To me it seems now that this problem is caused by the fact that before the server works on hiding the page title it actually first works on loading the panoramic image of the banner - and therefore, in the instances in when images larger in size and details are loaded, the server take an additional second or 1.5 seconds to load the image before it goes ahead and works on hiding the page title from the top of the article. Ideally, in order to solve the problem, we need to get the server to first hide the page title from the top of the article before the server goes ahead and works on loading the panoramic image of the banner. Any ideas on how to achieve this? (I tried moving the new code to the top of MediaWiki:Common.js but it didn't change anything, probably because it is defined somewhere else that the panoramic image would load beforehand.) ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note from some old wiki tidbits from ages ago (may or may not apply): Matroc (talk) 00:07, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To hide an article title on a single page can use a template to do so:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="display:none">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span>}}

To hide all article titles, I have edited Common.css (many years ago on a personal wiki):

body.page-No_page_title h1.firstHeading { display:none; }

Of course mediawiki code has change since quite a bit and the above may not work correctly. —The preceding comment was added by Matroc (talk • contribs)

Unfortunately DISPLAYTITLE can no longer be used to hide the page title - see Wikivoyage talk:Banner Expedition/archive#Not inhibiting title. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:14, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Migration data

The site is for travellers in general, so it should include migrants though of course tourists are the most important group served and business travellers likely come second.

Here is an interesting graphic, Where everyone in the world is migrating—in one gorgeous chart. Pashley (talk) 14:05, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Stack Exchange has a new QA site for expatriates (that is distinct from their Travel QA site) Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:34, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Malformed item in Tools menu

Swept in from the pub

Looks like something's gone wrong in the Tools menu in the left column. <wikibase-dataitem> Nurg (talk) 10:39, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also at the bottom of the other languages links. Nurg (talk) 10:40, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that something huge has gone wrong at Wikidata — all of the edit/add/save/cancel buttons there are broken. Look at wikidata:Q16503 for example. Texugo (talk) 11:18, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, they have fixed it now. Wikidata:Project chat#All labels are broken. Nurg (talk) 20:05, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Admin edit request

Swept in from the pub

Sidebar change Per bugzilla:64027. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:52, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at the bug and I'm not sure what we're changing. Powers ^(talk) 13:47, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The bug appears to be a request to change a configuration file on the server. That's something WMF's sysadmin would need to do. K7L (talk) 14:15, 22 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bug Change references in the sidebar from "Open Directory" to "DMOZ". —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:20, 27 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's the title of the bug. The question is what are we, as admins, supposed to be changing? As K7L indicated, this looks like a configuration file change, which admins don't have access to AFAIK. Powers ^(talk) 18:47, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry I misread Bugzilla. That's embarrassing. I apologize. Feel free to sweep this from the Pub. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:10, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

World's most dangerous cities?

Is this list accurate or useful? What do you think? Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:41, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't seem to have any facts behind it at all. Taking precautions in places like Mexico, Pakistan and Yemen is always a good thing, but I doubt specific to the cities mentioned. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:32, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It might be worth checking if top ones at w:List of cities by murder rate have warnings here.

We have links to several indexes of danger level at Retiring_abroad#Information_sources, under "statistics and indexes". Pashley (talk) 12:51, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also worth noting that the danger experienced by a tourist taking precautions and a resident who has to live in the city are likely to be markedly different. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:59, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Andrewssi2. I'm not sure I trust that article much, because this much I know for sure: it's overtly alarmist and an extreme exaggeration to make the grand generalization that "[Brazil's] most populated areas are not places you want to hang out in". Texugo (talk) 13:22, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's surprising that Kabul, Baghdad, Grozny and Damascus are missing from the list. However the cities on the list and the parts of the world they're located in aren't exactly famous for their safety either. ϒpsilon (talk) 20:03, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm living in world's most dangerous megacity but fortunately never felt I'm unsafe here so yes, safety concerns are definitely different for a resident and a visitor. --Saqib (talk) 20:21, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A more telling ranking might be one which doesn't count the ones where the victims are acquaintances of their attackers. Texugo (talk) 20:55, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just in, official data from the UN on the matter: https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html

And some analysis by the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21600713-un-offers-some-hints-how-avoid-being-bumped-dicing-death

Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:29, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Formal request: Renaming "Open Directory" as "DMOZ" in the sidebar

RfC please I am opening up a proper RfC for an issue that I mentioned briefly in a prior post. The Open Directory Project has officially branded itself as "DMOZ" (which is a name it has always used and is more popular). I have requested a page move at en.wp and similar changes at Wikidata and the Commons. For better or worse, English is the predominant language of the WMF projects and Wikipedia the predominant project, so I started there as a means of gaining traction across projects and languages for consistent branding of this site. This seems pretty non-controversial to me and others expressed support. What does the community think? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:22, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Should we be linking to ODP? It seems nearly impossible to get listings added or updated there. K7L (talk) 01:27, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@K7L: Why not? Even if it's not easy to get listings there, DMOZ can be a good resource for readers. At some point, a person might want more info than a travel guide would offer, so where should we direct them (if anywhere)? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:51, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Spoke with one of the founders of DMOZ a while ago. He stated that the project was mostly dead and that we at Wikipedia should not link to it. I am not a big fan of long lists of external links within articles and it is better than anything else out there. I guess the question is should the WMF start one? No strong feelings around the term DMOZ. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:27, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If the link is kept, it seems sensible to rename it as suggested. Nurg (talk) 05:06, 19 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd support removing the link to DMOZ. It's poorly curated and dying. —Tom Morris (talk) 14:10, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If we keep it, I fairly strongly prefer "Open Directory" or some other meaningful phrase to "DMOZ", no matter what they may call themselves. I want something a naive user (such as me) can understand at a glance.

From comments above, it sounds as though we should just delete it. Does anyone have clearer or more recent info that would either reinforce or contradict that? Pashley (talk) 16:48, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Media Viewer this week

Hey all,

This is a reminder that Media Viewer will be enabled by default for all logged-in users on English Wikivoyage this Thursday, 17 April. There will be an option to disable Media Viewer in your preferences. If you'd like to try out Media Viewer now you can turn it on in your Beta Features or by using it on the demo page on mediawiki.org. Please contact me if you have any questions. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 14 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What, if anything, should WV do with this? It is not at all difficult to think of places where various media files would be interesting or useful supplements to our guides, though I cannot think of anywhere they are essential. Nor is it hard to see that there could be various problems, though I cannot see any that look insurmountable.

Previous discussion rejected the idea of linking to media files. I'd be in favour of allowing some links. Rule one should be link only to files on Commons; no local uploads and no external links to media files. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Other opinions? Pashley (talk) 20:19, 14 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to be interpreting it to mean exclusively non-image media files, but it changes the way images are displayed when clicked on as well. I don't think it necessarily has any implications for our policy on non-image media files. It's just a visualization feature. Texugo (talk) 20:26, 14 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sibling project links in Wikidata?

According to mw:Extension:Wikibase Client#Other projects sidebar, Wikimedia is working on the Wikidata extension to allow it to be used to generate links to sibling projects in much the same way as Wikidata currently generates inter-language links within a project. The links would appear in a section of MediaWiki:Sidebar with title MediaWiki:wikibase-otherprojects.

For instance, wikidata:Q2078515 links to s:fr:Appel du 18 juin and a French Wikipédia article on the same topic. The Wikidata extension automatically puts "Autres projets - Wikipedia" into the sidebar of the Wikisource page without adding any codes to that page's wiki text. Contrast this with our current 'kludge' of an extension, mw:extension:RelatedSites, where every stray [[wikipedia: or [[commons: link gets moved to the sidebar (often unintentionally) as if it were a language and the rest of the siblings have no sidebar links.

The catch? This is still limited to one link per project from any page and it does require one line to be added to a server configuration file:

$wgWBSettings['otherProjectsLinks'] => array( 'enwiki', 'enwikinews', 'enwikiquote', 'commonswiki' );

There's a bit of discussion on m:Requests for comment/Interproject links interface but I'd presume that, if we want to use this, we should determine which wikis we want to appear so that a bugzilla: ticket may be opened. I'd suggest:

all Wikivoyage languages (as already exists)
all English-language versions of all Wikimedia sibling projects (Wikipedia, Wikinews and the like)
commons:, meta:, mw:
English-language DMOZ (if available).

Comments? K7L (talk) 16:24, 16 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There appears to be a related conversation on Wikidata: Wikidata:Wikidata:Project chat#Sidebar links between projects powered by Wikidata now possible - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:56, 16 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, some languages versions are already taking Wikipedia and Commons links from Wikidata, although the display of these links is still interfaced by the Extension:RelatedSites. Of course, it would be great to get rid of this extension. However, it is important that Commons links are set to categories instead of pages. Otherwise, many useful links will be lost. --Alexander (talk) 17:10, 16 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should be generous and include many links. It is great to have Commons links and links to various Wikipedias for instance. Also, doing so might increase the probability that these sites start to link to us in the future. Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:18, 17 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of DMOZ, I have put together a mapping of most Wikivoyage pages to their corresponding DMOZ urls that might be helpful. Unknown (talk) 07:07, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Unknown: Interesting! Is it available online? It is extracted from the Wikivoyage dump I guess? Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:17, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I've made it available here. It maps 27187/47623 of the Wikivoyage pages from the dump, at varying degrees of specificity. Certainly that could be improved with some manual inspection, as this was done with a pretty simple algorithm. Unknown (talk) 17:34, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is it just me, or...

...has there been an uptick lately in activity from non-regular contributors? As ever, I'm hopeful that Wikivoyage is gaining momentum. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:14, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Could be, and I can't disagree. Powers ^(talk) 13:25, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed this too - are things starting to look up for WV? Has anyone got any reliable statistics on site views? --Nick ^talk 18:07, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The other day I had the pleasure to welcome someone who's first edits to WT were in 2003 and who's even been an admin there to WV. Pretty cool, right? :) ϒpsilon (talk) 18:18, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's great to see! We need more people like that! It might also be worth considering how we can hold on to some of the people who are editing and get them to become more involved. --Nick ^talk 18:28, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you're wondering how to get them more involved, a simple message on their talk page would be a good start. Show them some extra Wikilove, and thank them for their contributions! New users like to see enthusiasm and encouragement from the more experienced users. Edge3 (talk) 02:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To Edge3: q.v. User talk:007contributor. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great! Just in case this wasn't clear, I'm not saying that Wikivoyagers do a bad job of welcoming new users. I was just making a simple suggestion, in case anyone needed the advice. :) Edge3 (talk) 03:44, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage offline

Hi all,

I just converted Wikivoyage to several formats:

OxygenGuide, the offline Wikivoyage, just a collection of HTML files streamlined to be viewed easily on mobile devices.
Listings as OBF, ready to be imported into the Android offline GPS/navigation app OsmAnd.
Listings as OSM, ready to be imported into your OpenStreetMap server.
Listings as CSV, for mashups, data reuse, error spotting, or just to have fun exploring the data.

If there is enough interest I will set up my scripts on Labs, so that these 4 files get refreshed automatically every 2 weeks. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:23, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe it is an absolutely necessary thing, but the next step would be some sort of communication with OsmAnd developers. I tried to import one of your earlier OBF files into my OsmAnd installiation and realized that the POIs are simply merged with thousands of POIs already existing in OSM. Then it is not possible to use or at least highlight Wikivoyage-specific POIs. Any ideas about that?

You may also be interested in interfacing Wikivoyage with MapsWithMe, which is an alternative to OsmAnd. --Alexander (talk) 05:22, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There are approximately 80 or so entries with embedded tabs, in most cases users may have tried to do some formatting (Discovered while converting file to tab delimited file)... ie. Manchester/Downtown - Trinity Brewhouse... Am testing a few ideas I have and will pass on anything else I find - Matroc (talk) 05:54, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed the tabs from the articles, so next time the listings file is generated, it will be fine. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:19, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - I fixed a few articles that contained \\'s or , as data as well. Matroc (talk) 07:30, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe I may have found a minor conversion issue -- The correct html code for no break space found in an article is converted to html code for an ampersand followed by nbsp; in the .csv file -- (1070 times) - example see Aarau, under sleep entry for Aarau-West. (Hopefully I am incorrect and not hallucinating!) Matroc (talk) 04:25, 25 April 2014 (UTC) ... same for ndash.[reply]

Hi Matroc! Not sure to understand the problem, could you please copy paste here what appears in the wiki, in the CSV, and what should appear in the CSV? Thanks a lot! By the way, the code for generating the CSV does not do anything special about ampersands etc. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:58, 27 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Nicolas - Rather than fill up Travellers' Pub with my verbage - I have created a section on my talk page for further discussion. Matroc (talk) 03:57, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dead links

Hi, Wikipeople. I've been poking around at your pages a bit and I've noticed that there are a lot of dead links. What's the general community feeling on that? I'm looking at this from the perspective of a DMOZ editor where there's a lot of emphasis on removing non-functioning links, but maybe that's not such an issue here -- I can see that a particular restaurant or B&B might stop having a website but still be a functioning business, and maybe you're more interested in erring on the side of providing the maximum amount of information that a user should then validate. If that's not the case, is there any interest in putting together some sort of bot to maintain the links? Unknown (talk) 07:01, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Quite often a dead link just means that the web page's structure has changed or it has moved to another domain (e.g. they've got themselves proper web pages instead of the small, sometimes ad supported space many ISP's offer free of charge). If I encounter a dead link I usually google the establishment to see if it still exists. ϒpsilon (talk) 08:31, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Having better links would increase the search engine ranking for the site. I think however this should be something that is corrected manually. Would it be possible to create a category of pages that have broken external links on them, similar to the broken image links category? --Traveler100 (talk) 11:08, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DuckDuckGo using Wikitravel links

Searches for places bring a link for more info on Wikitravel, for instance: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=london — it'd be a good way to drive some traffic to persuade them to link to Wikivoyage instead.JimKillock (talk) 17:30, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be good to make DuckDuckGo aware that this is an issue of interest to many. You can make suggestions to DuckDuckGo here. I believe we should make sure they get many messages suggesting the change in a short period. PrinceGloria (talk) 20:05, 26 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I created a thread about this at https://duck.co/forum/thread/5688/use-wikivoyage feel free to add comments there too. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:24, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

wikidata for listing details

I found my way here from Openstreetmap, experimenting with linking OSM objects to wikidata, then finally starting to contribute to wikipedia. I'm contributing to several language versions both here on WV as on WP. So this got me thinking. I added a restaurant to an itinerary, the next step is to add it to a locality guide about the region in this same WV, then do the same across, say 6 language versions. And we have all those details duplicated once again in Openstreetmap, of course. Copy/pasting is easy, no problem there. The problems start when some of those details, like say opening hours change. Who is going to hunt down all instances of where that detail was mentioned? To me, the obvious solution is to store all of it in Wikidata and then refer to the properties, although I'm not entirely sure how that needs to be done and if it's even possible technically, since the Q-item is not the Q-item of the article itself. This first question is of course, do we want to do it?--Polyglot (talk) 08:28, 27 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Polyglot, welcome to Wikivoyage! Wikidata Q-items do not need to match a particular article anywhere, so no problem with that. Actually, we need people to work towards implementing the models and tools that will make this whole centralization possible. See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Sister_projects#Wikivoyage https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Wikidata_Expedition We will also need to modify the listing editor to get the data from Wikidata if the listing is defined by a Wikidata Q-item. Nothing impossible to achieve, but quite a lot of work, so you are very welcome to join the effort :-) Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:19, 27 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Nicolas1981:, I tried, but I can't make it work. Please have a look at my last change on Andorra--Polyglot (talk) 17:54, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Polygot! Unfortunately for now it seems that article Andorra only has access to properties from Wikidata item Q228 (Andorra). Someone need to investigate how a wiki page can go through links to find all hotels linked from Q228 (and first find how to link a hotel from Q228). Still quite a bit of work remaining indeed... Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:29, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DuckDuckGo Instant Answer?

It appears that favouring Wikivoyage in organic DuckDuckGo search engine results is difficult. Instead, a community member suggested creating an "Instant Answer". Here are examples. I have not planned/developed anything yet, but if we go this route, we will have to answer the questions below, so your answers/ideas are welcome! Please comment under each question, thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:03, 8 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What does your instant answer do?

Prince Hotel Shinagawa -> Opening hours, price and other info about the hotel. Same for other POIs.
London -> First sentence of the London article, if there is no Wikipedia article for it (rather unlikely... what destination articles exist on Wikivoyage but not on Wikipedia?).
Driving in China -> First sentence of the Driving in China article .
... (Add your ideas) ...

What problem does your instant answer solve (Why is it better than organic links)?

What is the data source for your instant answer? (Provide a link if possible)

Wikivoyage

Why did you choose this data source?

Up-to-date travel info

Are there any other alternative (better) data sources?

Alternatives: WT, Yelp, TripAdvisor.

What are some example queries that trigger this instant answer?

Which communities will this instant answer be especially useful for? (gamers, book lovers, etc)

People travelling
People preparing a trip

Is this instant answer connected to a DuckDuckHack instant answer idea?

(Will create idea entry when we settle on the idea)

Which existing instant answers will this one supersede/overlap with?

Yelp
Wikipedia

Are you having any problems? Do you need our help with anything?

Formal request: Including OpenStreetMap in the sidebar

RfC please I am opening up a proper RfC for an issue that I mentioned briefly in a prior post. I think that OpenStreetMap is a good resource to include in the sidebar for a few reasons. First off, it is an open project, like Wikimedia and the ODP/DMOZ (which is the other project linked in the sidebar). On an abstract level, it's good for us to support one another. On a more practical one, OSM provides the kind of in-depth data that would be inappropriate for a travel guide but very useful for someone getting into the nitty-gritty of a city. Furthermore, it generally has high-quality content, although it's uneven—just like our WMF projects. Does anyone else think that OSM rates as a good enough and useful enough project to direct travelers to once they're done with travel guides from us? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:25, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We already integrate OSM information rather prominently, {{geo}}, {{mapframe}}, {{listing}}, {{marker}}, special:mapsources. How does your proposal differ? K7L (talk) 01:22, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@K7L: These other templates simply include OSM amongst other map services. I am proposing two things make OSM stand out from (e.g.) Google Maps: OSM has a number of high-quality options that other map services lack and it's an open project. As an open project of our own, we should encourage support of other such open projects. This is precisely why Wikitravel linked to DMOZ and Wikipedia in the first place. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:56, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not true. Take a look at Oswego#Get around; the German 'Wikivoyage eV' users have put a fine effort into integrating OSM maps to appear directly in Wikivoyage with our points of interest marked. OSM isn't being treated as just another map service like the (proprietary) Google Maps. K7L (talk) 13:24, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Most destination articles have a link to a full screen OpenStreetMap map - an icon on the right just above the banner. However I expect that many readers don't take this in, or notice that it is OpenStreetMap. It might be good to duplicate this as a link in the Related Sites group on the left. AlasdairW (talk) 14:35, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would love to see a map in every article. Could a bot do this? Also support the adding of an OpenStreet Map link in the sidebar. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:19, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest the icon be replaced with MAP; users may not notice the icon or realise its significance. Pashley (talk) 16:53, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DMOZ tool to mine and check Wikivoyage links

Link scraper There is a thread on DMOZ's forums (membership required) where a user has taken their regional link ontology and our RDF breadcrumbs and used some computing magic to find links on our pages that are dead or which are redundant to DMOZ. The forum is supposed to be for internal use only but I think it's okay to quote since they are interested in cross-collaboration:

Well, I've been doing a little playing with the data and I've got something worth looking at, although it's not what I think the final product could eventually become. It's a browser of DMOZ topics that maps to the related Wikivoyage links, broken down by their page and categories. For example Vancouver (Wikivoyage has several neighbourhood pages as well, which were also identified cleanly):

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/British_Columbia/Localities/V/Vancouver

or all the localities that I could automatically identify in New Brunswick:

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/New_Brunswick/Localities

Lots of stuff to mine pretty easily. I could also use the categorization that Wikivoyage does to suggest topical categories inside the locality -- I don't know if it's that important.

Thinking about things from the other direction, I see this cat:

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/New_Brunswick/Localities/Plaster_Rock

contains 13 sites not listed in DMOZ, but 6 of them are dead. I think there's a certain amount of possible value to be had for the Wikivoyage project. They are not a specialized link directory, but DMOZ is -- which is why we have a well developed QC system sweeping the directory clean. Right now from what I've seen, just using my own QC tools, Wikivoyage has an incredibly large number of dead links. If there were a database of links that are listed in both sites, maybe we could find a way to have their editors being notified when we are removing links on our side.

One obvious thing to do from the link mining perspective would be to filter dead links, but I thought it was useful to show them for illustrative purposes right now.

Interestingly, this is a segment of the DMOZ ecosystem that could benefit the Wikivoyage project that they might not want to internally develop due to their open source licensing system, since open sourcing the heuristics would let spammers easily circumvent them when buying expired domains. Maybe less of an issue for them since they are all nofollow links.

This could be extended to all the other languages of Wikivoyage of course. I just did English first to see if there was any interest, and because I'm more fluent in it.

On another note, I see the number of Wikivoyage listings in DMOZ has grown to 20 http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=wikivoyage.org .

Useful? Does anyone want to work back and forth with DMOZians when it comes to links on these pages and links to these pages? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:39, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting! A first thing is that we could really benefit from getting a list of all our dead links. Dynamic sharing of information (via wikidata?) would be even better. Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:04, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The links that were posted above had a layer of authentication that prevented them from being viewed by anyone other than DMOZ editors -- I've made a public version of the browser and updated the links. That's just the mapping of ontologies, but I do have a database of broken links (from your XML dump, not live) that I will put online in a bit. Unknown (talk) 15:10, 28 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is a [list of dead links on Wikivoyage], which is 29305/171536 = ~17% of links. Some of these will be transient errors of course, and it's based on the XML dump which may be slightly out of date. There are also around 10,000 probable errors or things that should be corrected that aren't listed here because they're more fuzzy (extremely tiny pages, weird redirects, etc). I'm not sure what the best thing to do with this data is. It's a pretty big list, obviously -- if there were constant maintenance going on thena single page listing errors would probably be sufficient but maybe this is too much for one page? Might be better to break it into more manageable chunks, or maybe mention them on the individual talk pages? I could also make this into a more searchable system if there were some interest in that. Any ideas welcome! Unknown (talk) 00:51, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for the list! I fixed a few ones, and realized that trying to fix links takes too much time, it is probably better to just remove the 29305 broken URLs... could anyone write a script to do that? Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:24, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed a handful of broken links in Culver City and Yellowstone National Park, but also came across a few false positives that would make me hesitant about using an automated script to remove them all. Additionally, manual removal might allow us to identify (and remove) some closed listings. Can we promote this list for a while (perhaps via Wikivoyage:Cleanup and other means) and see how much manual cleanup is done over the next couple of weeks before considering automated options? -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:12, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly didn't intend to automatically remove everything on this list :) This was definitely for manual inspection. If we wanted to do an automated solution, we'd want to put dead links into a queue and see if they come back within a week or two to make sure they weren't transient errors, and we'd want to have special handling for different cases. In DMOZ once we identify a link as properly dead we don't even delete them then either, but instead we throw them into a secondary queue where editors go and hunt down a replacement since there is often a good reason, like a business changing names, getting a new domain name, or whatever. Which is why I was thinking that some means of directly collaborating between the two projects would be a good idea, as the link scanner I put the Wikivoyage links through is not nearly as well developed as the ones running at DMOZ, and also because are constantly fixing our links and it would make sense to get the value of that work propagated out to other open projects like this. Ideally, when Wikivoyagers find replacements those replacements would be sent in the other direction to improve DMOZ as well. Using Wikidata to do this dynamically sounded like an interesting idea. Either way, I'm happy to continue generating these reports from the WV XML dumps on an ongoing basis if they are helpful here. Unknown (talk) 15:03, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I thought the list came from the same multi-step checking engine as DMOZ. If it is only a one-time check, then deleting URLs would be premature indeed. But if a link has been consistently down, I would be in favour of just deleting this link (and keeping the listing). Unlike DMOZ, we don't absolutely need URLs. Unlike DMOZ, we have a relatively high number of people who actually travel to that destination, these people are the best for the task of adding correct URLs later or removing the listing altogether if it has disappeared in real life. Anyway, looking forward to collaborating with DMOZ on this! Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:15, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any plans to rerun this list? It might be good to have a focused cleanup drive and then re-run to see what's left to do. I've been fixing links here and there and it sounds like others have been too, so the list has probably changed. Agree with others that it's not a good idea to summarily remove links before checking whether the listing has closed. -- Phoebe (talk) 05:36, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd hesitate to count on having "a relatively high number of people who actually travel to that destination" as a sanity check, as that varies depending on the popularity of a destination and the number of our regular users there. A small eatery in a tiny, out-of-the-way village often disappears very silently, with only the locals in that village being the wiser. Broken URLs are often the first outward sign that the business has closed, as domains expire to be hijacked by spammers if they're not renewed annually. Outdated white-page or yellow-page listings still exist online for a decade or more because some sites don't update their info. Short of using a cheap voice over IP service to actually call these venues (which can be a penny or two for a one-minute call to landlines in most industrialised countries), we have no idea if they're dead or alive. A broken URL is all too often a closed venue.

Another option may be to gather a list of what's broken and contact the local CVB's in those destinations to enlist their aid in spotting business closures. K7L (talk) 14:58, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage Leaflets for Wikimania

Please see m:Wikivoyage/Lounge#Wikimania Leaflets. I think this is a great idea to help promote our project to the WMF community. Powers ^(talk) 12:42, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great. Who's going to make a request for leaflets of WV? --Saqib (talk) 12:46, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was hoping we could discuss details at meta. Powers ^(talk) 00:07, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but I thought it would be better to discuss it here first as we've more chances to get potential interested people, otherwise so far no one responded on Meta yet. --Saqib (talk) 00:19, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Left note on Meta that I think it would be a good idea to promote Wikivoyage by doing a leaflet - Matroc (talk) 02:44, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A pagebanner printed on card would make the basis for a good bookmark. There would be enough space on the back for a few lines of text. I expect that this would cost about the same as a small leaflet and would be more likely to be kept by people that pick one up. AlasdairW (talk) 22:40, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Promoting Wikivoyage

Hello! The Individual Engagement Grant at m:Grants:IEG/Promoting Wikivoyage was selected. I am so excited to share what a great resource Wikivoyage is! The basic plan is to directly inform Chambers of Commerce in the United States about Wikivoyage. I'll be asking for community input along the way and posting on the pub with updates. The main project page is at meta. For now, just letting you know the good news. I'll be seeing you around! --Tbennert (talk) 03:51, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Terrific. Well done! -- Alice^✉ 03:57, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Tbennert, congratulations! That's really good news. --Danapit (talk) 16:46, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We count on you :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:37, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great job! Congratulations! Do let us know if you'd like any help! :) --Nick ^talk 21:00, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Travemünde

Mates,

since today the first cross-wiki collaboration is online on .de and .en! I would like to thank User:Ikan Kekek, User:Pashley and User:Texugo for their proof reading and tireless control of my inferior writing skills, User:Saqib for the static and User:Mey2008 for the very early implementation of the dynamic map. Special thanks go to User:DerFussi and User:Tine who are the German admins who made the German side possible.

I think we need to keep working on cross WV to maintain the spirit of a multi-language community WV is. Mr. Nugget does a good thing at the moment, so maybe we should aim for an annual cross-wiki collaboration for a Dotm/OtBP? Regards, jan (talk) 11:35, 11 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mr Nugget! Thanks! I'm learning all the time here, and that's worth more than gold. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 19:52, 11 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations to you and all others involved! I think it would be great to have other cross-WV features. A cross-wiki feature would be great, too, if we could get cooperation from any other wiki. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:43, 11 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I talked with the German WV community https://de.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Lounge#Travem.C3.BCnde and they are positively interested in having an annual collaboration for a Dotm/otBP/FTT. André is our grandmaster for that area so i hope we will work a way to keep that going. Maybe we can even aim bigger and do something with the Italian and German community together. jan (talk) 07:09, 12 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the belated response to this thread. To address jan's suggestion, I'm fully in support of an annual cross-language feature. I can serve as liaison to fr: and es: when/if we collaborate with them, but in other cases it would be good for other willing polyglot editors to identify themselves. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 12:16, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No worries André, i see you are busy. I guess User:Andyrom75 can serve as go between for it: and User:Texugo for :pt. I will post something in the interlingual pub. jan (talk) 12:35, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I can do my best. To be honest, on pt: I usually prefer to keep things in order and work in the background and leave the actual prose writing to the native speakers, but at the moment there are no regular contributors there besides me. Texugo (talk) 13:37, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps if we made Lisbon a multilanguage collaboration that could spark some interest - maybe we could ask the Portuguese Wikipedia community if they'd care to participate? PrinceGloria (talk) 14:53, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think that sounds like a good idea. It might be best to start off with experienced people here, to make sure that the basic structure is in place, but talking to w:en:Lisbon's editors or w:pt:Turismo's might be a way to find someone who can help with language or local information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:38, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

jan, very glad to help when needed. Just give me a whistle on it:voy just to be sure of catching my prompt attention ;-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:23, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

André, WhatamIdoing, PrinceGloria, Texugo i started the discussion on coordination on the interlingual pub. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Lounge#multi_lingual_display_for_Destination_of_the_month Regards, jan (talk) 12:33, 18 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Twitter

Hi everyone, despite the title, this section isn't about Twitter alone. It's also an apology for my extremely reduced activity over the last few months. As you've perhaps guessed I've been rather overwhelmed by work recently and I've not been able to give Wikivoyage the attention I'd have liked; I hope you're all well!

As part of this, whilst I have tweeted from the Wikivoyage account as often as I can, I haven't been able to give it all the attention I feel it deserves. As such, I'd like to appeal for another user to help operate the WV Twitter account. I don't propose to stop tweeting altogether, but it would be good to have someone else to fill in the gaps when I'm otherwise engaged - we're on more than 500 followers at the moment and they expect content! In terms of requirements, any previous Twitter experience would naturally be a bonus, but really you'll also need to be a trusted Wikivoyage user (whatever that means) and you'll also need to be prepared to give me your email address/have that feature enabled on your profile so that I can send you the log-in credentials in confidence. If anyone can think of any other necessary requirements, please let me know.

Once again, I apologise for my protracted absence, but I hope to be able to become a little more active over the summer. It's been great to see how the project continues to grow (even from a distance), and I remain absolutely committed to WV's success. Thanks! --Nick ^talk 22:44, 12 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nick. Glad to see your message. I can handle WV Twitter if the community have trust on me. Currently, I'm handling @WikimediaPK. --Saqib (talk) 22:53, 12 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Increasing spam

Recently I saw a significant increment in spam from IP addresses. I was thinking would it be a good idea if we limit article creation only to registered users only? --Saqib (talk) 11:29, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I see a few new pages but could you give some examples of spam? --Traveler100 (talk) 12:46, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Spam deleted.--Saqib (talk) 12:48, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that spam has reached any level where it's eating up too much admin time or threatening to get out of control. I'd like to keep things as open as possible for new users unless/until things start to get pretty seriously out of hand. Texugo (talk) 12:54, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the wikimedia foundation's position on this be?

Also it seems like a lot of accounts are automatically created for spam purposes, so I'm not sure restricting anonymous users from creating pages will help too much... --Andrewssi2 (talk) 13:07, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Texugo - right now it looks like we're dealing with an average of about 2-4 spam articles a day created by IPs, which is a minor annoyance rather than a problem, and not something that I think merits a change that would affect our principle of being as open as possible. -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:41, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is something that might be declined by WMF, yes. --Rs chen 7754 14:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My guess is that the WMF will back the WV users if we decide to keep things as they are now and they would also back us if we decide to restrict new users or IPs from creating articles. I think WV would have to go a long way towards unreasonable (in either direction) before WMF would intervene at all - in my opinion. On the question of automatically generated accounts: that I can see WMF acting on via technical measures, without even consulting us. Remember that User accounts are now accounts on all WMF wikis. I believe there is already a restriction on creating a lot of new accounts from the same IP address in a short period - I was warned about this when I helped run an editathon. Filceolaire (talk) 19:51, 22 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Twitter: WeAreWikipedia

The @WeAreWikipedia account on Twitter is run by a different Wikipedian each week. This week it's me, and I'm trying to include something about each sister project. Do drop by, and follow it if that's your thing. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:01, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Andy, this is a great idea! If you wanted to mention something about Wikivoyage, you may perhaps say that our article on Berlin is now undergoing major refurbishment, but we are lacking voices from those who actually LIVE in Berlin. Since the German Wikipedia/Wikimedia community is actually one of the strongest, this may be because they did not take interest in Wikivoyage before - if Berlin is close to their heart, perhaps it is time to plunge forward! PrinceGloria (talk) 15:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

PS. Similarly, I am not sure if Wikipedians know that we are actually using OpenStreetMap to dynamically map out POIs (points of interest - such as sights, restaurants, hotels/hostels etc.) people add, so that we always have an up-to-date map. This world-class application is unique to Wikivoyage (e.g. Wikitravel does not have it) and has been basically created and maintained by one, very committed user - as it happens, a German one!

Berlin done - thank for the tip. I'll cover OSM later. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:15, 21 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Swept in from the pub

Just three months after Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared with no trace, another passenger plane of Malaysia Airlines carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members shot down on the Russian-Ukraine border. I'm deeply saddened and this is a really devastating news. --Saqib (talk) 17:00, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it is. I hope it was a case of mistaken identity, but whatever the reason, it's been an extremely tragic year for Malaysian Airlines, and my heart goes out to all who are touched by this calamity and outrage. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:11, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

~~Also of also in Donetsk, the MH17 (from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam to KUL, Kuala Lumpur) has been crashed in Grabovo (borders with Russia) (see BBC). --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:32, 18 July 2014 (UTC)~~[reply]

Really sad to hear about it. ϒpsilon (talk) 12:56, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Quite saddening and this year is rather a tragedy for Malasyia Airlines. Jianhui67 (talk) 11:13, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for WikiVoyage!

Swept in from the pub

Hello,

sorry for writing such a random note here (I don't know where else to put it), but I really, really do like WikiVoyage as a travelers guide. So I want to thank all the people making it.

It is becoming (for me) the third most useful Wikimedia project, after wikipedia (of course) and wiktionary.

(There are some other projects, like Wikiversity, that I don't get at all, but that's for another debate.)

Thanks guys. Since I am from Prague, I am thinking about enhancing its article. --Running (talk) 08:01, 6 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You're quite welcome, Running. It's always gratifying to see travellers making use of what I personally feel is a tremendous resource. As for our article on Prague, it would be absolutely wonderful to have you as a contributor. I encourage you to plunge forward with your enhancements! -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 13:56, 6 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Fantastic to hear! I'm sure you'll enjoy contributing both to Prague and any other of our destination and travel topic articles. ϒpsilon (talk) 14:10, 6 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics recalculated

You might like to know that the statistics (Special:Statistics) for all Wikivoyage additions have just been recalculated. For those not aware, many of the counts were excessively high due to a (still-existing) bug that leads to multiple counting when pages are imported from other sites. This, that and the other (talk) 11:50, 14 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just FYI the known bugs that currently affect the stats are two: page importing (bugzilla:40009) and page movement (bugzilla:64333). The first one has been opened almost 2 years ago while the last one is quite recent but it seems that no one has yet tested/confirmed it. Feel free to access bugzilla and vote for their resolution. --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:17, 14 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that votes are mostly ignored at Bugzilla, even if it's turned on for some of the projects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:04, 14 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WhatamIdoing, there's the possibility that you are right, but considering that the alternative is not doing anything, waiting other 2 years for nothing, it worth a try ;-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:07, 15 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe good news

Hey all. Maybe some good news on the readership front. We have had a consistent (14days) of three fold increase in readership per Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:50, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am completely failing at figuring out how to view site stats for anything more than 1 day. And even those numbers don't change when I select a different language or project. Powers ^(talk) 20:07, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You need to select project totals than select, stats under wikivoyage, than set the days to 180. Might simply be that these numbers are not accurate though.Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:36, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Summer season? The figure seems to be just a bit higher than July last year. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:03, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Something happened a couple of weeks ago to increase viewership. Could just be a bot or spider, though. Powers ^(talk) 17:34, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes is a spider; most likely from Guidesebooks.com (it's just a guessing without any data). More than 1M click have gone to the following pages: Special:CentralAutoLogin/setCookies Special:CentralAutoLogin/deleteCookies. No brain gifted person would make 1M click to these technical pages :-P --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:23, 25 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Updates to Wikidata documentation for Wikivoyage

Hi all!

I am a current Wikimedia OPW intern working specifically on Wikidata outreach and just wanted to let you know that the Wikidata documentation for Wikivoyage has now been updated and hopefully will prove useful for the Wikivoyage community and encourage further collaboration. If interested, please have a look at Wikidata:Wikivoyage. You can also leave any feedback on the talk page.

Cheers, -Thepwnco (talk) 16:45, 31 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Automating warning boxes

Hello!

As a (future at least) major source of information regarding travel we have a big responsibility to make sure that our guides provides accurate and up-to-date information regarding security information. As of now this is a manual process were any user can add the warningbox-template to articles. This can be quite tedious as a single warning might effect dozens of articles. For example the current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa should be added to all articles about places in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. As you all understand that takes a lot of time and more often then not articles are lacking important safety information.

So, what I think we should introduce is a script when a warning box i added to country/region all pages that's under it automatically get warning boxes too. As articles already is categorized by which region they belong it seems the same mechanism could be used for this.

However, they are of course some exceptions. For example we would have warning boxes regarding the current ISIL offensive on the Iraq page as well as all northern regions. But it makes no sense adding it to it's southern regions were we have more of a general warning. Those types of issues would have to be sorted out.

Overall, I do think this is quite an important issue to look into. Especially as Wikivoyage hopefully will be a major source for travel information. Jonte-- (talk) 12:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds like overkill. Consider a directly travel-related safety event like 9/11: Would you have added the same warning to absolutely every town in the US? I could see adding it to US, DC, and New York; I could maybe even see adding it to every US state, or possibly to every city containing a commercial airport (because airports were closed). But every single tiny little town? I don't think so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:41, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We need to be careful to not position ourselves as an authoritive guide to travel safety, quite simply because we are a volunteer group and few of us (if any) are really in a position to speak with authority or update the relevant articles in a timely manner. Obviously we do it sometimes for major news events, but to automate the process and have warning boxes everywhere doesn't seem to be the right direction. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:53, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also per the Reuters, South Africa have banned travellers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 07:09, 22 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Echo and watchlist

Special:Notifications & Special:Watchlist substantially overlap in functionality, except the former also contains extra (some non-public) events and doesn't provide with passive usage options (means to turn off web-nagging or email-nagging and to just keep visiting the page whenever I'm free), while the latter doesn't provide with options of active web-nagging notifications (but already provides email interface). Partly, in my personal view, the Echo/Notifications project was driven by low usability of watchlist; comes to mind. It's also perhaps worth noting that Echo users aren't exposed to Special:Notifications unless thy have JavaScript disabled — in which case it's their only means of reading the notifications.

I'd like to get this done:

Merge these two pages into one.
To remedy large inflow of information, introduce multiple levels of importance of the web-nagging notifications (red for mentions, orange for thanks, blue for new watchlist items, etc and configurable in your settings).

Thoughts on both, please? --Gryllida (talk) 02:39, 9 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I do not see them as overlapping. Would not really want the fact that someone leaves a message for me or is referencing my user name mixed up with the many articles I have on watch. --Traveler100 (talk) 04:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Gryllida, how many places did you post this idea to? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]