Wikivoyage talk:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel/Archive 2012-2013

What is the difference between this site and Wikitravel?

Swept from the pub:

This is probably a rather silly question, but I couldn't find an answer. This wiki and the other seem to have almost identical content, but with no advertisements. What's the difference between the two? Hawaiian Eskimo (talk) 23:01, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikitravel was the original travel guide wiki project. Its founders sold the website to a commercial company that runs various sites and recouped their investment by placing ads. The community of editors got tired of the ads and the fact that the owners of the Wikitravel website began making changes to content, community rules, etc. without anyone's consent. Since all the Wikitravel content can be freely used because of its Creative Commons license, Wikivoyage was set up and became a project of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (same as Wikipedia) using the freely-licensed content. There's a few more details, but that's the basics. AHeneen (talk) 01:14, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

The page m:Wikivoyage/Migration/FAQ has more details, if you're interested. –sumone10154^(talk) 03:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

The main difference is that on Wikitravel, since it is the original site, there are tens of thousands of members, and hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, so the overall contributions there are that much more updated & accurate. Here, there are good contributions but from a very small group of contributors (basically just 50 admins). I will sometimes check in at Wikivoyage if there's something I want to see if its different; but in general I find Wikitravel to be the superior for-travelers, by-travelers guide. Just my opinion, and I'm sure some admins here will possibly disagree. By the way, you can go to your User Preferences on Wikitravel and turn off the ads permanently. So really there's no difference except the size of the communities-- MUCH bigger at Wikitravel. Hope that helps! —The preceding comment was added by 166.137.208.29 (talk • contribs)

Ah, so it's a political fork. That makes sense. This site seems to have the same content since it appears to all have been imported, plus I like Wikimedia better and hopefully this wiki will gain more traction once it gets out of beta and winds up on their list of "big boy" wikis, so I'll stick around for now. Hawaiian Eskimo (talk) 00:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I guess the best description would be that this is a political fork. I would like to make a note that the above comment from 166.137.208.29 with overly flowery language supporting Wikitravel is almost certainly from Internet Brands (owner of the Wikitravel website). Their employees have been trying to troll Wikivoyage using both accounts and anonymously (including edits from the 166.137.208.** range, see this & this). Just have a look at couple of edits from that IP address: [1], [2]. AHeneen (talk) 03:37, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia normally lists relevant pages on sibling projects (like wikinews: or commons:) with interwiki links in the "external links" section of articles. We currently have turned off those templates (in our case, "wikivoyage" and "wikivoyage-inline") until we can finish importing images; once they're re-enabled, there is likely to be an influx of new users as search engines detect WT to be just an outdated version of WV and inbound links start pointing here. K7L (talk) 00:52, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting theory; but you forget who is the fork of whom. How will search engines decide which version of a page is "outdated" when they're both getting edited? And how do you think they will not severely penalize WV for being merely a copy of the original Wikitravel source -- with attribution on *every single page* no less? And all that Google revenue being generated by those Wikitravel ads... hard to imagine they'd want to stem that flow. Wikivoyage seems destined for continued irrelevancy, I'm afraid. Too bad; such dedicated admins. Oh well. it'll still be a nice hobby site for them, even when nobody comes to read it. Who knows? Perhaps Wikitravel will come and grab all that nice new content for themselves, so the world can see it? —The preceding comment was added by 166.137.208.28 (talk • contribs)

Actually, no. Wikivoyage content *cannot* be copied into WT because the license requires attribution to the original author. If the only known identity for an author is "Nick Name at Wikivoyage", it isn't possible to paste into WT as "CC-BY-SA, by Nick Name at Wikivoyage" because WT uses an abuse filter which blocks and logs all mention of Wikivoyage. (It is, however, possible to copy in the opposite direction if attribution is preserved.) As for users, WV has the advantage of being easily able to attract users from the largest wiki in the world, Wikipedia, which is a sibling. The search engine determination of which site is the fork is based almost entirely on inbound links; templates spammed onto WP promoting WT were already voted for deletion on the English and French Wikipedias and also deleted from Simple English. There will be more of these deletions in the days and months to follow across various languages. WP has no reason to link to WT if the same content is already on Wikimedia's server, especially if WT is an outdated and increasingly irrelevant fork. You also missed the bugzilla: fix where all links at the bottom of the page to external sites are now rel="nofollow", so that Google will ignore them. Google weights Wikipedia results *very* heavily. Enjoy your stint on the unemployment line. K7L (talk) 01:54, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Not true about "attribution on *every single page*". WV has new destination pages that have been created from scratch. Nurg (talk) 02:52, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Google also has a motto called "don't be evil". I am sure that when we are ready they will figure out who to link to :-) Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:18, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I think you are being somewhat naive with regards to google's actual approach to things. In practice neither website carries enough traffic for google to be very worried about them.Geni (talk) 23:44, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikivoyage already has more daily edits than Wikitravel. My comparizon script: https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/VoyageVsTravel Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Looking at recent changes on both sites, WV is obviously doing better in at least three ways.

First, WV is mostly getting quality edits while WT has much spam, dozens of new misnamed/misformatted pages from naive users such as [3] and dozens of bogus "user" pages like [4] which are basically spam. Of course, WV is likely to see more of these problems as it comes out of beta and gets better known, but curreently there is an obvious difference; one site is clearly improving and the other equally clearly decaying.

Second, WV has an active and experienced community of admins, nearly all the old WT admins plus lots of experienced people from other WMF projects. Edits are being patrolled and the bad ones efficiently dealt with. Meanwhile at WT, only a few IB staff and a few others are patrolling and even a cursory look at recent changes shows they are not doing it well.

Third, WV is being improved by a number of bots imported from other WMF projects; these are making significant & useful changes. Pashley (talk) 12:43, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Those statistics show the number of edits and the quality of the edits, but do we have any information about readers? I would expect Wikitravel to have more readers for the moment as the site is more well-known but that readers gradually will shift over as Wikivoyage becomes more well-known. There will probably be many more visitors to Wikivoyage once w:Template:Wikivoyage begins to present a visible link. Internet Brands people sometimes talk about hundreds of thousands daily (or weekly?) visitors, but it isn't clear where the numbers come from. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Internet Brands tries to present a number which is as high as possible, for example by including Google's bots and other automated scripts which are not real readers. --Stefan2 (talk) 12:56, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

At the moment, Google appears highly resistant to listing our site -- even including "Wikivoyage" in the search returns results from wikivoyage-old, not here. LtPowers (talk) 14:25, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Not for me. I google <wikivoyage tongariro National Park> and the en.wv page is top of the list - cached a week ago. Given the site has not even publicly launched yet, I don't think there is anything to worry about. Nurg (talk) 03:17, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Without significant Google traffic, we will not get significantly high volume of visitors from outside of WM sites, if that even matters. Do the old Wikivoyage German crew have any idea how long it was before they began to be indexed independently of Wikitravel after they forked? We may have to get used to the idea that it might be years before we appear high in the search engine results. We are after all duplicate content, which Google does not like. For all its faults, Wikitravel does have an established good reputation for years. How to overcome that, I do not know. —The preceding comment was added by 166.137.208.37 (talk • contribs) 2012-12-19T23:22:03‎

Links from Wikipedia will help tremendously. I wouldn't worry until we see the effect of turning those on. LtPowers (talk) 00:04, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. I realise it is not appels/appels, but the WP links to Wikitravel have been turned off weeks ago? Or months? It does not seem to negatively be affecting their Google page rank to not have them. Wikitravel still appears very high on all travel searches-- usually first page of results. How valuable can the WP links be to WV if Wikitravel is not hurt by not having them. Forgive, but I am worried. I do not want to spend time editing here for "no thing" if nobody will see my work, I will perhaps go to edit Wikitravel as well and see what happens in time. —The preceding comment was added by 166.137.208.45 (talk • contribs)

It is your choice whether to edit on WT, WV or both. If you have the time to spare, you are free do work on both, and other than the time spent, no harm done. I am putting my money on a site where the consensus derived processes are upheld and not arbitrarily overruled by self-appointed bureaucrats employed by a profit driven site owner. Try discussing the relative merits of Wikivoyage on Wikitravel and see how much freedom of expression you are allowed. YMMV. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 01:00, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

The anonymous user is most likely just trolling for IB. To repeat content from a comment I made above in this topics: "[IB] employees have been trying to troll Wikivoyage using both accounts and anonymously (including edits from the 166.137.208.** range, see this & this). Just have a look at couple of edits from that IP address (166.137.208.29): [5], [6]." These are the only edits made by 166.137.208.37 and 166.137.208.45 and should just be ignored to avoid feeding the IB trolls. AHeneen (talk) 03:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Or we're staying at airport hotel in Los Angeles & writing to the site from mobile phone? It is honest questions still... —The preceding comment was added by ‎166.137.208.39 (talk • contribs)

• One difference is that Wikitravel doesn't support IPv6, while Wikivoyage, being on Wikimedia's production wikis, does. The one thing I'd like to say though is that IB simply doesn't know how to run a wiki and refuses to admit it.--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:37, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Hm why you say that? It looks good

Agreed. Both of WikiTravel and WikiVoyage looks like good places to get travel informations. You should stop fighting and maybe you should work together & combine as one? --216.3.101.62 21:34, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

That is an interesting suggestion. Why don't you try making that suggestion on Wikitravel too, and see what response you get? Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I used to write a lot for Wikitravel and Wikipedia. Just got to Wikivoyage. Also found out that Wikitravel is jealously blocking any mentions of Wikivoyage. Seems like Wikitravel will kill itself through this policy. /Yvwv (talk) 09:50, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

In pt too. They will hang themselves with this stance. Or will they hire a lot of people to keep online. Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton ^m 10:13, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

New content from WT

Swept from the pub:

Look here:

http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Saint_Vincent&curid=30673&diff=1920064&oldid=1913939&rcid=207163

I think these edits should be reverted. We can not copy text from WT after the migration. The footer states a specific revision of an article and attributes the contributors till this stated date. From this point of time we can not copy text from WT. If different WT contrubutors edited this article on WT meanwhile, then we have NO proper attribution here. The idea is nice but we can not do that. Please do NOT copy cc-by-sa 3.0 text from other sources (like WT, WP or elsewhere) without attribution. We should revert these edits immediately! -- DerFussi (talk) 14:40, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

Sorry! I thought it was OK. Can an admin revert all my edits from last few days in one move? Jjtk (talk) 14:54, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

No, it is not possible, you will have to do reverts by hand=( However, I believe that you can keep all anonymous contributions. You can also keep small personalized contributions by slightly rephrasing them (that's what I had to do for Middle Asia because of bad grammar and poor style). Regarding the big pieces of text, it may be good to get in touch with their authors who are probably not aware of the fork. Just leave them carefully phrased messages on their talk pages.

Stefan, will you accept this strategy? Atsirlin (talk) 15:37, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

Alexander, it's possible with most edits. Only the edits which have been reworked by someone else afterwards need to be done manually. I think i that case, rephrasing is easiest. I started but feel free to amend my reverts. Jc8136 (talk) 15:41, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

How are you doing it? Could you share this secret? Atsirlin (talk) 16:02, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

I reverted all my edits except two by anonymous WT contributors and one that had WT user's permission to copy. But is not the link I pasted in edit summary an attribution? Jjtk (talk) 16:17, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

It is freely licensed information, and can be used on Wikivoyage. Instead of wholesale reverting, I think proper attribution should be added. --Globe-trotter (talk) 16:54, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

That's the hard part, though. Our attribution is traditionally programmatic, making use of the article history data built into MediaWiki. There's no easy way to combine that with "manual" attribution. LtPowers (talk) 17:19, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

This issue appears often when translating text from one-language Wikipedia to another or merging articles. Current position there appears to be that indicating in the edit summary where the open-content was taken meets CC-BY attribution requirements. K7L (talk) 19:28, 18 October 2012 (CEST)

If the WT edit is referred to in the edit summary (i.e information from WT user xxx on date yyy) I don't see why this attribution is any different to that give for other edits on WT or WV. Our policy says we can copy data from other CC-BY-SA sources, such as WP. If we can't, I suggest we revisit those policies. --Inas (talk) 00:10, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

We can copy from WT and WP but we have to attribute it. A statement of a revision in the comment is not enough. i think. And at the moment there is no way to attribute an article later by hand. Neither when copied from WP nor copied from WT. Rewrite it or leave it. I know it's a bit unsatisfying. But we can not change it. -- DerFussi (talk) 08:41, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

In the edit summary of a copy and paste job from WT, would leaving a link to the page giving the specific change in an article (e.g. [7]) be an easy way of proper attribution? I've tried it with the edit summary of this comment, which links to a random recent change on WT. (WV-en) Travelpleb (talk) 09:56, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

Well, the hyperlink from in edit summary didn't work, but the specific edit is still unmistakably referenced for all to see.(WV-en) Travelpleb (talk) 10:00, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

And of course there were pages with revision level attribution all over the place on WT originally, that we have copied. Revision level attribution is the only attribution we give to our current contributors. It is the only attribution WT gives to theirs. If there is a requirement for greater attribution, then I feel we are not meeting it for anyone. --Inas (talk) 13:05, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

We have attribution templates, like Template:Wikipedia. How about we make a similar template like that for Wikitravel? --Globe-trotter (talk) 13:23, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

It would have to make clear that the imported content is separate from the content that was imported in September. LtPowers (talk) 15:06, 19 October 2012 (CEST)

Why do you say that? In what way is it different? The attribution and licence requirements are identical --Inas (talk) 06:02, 21 October 2012 (CEST)

Just based on the wording. "This article contains content from Wikitravel's Paris article"? Well no duh. Most of our articles contain content from Wikitravel, because that's where we came from. What would make content tagged with that template unique is that the article contains additional Wikitravel content beyond what was imported in September. LtPowers (talk) 17:12, 21 October 2012 (CEST)

Hmmm... Still don't see it really. That the article contains information from Wikitravel + revision level detail of which revision seems like fairly complete attribution to me. I don't see what makes the information copied in the original setup any different from subsequent edits.

I think this is really worth pursuing. We went to considerable lengths at WT to make the information easy to share and open to all. Others reuse the information just referencing WT. I don't understand the issue here. Are we scared of IB legal action? Or just concerned to do the right thing by contributors? Or what? --Inas (talk) 23:45, 21 October 2012 (CEST)

Certainly it's complete attribution. I'm just saying the wording is ambiguous because it may not be clear to readers that this content "imported from Wikitravel" is different from the content imported from Wikitravel all over the site. LtPowers (talk) 02:21, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

Okay, I get that. But why is it important to make this distinction? We comply with the attribution requirements (and you seem to agree that revision level attribution does) and we're done, right? --Inas (talk) 02:27, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

I just think it's confusing. I don't understand why you're so concerned about a simple change to the wording of the template. LtPowers (talk) 15:21, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

Wikipedia gives you this message when submitting an edit: You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license. I think a simple link to the relevant history at WT is enough.

If more is required, as I suggested early, having a WV edit summary refence a WT edit's specific URL allows any WT content to be thoroughly attributed. Such WT gems as [8] are available for all to see their exact source.(WV-en) Travelpleb (talk) 20:19, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

Resolution?

Was this question resolved? I can't see a problem - but having just copied some good content across (and being clear where it came from, in the form of a URL) I wanted to ask. I note that Facebook copy Wikipedia content and just link back in this way. JimKillock (talk) 01:03, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Simply linking in the edit summary back to the original wiki page where the content was originally added is pretty standard procedure for WMF projects, and I feel fairly confident that basically everyone here is OK with the practice. The discussion above comes from a transitional period when wv/en was hosted by the Wikivoyage Board, which was understandably nervous at the time about legal issues. If anyone disagrees, please speak now or forever... --Peter ^Talk 18:36, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, perhaps someone could put a definitive answer in the FAQ? I'll add the question. JimKillock (talk) 22:40, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Added a question here but needs an answer! JimKillock (talk) 22:44, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll take the lack of other responses to mean that my answer was the consensus choice ;) I'm pretty sure it was prior to the above argument on the old WV servers. So I'll go ahead and update the FAQ. --Peter ^Talk 17:59, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

We do have Template:Wikipedia, which should probably be used where appropriate, and might merit a mention in the FAQ. LtPowers (talk) 02:29, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I wonder about that template, though, since it is designed (like our translated materials template) to note when a significant portion of the article comes from Wikipedia. But is there ever a case where that should be true? We discourage copying content from Wikipedia, in pursuit of original, value-added content. --Peter ^Talk 03:05, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

If you wish to copy content from Wikitravel, then the cc-by-sa licence requires that you attribute the author. There are two common ways to do that, and both have problems:

• Exporting a page using Special:Export at Wikitravel and then importing it using Special:Import at Wikivoyage. Wikitravel has disabled Special:Export, so this isn't possible. You could maybe create an XML file manually using a text editor, but it would take a lot of time for each page to be exported and you might risk making a typo. Also, if an edit is credited to User:Example at Wikitravel, then it will be automatically reassigned to User:Example at Wikivoyage, who might be a different person.
• Copying the content and linking to the page history. Ideally, there should only be one travel wiki with the same content, so ideally, I think that Wikitravel should close down at some point. However, if that happens, then the links break, and then there's no longer any link to the users' usernames and so you begin to violate copyright. Also, if you use Special:Book to export the pages as a PDF file (useful if you need to print them out on paper), then there is no attribution to these contributors.

That said, I'm not sure exactly what cc-by-sa requires or whether any of the above is sufficient. Maybe the best is to just link to Wikitravel (or to any other project you're copying from) but also keep a local copy of the version history table if the page isn't imported from a Wikimedia project (to keep a backup in case something goes down). --Stefan2 (talk) 12:40, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

With its current policies, Wikitravel is killing itself. So, how does one extract the log of authors from a wiki article? /Yvwv (talk) 14:10, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

If you just want a list of all authors, go to the page on Wikitravel and add "?action=credits" at the end of the page. Using the English Main Page as an example:

• Page = http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page
• Editors = http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page?action=credits

"Based on work by" are users who have set a real name in Special:Preferences. These users are listed under their real names. "Wikitravel users" are those who have not set a real name in Special:Preferences. These people have to be listed using their user names. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:23, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Imported Stockholm/Östermalm. Good enough? /Yvwv (talk) 14:32, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

That seems good enough to me, certainly—it's actually more than what Wikipedia requires. I suggest we do have a policy on this: provide attribution in the edit summary, using the names from $action=credits and a note of what site it's from. Does that sound reasonable? --Peter ^Talk 19:51, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

• Maybe there should be a translation of sv:Wikivoyage:Välkomna, Wikiresenärer or de:Wikivoyage:Herzlich willkommen, Wikitraveller? The Swedish page tells that it is illegal to copy the material from Wikitravel by simply using copy&paste, but I'm not sure if this is correct. Right, it is illegal if no attribution is provided, but I don't see why you can't provide attribution while still copying and pasting the text. Content is sometimes copied and pasted ("swept") from this page to other pages. Is that also illegal, since it's copy & paste instead of a full import of all edits?

Wikipedia practice varies from language to language. Norwegian Wikipedia generally seems to import pages (see w:no:Spesial:Logg/import) whereas Swedish Wikipedia never does this (see w:sv:Special:Logg/import), and English Wikipedia varies from case to case (some articles imported and listed at w:en:Special:Log/import, most articles not imported). --Stefan2 (talk) 16:02, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage launch and why we're better

Swept in from the pub

In preparation for launch, I wrote up a blog post that may prove helpful in convincing people to switch over: http://gyrovague.com/2013/01/14/free-travel-guide-wikivoyage-comes-out-of-beta-and-is-already-kicking-ass/ Jpatokal (talk) 10:09, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

And it is! --EvanProdromou (talk) 02:38, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Wow, that is beautifully thorough. Thanks for a reason to smile. Sj (talk) 09:01, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Evan, didn't think you'd need all that much convincing though ;) Jpatokal (talk) 22:40, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Voyage/Travel stats for January 14

Swept in from the pub

Stats for 20130114
Number of entries in recent changes edits (including deletions/blocks):
WV: 1001
WT: 515
Number of article edits:
WV: 894
WT: 332

By https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/VoyageVsTravel Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:15, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Here's an update, for January 17. I'm sure noone will be surprised that numbers have gone up a lot.

Stats for 20130117
Number of entries in recent changes edits (including deletions/blocks):
WV: 7142
WT: 726
Number of article edits:
WV: 6407
WT: 507

--Avenue (talk) 03:41, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

May the better site win, hehhehheh. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:49, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

It's time to set our eyes on bigger prizes—let's aim to knock the real online travel giants off their thrones. --Peter ^Talk 05:31, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

How to import from Wikitravel?

Swept from the pub:

There are some articles at Wikitravel (about Stockholm etc) which I would like to see imported here, in their current version. How can I do that? Thanks in advance. /~~ —The preceding comment was added by Yvwv (talk • contribs) 2013-01-10T11:26:47‎

See #New content from WT above. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:10, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps we need a new policy page, either specifically on imports from WT or more generally on imports from any site (http://rationalwiki.org http://en.citizendium.org etc.) that uses a CC license requiring attribution. Presumably it would need checking by WMF lawyers. Pashley (talk) 13:41, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

I would appreciate such a page. /Yvwv (talk) 14:04, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

If you are responsible for the new content, it may be safer to copy and paste the diffs for now. I think we need to do this carefully. I made a page Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel to try and summarise the state of play. I imagine these kind of issues are going to come up, and best we address them directly. --Inas (talk) 03:37, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, that was a good clarification. /Yvwv (talk) 14:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Explain Wikitravel fork more prominently?

Swept in from the pub

I first came here from Wikipedia about an hour ago and was a bit confused as Wikivoyage pretty much looks like Wikitravel with a nicer logo. The articles are the same in look, structure and most of the content, and there are no ads. If you're familiar with Wikitravel and don't know Wikivoyage and the reasons for the fork, this wiki feels distinctly scummy. To me it seemed as if Wikimedia had simply copied all of Wikitravel's content (a tiny wiki compared to most of Wikimedia's projects), ran a search-and-replace for "Wikitravel", and slapped a new brand on it. Hell, they didn't even bother to rename the Travellers' pub. And while I knew that this is completely legal under Wikitravel's CC-BY-SA licence, it just didn't feel right.

After a bit of reading (mostly this very page and Cohen's NYT article), I now understand and support the fork. Still, now that Wikipedia links so obtrusively to this project, we'll have to expect an influx of people who may be familiar with Wikitravel and might ask themselves the same questions as I did, find no readily accessible answers, and then put down Wikivoyage as Wikimedia's attempt to steal another wiki's glory. We can't expect everyone to do research on the political reasons that gave birth to Wikivoyage, we can't even expect many people to be interested in them. As long as the Wikivoyage and Wikitravel are as similar as they are now, shouldn't we explain why Wikivoyage was created and why it is based on Wikitravel in a prominent spot (maybe with a brief explanation on the front page that links to a more detailed explanation elsewhere)?

Over time, the two wikis will diverge further and the similarities will fade, but for now I think an explanation is in order.

pb (talk) 13:17, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I just saw, a page addressing exactly these questions already exists: Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel. I think we ought to link to this on the front page, in the sidebar or at least on Wikivoyage:Help. pb (talk) 13:26, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I asked on wikimedia-l if the Wikimedia Foundation are going to put out an announcement. Apparently, they will, in about an hour's time. That'll probably be a good place to point people. Tom Morris (talk) 15:02, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

For legal reasons, we have been asked not to talk too much about that other Wiki. It's a very fine line to tread, unfortunately. LtPowers (talk) 15:08, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I am not very happy with the explanations given in Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel. Could we not have some simple facts? Has the whole of the old English Wikitravel been incorporated into Wikivoyage? If not, what has been left out and why? What about all the links to Wikitravel from Wikipedia articles, etc.? Will these now be automatically transformed into links to Wikivoyage? And how about ongoing developments under Wikitravel? Will there be any possibility of incorporating them into Wikivoyage or do "legal reasons" stand in the way? We certainly need a clearer picture and it certainly needs to be explained up front. --Ipigott (talk) 15:34, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I understand that we shouldn't go shouting about Wikitravel, but we need to be able to point people somewhere so they know what's going on and can get answers to questions that are sure to come up anyway. If Wikivoyage doesn't make a prominent official statement, someone else will. pb (talk) 15:56, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Gawd, Techdirt

That Techdirt article (a) is terrible (b) gets all its substantive comment from my blog post. Please consider linking the source blog post, or possibly neither ;-) - David Gerard (talk) 23:01, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

To be honest, I just grabbed the first few articles from a strategic google search that seemed to cover the ground. By all means plunge forward. --Inas (talk) 23:49, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

OK, I just thought I'd ask first before self-linking :-) - David Gerard (talk) 20:43, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Advantages

I've plunged forward and added a brief list of reasons to favor Wikivoyage over Wikitravel, because they may not otherwise be obvious to the casual reader. Jpatokal (talk) 00:31, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Great job! /Yvwv (talk) 18:21, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Copying content from new articles at Wikitravel to Wikivoyage

I continue to edit sporadically at Wikitravel.

Very occasionally I see brand new articles appear at Wikitravel which are not duplicated here either in content or subject.

What is the recommended way of importing them and giving attribution, please?

If only one editor has contributed to them at Wikitravel, is it sufficient simply to give attribution to their user name at Wikitravel in the edit summary upon first importation of the content? -- Alice^✉ 05:49, 7 February 2013 (UTC)-- Alice^✉ 05:49, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Alice has gone ahead and copied one at Alexandria to Cape Town by train and bus, with attribution in the edit summary.

We still need a clear answer to the question above. Does this need advice from the WMF lawyers?

If that is not OK, we should delete the article. If it is, we should get a statement of that into a policy page. Pashley (talk) 02:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

No link to FAQ?

I think this should link to the FAQ on meta but have not added the link because I do not know if there are still legal reasons to tiptoe about the topic. Anyone know? Pashley (talk) 23:12, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

That FAQ is totally out of date. Regarding tiptoes, it's better that we stay on them for the time being. Basically, we wait for this [9] to be resolved, and then wait for the word to relax. --Peter ^Talk 04:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

IBadmins

Swept from Wikivoyage talk:Search Expedition

Interesting to see that St Valentine's day is not universally a day of love.

Comment left at http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/en.wikivoyage.org about Wikivoyage by "WorldTravelller 02/14/2013 Bad customer experience Sorry to say, this site is nothing but a copy of the very popular 10 year old free wiki, Wikitravel.org -- except with no visitors, so the content is FAR out of date.

I'd rather see an ad or two that have cruddy content. And this site is super cruddy."

I note that the threshold for registering and leaving a comment is somewhat low. -- Alice^✉ 04:13, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing that up. Isn't it coincidental that on the day we create the Search Expedition and link to our WOT profile, the first negative comment appears. I've reported the two comments that account has made as misinformation. The other one said we had viruses, which is severe misinformation, so WOT will definitely remove that. Once we confirm our site, we are able to respond to comments as well. Also note, I've reported comments on Wikitravel's profile saying they are owned by Wikimedia, which is false. I haven't, however, left a negative comment as that is poor practice. JamesA ^>talk 06:29, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

You need to understand that not only are some IBadmin's pay-cheques at stake now, after such a series of appallingly costly strategic errors, some of them also have share options. The low lying fruit here is really Wikipedia. Top priority should be to remove ALL WT links from there and get as many ranking search terms into our own anchors there as possible. "no-follow" does NOT do exactly what it says on the tin, as far as Google is concerned! -- Alice^✉ 08:36, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Of course Wikipedia is the ultimate top priority. However, I believe all links have already been removed from English Wikipedia. It's just a matter of removing links from other languages. The link to the checklist is on the Search Expedition page. There's a VfD underway on one of the wikis for the Wikitravel template, but its only had one comment and thats a "Keep". It's hard to explain the whole situation to people who speak another language. JamesA ^>talk 08:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikitravel and Wikivoyage comparison, side by side

What I think could be a good marketing tool is a side-by-side comparison site of Wikitravel and Wikivoyage. We know we have the upper hand and that our content is both more up-to-date and more complete. So a comparison site would allow users to view how our site is often better. Of course, there are still many instances where the content is identical. But there are others where there is a significant difference, like Qatar and UNESCO. We could always highlight these pages on the comparison site, encouraging users to click on the links and compare WT and WV's coverage. There are so many benefits, that I thought I'd write them in a list:

• Let users see for themselves how Wikivoyage is often better
• Specifically highlight instances where Wikivoyage clearly has better coverage than WT, including the absence of spam
• Remind users that Wikivoyage has a cleaner interface with no ads
• Help in the hunt for redlinked images and assist users in seeing what old images looked like
• Useful tool for editors as they work towards differentiating the site from Wikitravel and reformatting articles

An example in terms of maps is Bing and Google. Thoughts? JamesA ^>talk 06:11, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

This would strike me as a bit immature. We're trying to be the better site, and that means attitude and not just content. To the public I think it would look less like "Here are the advantages we have over our old site" and more like "We're better than they are, please please please visit our site?" LtPowers (talk) 15:03, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree with LtPowers. It would also give IB a centralized place to look for things to copy us on.Texugo (talk) 15:25, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

I also agree with LtPowers. I don't think anyone who knows of us thinks Wikitravel is a better option, so we're just preaching to the universal choir. I know this isn't necessarily a widely shared opinion, but I think Wikitravel is basically irrelevant from the time we left, with the sole exception of IB trying to sabotage our site, and isn't even worth talking about anymore—aside from answering questions, which this page does. I'm very supportive of the search expedition's efforts to promote our site, but I don't think there's any reason to run down WT—IB does a good enough job of that on their own, anyway. --Peter ^Talk 15:29, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Voyage/Travel stats for January 21

Swept in from the pub

Stats for 20130121
Number of entries in recent changes edits (including deletions/blocks):
WV: 2652
WT: 525
Number of article edits:
WV: 2492
WT: 349

By https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/VoyageVsTravel Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:09, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

And have you seen those 349 article edits? I would wager that at least 95% of them are spam.

Good for us.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:23, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

(EC) The problem with these stats is that wikitravel has major problems with spambots at the moment, so I wounder how many wikitravel edits are legit. 86.45.191.101 05:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, one should keep this in mind when using these raw statistics. By the way, other interesting stats can be found here: WV WT (same warning applies). In particular, Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days: WV=2,136 WT=606 Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:06, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

With respect to article count they have also switch over to using totals that include talk pages and now are saying they have more. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:14, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Settlement of litigation between Internet Brands and the Wikimedia Foundation

Swept in from the pub

A settlement to the lawsuit between Wikimedia and IB was announced today: [10]. From the blog post:

"The settlement was signed on February 14, 2013, and Internet Brands has now released the Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V. (the German not for profit who worked so hard to make the project a success) from any and all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the wiki travel project. In return, the Foundation will dismiss the suit... It's now possible for the Wikivoyage community to continue their efforts to build a global free-knowledge travel site unhindered. We wish them the best of luck and look forward to working closely with the Wikivoyage community as the project grows and thrives."

On a personal note, the Wikimedia Foundation immediately offered to help me when IB first announced the lawsuit against James and I, they provided excellent defense through the law firm of Cooley LLP, and they have been amazingly supportive and professional through this ordeal. I hope no one ever has to go through the stress of being sued, but the WMF made a difficult ordeal as easy as it could possibly be and impressed the hell out of me during the process. While I was a supporter before, having seen first-hand how hard and professionally they worked to support this community, I'll be an even bigger supporter of theirs for a long time to come. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:00, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Here's to catharsis. Onward and upward.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:08, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Very great news. I and other WV contributors are also very thankful for the work WMF has done to establish this wiki and for the work and courage of the two of you to open doors to make this move possible and bear through these lawsuits. AHeneen (talk) 04:11, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Importing articles from wikitravel

Swept in from the pub

So, I see that WT still has about 4x the amount of articles WV has. Why haven't they all been migrated? --Piotrus (talk) 02:53, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

All English Wikitravel articles as of September 2012 were imported to Wikivoyage, but since then the content of the two sites has diverged. Assuming you're getting the 4x number from the stats on the main page, Wikitravel displays {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} as its "number of pages" value (currently 173,474 on Wikivoyage) while Wikivoyage displays {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} as its "number of articles" value (currently 32,882 on Wikivoyage). From mw:Help:Magic words#Statistics:

• {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} Number of wiki pages.
• {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} Number of pages in content namespaces.

The latter value does not include talk pages, categories, redirects, user pages, etc and is a better indication of how many actual articles are on the site. See Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel for more info. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

See this edit http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=prev&oldid=1977165 made by IB soon after the fork, and make up your own mind :-) --Inas (talk) 03:15, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

So they cheat :) Or we don't. Bad marketing on our part, but since when do we ever care about it. I support using the smaller number; through it would be nice to make it easier for others to find out about the difference somehow. I am not sure how to do so; a footnote on the main page is probably not going to be welcomed... --Piotrus (talk) 05:43, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

WT may have a higher Alexa rating than us for the time being, but the writing is on the wall. Wikipedia and the other WMF projects have been diligently adding links to WV on their pages, and excising WT links—those interwiki links are a big part of the reason why WT ever became so well known. Meanwhile, despite the glorious predictions of a brilliant future that IB's staff periodically issues, no one among the skeleton crew they've assigned to WT seem to be able, or care enough, to do so much as clean up after the spambots, let alone add any new content. Users of travel wikis are not idiots; WT's temporary advantage in terms of name recognition and Google rank won't stop folks from going elsewhere for their needs as the information at WT becomes more and more outdated and tainted by touts and spambots. Also, the news media that covered the recent legal drama took the WMF's side almost unanimously and gifted IB with a boatload of bad publicity. So I say, if IB wants to play fast and loose with the numbers, it amounts to nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I, for one, think that any attention we pay to that abortion of a wiki is too much. They are no longer a threat to us, and we have bigger fish to fry here. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 11:51, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

The only reason why search engines are not aware that WT is just an outdated copy of WV is that it took until February 2013 for Wikimedia to force rel="nofollow" onto all links to that dump. See bugzilla:41983, also m:talk:interwiki map#Wikitravel. As for how much linkspam WT has dumped onto Wikipedia over the years? To the best of my estimates... It's over NINE THOUSAND! There were somewhere between two and three thousand links from en.WP articles to WV articles which were removed by a 'bot after a successful template VfD a few months ago. There are 1760 links from non-English WP versions which are still being cleaned up now, and likely about five thousand already removed. In many cases, the links were pure spam - such as blindly linking from an Indic-script Wikipedia to wt:{PAGENAME} in English (which... surprise, surprise... doesn't work properly). In a few cases, WT had been misrepresented as a Wikimedia sibling project - something which it is clearly not.

Sometimes, authors writing even mainstream media news get lazy... when describing a place, they look at the WP entry and whatever links are provided from WP instead of doing extensive original research. The end result has sometimes been "travel" articles which link to WP, WT and the like - something at best one level above citing Facebook as a journalistic source. (The latter, sadly, also happens as print media try to prove their "awareness" of new technology for fear it will make them irrelevant.) It would be best that those authors find proper WV links in Wikipedia instead of links to an outdated fork on a rival site. Certainly, the task of contacting webmasters who still have links to WT on their sites and getting those links updated to WV is important. It's most annoying to see that Alexa acknowledges us as a top-10000 site but lists "wikivoyage" (or variants) as the only common search terms that are allowing users to find us from search engines (as opposed to finding us from Wikipedia, other wikis, blogs or anything that's not a search engine). Fix the inbound link rot and this could easily reverse to be search engines trashing WT as just a useless copy of WV. All or nothing, unfortunately, but I have a sneaking suspicion that IBobi is going to be very bitter and very unemployed the day Google's algorithms begin to clue in to what his employers have been doing. WT will be as irrelevant as the hundreds of cookie-cutter sites which mirror Wikipedia. K7L (talk) 16:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Voyage/Travel stats for March 13

Swept in from the pub

Stats for 20130314
Number of entries in recent changes edits (including deletions/blocks/reversions/welcome messages):
WV: 541
WT: 789
Number of article/talk edits:
WV: 491
WT: 477

By https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/VoyageVsTravel Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:30, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Daily article edits since WV launch

Wikivoyage edits, although variable, haven't shown much trend lately. Wikitravel edits, in contrast, have gone up a lot in the last week. --Avenue (talk) 14:45, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Which may very well reflect nothing but increased spambot activity and its respective cleanup. I'd like to see a comparison of useful collaborative edits. I think there is lot more happening here.Texugo (talk) 15:04, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

It just takes a look at their Pub page to see the lack of community there. In the past three weeks, they have had only 50 posts in their Pub, practically all by IBAlex, one other user, and spammity spam. We have had 50 good edits by 17 different users in the last two days. Texugo (talk) 15:16, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

On the contrary, one prolific editor who edits on both has done over 400 edits on WT in the last 4 and a bit days, and only 3 on WV in the same time. That editor said about 10 days ago that they were thinking of permanently quitting WV because of issues with other editors. Nurg (talk) 00:31, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

That's disappointing. Who was that please, @Nurg:? --118.93nzp (talk) 02:28, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

New script : Semi-automatic merging of recent changes from WT to Wikivoyage

Swept in from the pub

WT still gets good edits, mostly by Wikivoyage-unaware IPs. We should merge these good edits into WikiVoyage. I wrote a Linux script that makes it semi-automatic:

https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/MergeFromWt

For each article recently modified on WT, it shows the differences between WT&WV in a diff editor, and give you a link to easily upload the merged wikicode if there are edits worth taking. You can easily choose what changes to take/skip in the diff editor.

Please use it :-) Waiting for your feedback! Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:57, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Is this compatible with copyleft? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 08:00, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

WT articles are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and WV articles are Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. They are compatible, the only thing might be about listing the authors... ideally, recent authors (visible at the top of the WT history page) should be cited in the change summary. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:13, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Solved! The script now also outputs the list of recent contributors, to be pasted into the edit summary. So the use of this script is perfectly legal. Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:22, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Being an admin on competing wikis

Swept in from the pub

I'm not talking about sister sites here (e.g., Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary). Is there a conflict of interest when someone is an admin on two travel wikis, one of which was involved in hostile legal action with the other? Or is that OK? I hope it's not inappropriate for me to bring this up; I thought it merited airing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:42, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

It has also concerned me lately; I'm starting to wonder the particular motivations of those admins. Although slightly different, and probably none of our business, there are also quite a few users who are regular "active" members of both communities and contribute to both (if it can be said that the competing travel wiki in question even has a community). JamesA ^>talk 13:22, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

If we are genuine about

1. our philosophy and whole raison d'être that the traveller comes first
2. that an admin's task is primarily janitorial in cleaning up a mess

then I don't see a conflict of interest here for any person who is an admin on both.

Many of us hope that Wikitravel will quickly diminish in search engine popularity but stupid deletions like those made by Ryan in his (unwitting?) religious zeal to stamp out heterodoxy only postpone the otherwise inevitable decline of Wikitravel in SEO rankings and make it almost essential for ordinary editors to be active on both if a wide audience is sought for their current contributions.

Notwithstanding what I write above, the list of admins at Wikitravel is not necessarily up-to-date. -- Alice^✉ 15:11, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

In regard to "the traveller comes first" the WT articles are causing issues for some travellers in that they still see the articles as being reliable and authoritative, yet in many cases they are not. Some people have inadvertently become involved with inappropriate travel services suppliers due to poor control of the listings. I am referring in particular to organised and guided ascents upon an Indonesian mountain. This is disturbing and likely not an isolated incident. Really WT should be voluntarily locked down by IB as in some circumstances the interests and possibly the physical welfare of travellers can potentially come into harms way when article content is not managed vigorously. -- Felix (talk) 18:54, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

The point of being an admin is indeed primarily janitorial, but the tools at our disposal could be used to cause damage (albeit temporary damage), if an admin so chose. Of course, damaging actions would become evident very quickly and could then be counteracted in short order, but nevertheless, I think that if there are people who are currently active as admins on these two competing sites, maybe they should explain their motivations for thus dividing their admin work. Where would be the best place to have that discussion? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:52, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

If we take the WMF's statement at their word, then adminship on both sites is completely compatible. --Rschen7754 20:09, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

I didn't realize there was a WMF statement about this. Very well, then. Does the other site feel the same way? Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:14, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

The WMF statement can be found at the top of Wikivoyage:Policies#Cooperating with other websites. With regards to the original question about "competing" wikis, I'd prefer that we not consider Wikitravel relevant to any decision-making here unless absolutely necessary. So long as contributors to Wikitravel aren't disrupting things here, and issues aren't being created here as a result of Wikitravel, then that site should be irrelevant to the operation of Wikivoyage. There will obviously be some instances where we need to consider past actions by Internet Brands and act accordingly (example: Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel#Can I copy content between Wikivoyage and Wikitravel?), but otherwise let's just move on. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:37, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

OK, fair enough, but I will reiterate that I find the idea of being an active admin on both sites kind of weird and troubling. However, everyone should take that as a personal view only, and I won't mention it again. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:54, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, and it's easy enough to flag down a steward on IRC should we need an emergency desysop for some reason. --Rschen7754 21:42, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

I am probably more active on WT than any of the other admins here, unless someone is active there under a different alias. All I do there, though, is delete utterly obvious spam (sometimes over 20 pages a day; they really have a problem!) and keep a dozen or so pages watchlisted so I can track what they are up to. Roughly once a month I get irritated enough to block a persistent spammer, generally after they have created at least half a dozen spam pages over several days and no-one else has banned them.

Everything I see there indicates a dying site. There are not many actual contributors and nearly all admins are IB staff. I see huge numbers of semi-obvious spam pages — typically a user page with a formulaic self-introduction in appalling English (computer generated?) followed by some irrelevant link — and a fair number of marketer edits. I don't touch either of those; basically, I won't do anything there that needs any thought or judgement. These problems are occasionally fixed by IB admins, but nothing like regularly enough to keep the site healthy. Pashley (talk) 22:01, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Being semi-active on both sites, I can personally vouch for the truth in what Pashley writes above.

It is precisely because of the sort of dangers described by Felix during (what will probably turn out to be, if some of the "Old Guard" don't "wise-up" to SEO sins of omission and commission,) a very prolonged and ugly death struggle that admins and ordinary editors who conscientiously contribute to both sites should not be seen as traitors or turncoats.

For the sake of completeness, IB never bothered to timeously make the statement legally required of them - although, being fair, that may be because a relevant statement was inserted with this edit that was not reverted or changed by IBobi.

Lastly, I discern a subtle difference between the actual advice given at http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage_and_Wikitravel&oldid=2201210#Can_I_copy_content_between_Wikivoyage_and_Wikitravel.3F of "However, as Internet Brands and the WMF have engaged in litigation, please discuss before moving content from Wikitravel to Wikivoyage." (ie a copy to WV followed by a delete from WT) and the more likely scenario - just copying relevant material with an URL of a diff in the WV edit summary for attribution purposes. Whether this was intentional though, I doubt. -- Alice^✉ 22:50, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

The stewards are very proactive at dealing with spambots and open proxies (even shutting down entire ranges with misbehaving ISPs), so I think that's a large factor too. --Rschen7754 00:21, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Alice, while I understand the desire not to publicize exact methods being used for SEO, it might behoove you to contact users privately about said activity, rather than referring to it obliquely and insultingly here at the Pub. LtPowers (talk) 00:33, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I had noticed this particular issue myself, though I'm not sure it's a problem. I think it would be wrong to exclude anyone from any role here on WV just as a result of 'fraternising with the 'enemy" - that's the sort of thing that another Wiki-based travel site would do and we don't want to go down that path: we're the traveller's travel guide. Unless there's a major conflict of interest or a history of vandalism, I don't think we need to be concerned, though it is good that this discussion is taking place. However, as has been raised above, perhaps we need to give our SEO and Wikivoyage:Search Expedition a nudge, just to help us rise through the ranks further - we still have much to do. --Nick (talk) 00:51, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I also don't think it's a major issue, and many of the admins who edit on both sites don't seem to have a "loyalty" problem. If anything, it keeps parts of our community up-to-date on what the happenings are in the "travel wiki world" and important tidbits for our Search Expedition. Speaking of which, I do think we need to inject some new life into that, possibly in a private, request-only sphere of communication. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time lately to put into my brainchild, but hopefully we can implement some new techniques and ideas soon. JamesA ^>talk 13:00, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I was motivated to edit there recently to the mitigate potential for someone to suffer significant grief or catastrophe on a mountain ascent, so don't anyone go thinking that I am sanctioning, supporting or wish to participate in any lifelines being sent out to WT, that would involve a deep misunderstanding of my motives and actions. The destination concerned includes Indonesia's 2nd highest volcano and 39th highest mountain in the world (by prominence). It must be made clear this was not just about filtering or managing commercial listings on both WT and WV articles concerned, people do occasionally die on that mountain. The tracks are often slippery and dangerous and people have fallen to their death. Others have been poorly equipped and died of exposure, some others have become disoriented, got lost and then perished. It is a 3,726 metre high mountain, things can go wrong, and sometimes they go very wrong.

Editing across the two projects in parallel is potentially unsettling as it raises concerns of newly edited content on WV looking similar to that on WT if similar edits might be required to parallel Wiki articles. I considered that openly and clearly using my established identity on both articles made it difficult for anyone to claim the content had been 'copied' and in any case most of the activity involved deletion of invalid content that would have been misleading travellers, both in that article and a couple of associated articles at the same destination. Also as my activities involved 'managing' the listings of mountain ascent provider listings it was of benefit for it to be clear who was doing it. Personally I would not encourage working in both domains due to issues of clarifying authorship and originality, and in any case there is plenty enough for a committed contributor or admin to do on WV without wandering off to make hospital visits to terminally ill Wiki relatives.

It is unlikely that IB will read any message of support for their project from my own actions and the very constrained scope in which I have recently participated there would be fairly apparent to them if they are at all perceptive. I truly hope that the outcome of my recent efforts in remediating the mountain ascent listings concerned will provide them with sufficient impetus to manage that articles listings of providers on their own from now on.

My own views on IB and WT have been expressed rather comprehensively in the past and I doubt iBobi has entirely forgotten my parting words, or the commentary that preceded it.
When we sought remedy the bunch of misfits that comprise IB sought to sue some of us, threatened others including myself with legal action and in quite bizarre circumstances also blocked a good number of us from participation in the WT project. Other antics included changing policy on the fly, removal of content, including policy and project discussions, playing around with admin status and blocking user accounts.

If I visit WT and see the article/s are full of spam, vandalised or blanked they will be receiving no remedy from me. Their previous quite mischievous blocking my user account, suing people and IBs appallingly game playing took care of any future opportunities for that to occur. I would never do it myself but if someone blanked any of those articles or filled them full of complete jibberish or chock-a-block full of spam it would provide me with considerable relief. At least then a visiting reader would know to just entirely ignore the article content and would wander off to seek information elsewhere. If the IB staff resource was turned to the far more productive task of updating articles in a non-public Wiki environment rather then mopping up spam they might have some limited potential to continue as a travel guide themed website. Currently their site is somewhat messy and a regurgitated dog's breakfast likely has more appeal.

Anyone from this project who is 'helping out' by sweeping out spam, patrolling, editing content, or in general mopping up this canine emesis is really only keeping the ailing diseased and possibly insane patient alive. Just let that project fill with spam, clutter and junk. At least then the travellers who go there can really identify there is a problem and look elsewhere for travel advice and the sooner IB might realise the best solution is to take it down and put it in a box. That site long ago lost credibility and content integrity. -- Felix (talk) 14:23, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

1) Unlike IB, we should keep a "fair play" attitude towards competition. That's why we should assume good faith and accept anyone regardless of their external activities. 2) It would be a shame to undermine the nice convivial atmosphere here with any witch-hunting. 3) I don't wish WT gets spam, because it is not a good thing for us, as it makes Internet users wary of tourism-related wikis general. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:17, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I would ask that anything I've written here *not* be copied to WT. I realise that the free license allows commercial re-use if proper attribution is provided but blocking all mention of WV with this "Salem's Lot" nonsense means that attribution is not being provided and cannot be provided. Unattributed copying of WV content does violate copyright and is theft. I hate to be blunt about this, but as long as search engines are heavily penalising duplicate content it is an issue which needs to be taken moderately seriously. K7L (talk) 14:37, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, well, well: [11]. AHeneen (talk) 01:20, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

[12] Demoted, too. I tried to save some articles i cared about but that was ridiculed, so i stopped. I'm happy that i never used my real life identity at WT. It's a sad decline but IB seems to be happy otherwise they would be more restrictive. jan (talk) 13:34, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I do not have any issues if people wish to edit over there. When I first posted at WT it was an offer to work together. I did not expect what happened to follow. Personally I would not feel comfortable editing their due to the litigious environment. And lots to improve here... Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:18, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Rebuilding this article

We're currently working on a new draft version of this page here. Please come and take a look! :) --Nick ^talk 18:30, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Like the table, not sure sure about the Date of Birth. --Inas (talk) 05:02, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Mentions of that other site

Swept in from the pub

Mostly an observation, as I don't necessarily think we can or should bother with it, but I have noticed that although all mentions of that other site on talk pages have been changed to Wikivoyage, places where it was abbreviated WT or capitalized midway through (like "WikiTurdbucket"), all remain, sometimes resulting in a contextually odd alternation between referring to that site and referring to ours... Texugo (talk) 21:02, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I remember noticing and remarking before that I saw several instances of the word "Wikitraveller" (spelled with two L's) changed to "Wikivoyageler". -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:21, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

It was a bit ham-handed and we probably shouldn't have bothered (at least outside of article space), but unfortunately, what's done is done. LtPowers (talk) 02:29, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

The big worry back then was the potential for self-referencing as Wikitravel (like a talk page comment "Here on Wikitravel, we do such and such"), which could have supported the argument of a then current lawsuit that we were trying to use the WT trademark to "trick" users into thinking it's the same site. It's happily not worth thinking too much about that nowadays, but if you see weird instances, feel free to change them so they make sense. --Peter ^Talk 05:36, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Date of birth

Repeating what I said on the draft of this new version, I still think Wikivoyage's birth date should be either December 10, 2006, or August 30, 2012 (depending on whether we're talking about all language versions or just English Wikivoyage). LtPowers (talk) 20:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

That sounds fair. I've changed it to the latter as all the other statistics relate to the English version. --Nick ^talk 22:16, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't agree. The birth date of Wikivoyage was the 2006 one. The later date is the birth date of English-language Wikivoyage. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:18, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

DOB is going to need explanation no matter what date is used. Why not use the official WMF launch date in the table with an asterisk that links to a "Why is there an asterisk next to date of birth for Wikivoyage" sub-section explaining the history and noting that the content and many contributors of Wikivoyage date back to 2003, the domain name dates to 2006, the fork occurred in 2012, and the official launch as a WMF project was in January 2013? -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:24, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

As long as there is sufficient information and we're not dissing the German-language Wikivoyage founders, who were so helpful to the other language contributors during the later forks, I'm fine with it. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:49, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I took a stab at it: [13]. Please update, correct or revert as desired. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:27, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't work. If we want this info, we should do a timeline. --Inas (talk) 23:54, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Inas. There is no one date of birth, it came together in different stages over years. And if any first date would have to be chosen, it'd be December 10, 2006. Can't we just remove it? Globe-trotter (talk) 00:16, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Am I going crazy or has WT just plagiarised the new WV main page layout?

Swept in from the pub

Hopefully i'm missing something, because otherwise this is terrible. Oncenawhile (talk) 21:43, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, yes, but I don't think it's really worth worrying about. There are more significant problems there, which happily are no longer ours to worry about. --Peter ^Talk 21:56, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it is embarrassing for them - of all the possible revamps they could have done, they decided that it's better to copy WV so people might not realise which is which. It's amazing how the tables have turned - with WT chasing WV's coattails.

Btw, on a longer term note, I don't think WMF's PR team have done as much to highlight the success of WV as it deserves over the last six months - you guys have been doing a great job. I haven't seen much press since January and after six months they still have an Alexa rank above WV by a factor of 10.

This silly move by WT could backfire for them if WMF ensured it got picked up by the press - the more press coverage the better as any coverage will help readers differentiate.

Oncenawhile (talk) 22:12, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Our Alexa problem has far more to do with Google than the WMF. And as for IB's plagiarism, it's an unfortunate consequence of the copyleft license we use. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Copyleft requires attribution. A wiki where WV can't even be mentioned without triggering edit filters has no means to provide that attribution. CC-BY-SA, remember? Any attempt to copyright the main page for themselves also violates the licence if there's any CC-SA content on it. K7L (talk) 18:04, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

IMHO it's better than main page here. --Stryn (talk) 22:17, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes we can still improve our main page. The WT main page is no longer editable by anyone other than IB. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:11, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Unless I am mistaken they also appear to be copying your banners here 81.178.174.20 20:37, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

You're right - that does look like someone's tried to copy the pagebanners, though it's a pretty poor attempt it must be said! --Nick ^talk 20:48, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Nahh, that's just the uncommunicative and robotic IBadmin Tyen not understanding that not everybody on planet earth has screens wider than 800 pixels. To my mind, a banner is not just an very wide (and narrow aspect) sock-em-in-the-eyeballs image at the start of the article. It also carries the name of the article and most important of all, a functional, horizontal table of contents - something even our banners are largely missing at the moment. --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 21:00, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Page banners are not unique to WV, nor were we the first to think of them, and the banner on WT is almost totally unlike our banners, so any talk of plagiarism is somewhat over the top. Hammer them when they use dirty tricks, like attempts to pervert justice or copyleft, ignore them when you find they jumped on the same bandwagon that we are on.• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:13, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Remember also that it is IB we have problems with, not Wikitravel, the product, which was largely built by us, or the majority of the Wikitravel community. Also remember that some of the Wikitravel community are part of ours too, and that as a general principle Wikitravellers are welcome here whether they stay on at Wikitravel or not. Unless of course they are IB employees/meatpuppets with an agenda to cause disruption on WV. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:22, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

You-know-who is violating copyleft on Twitter

Swept in from the pub

I just happened across that other site's Twitter account and notice that they are posting images via TwitPic. I clicked on one at random and was presented with this picture of Khao San Road in Bangkok, without any credit to User:Globe-trotter, who originally uploaded it there. The only way to find the credit is to back out of Twitpic and click on the separate link in their post that leads to their article, where you can find the same picture and click on it for credit. There are a number of similar posts to other CC-by-SA images (I came across ones by User:(WT-en) Burmesedays, User:Shaund, and other users I recognize), and at least one other post with no link to their corresponding article (as a "guess where this picture is" game). If this weren't already enough to constitute a breach of copyleft, we also find this in the small print on TwitPic's website:

By uploading content to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your content on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites.

...

You retain all ownership rights to Content uploaded to Twitpic. However, by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

I don't have any idea what, if anything, could or should be done about it, but I did want to bring it up. Just another example of our former slavelord's less-than-exemplary understanding of wikis, selling out their own license... Of course, if it is you who uploaded one of those pictures, you could actually do something about it... Texugo (talk) 22:29, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

That is naughty of them! With the WV Twitter account I've tweeted the creator's name (and a link to Commons) for any image that we've used (only in the cover image at present) - is that sufficient? The background proper was created by me from a public domain source. Is there anything we can do about their infringements? --Nick ^talk 00:40, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Send a cease and desist letter. Also send a note to TwitPic that one of their users is uploaded content to which they do not own the copyright and which is not compatible with with their licensing agreement and that you wish it removed. Or appropriately attributed and the license made clear per CC BY SA requirements. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:16, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Nick: You also need to specify and link the license, if it's Creative Commons. LtPowers (talk) 01:33, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the info! It's good to know! I've added a link now. --Nick ^talk 02:29, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Possibly anyone could notify Twitter, but I think a cease & desist letter would have to come from the copyright holder.

The Free Software Foundation are sometimes quite aggressive about GPL enforcement; would Creative Commons take any action over violation of their license? Pashley (talk) 02:54, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Neither CC or the WMF will likely do much. It is the person who owns the copyright to the content in question that is best positioned to pursue this. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:59, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Articles copied from Wikitravel

We continue to get the occasional article here that appear to be copied from Wikitravel - they often contain XML listings (see Category:Articles using legacy listings) or use the "Get out" header. Given the dicey legal history, what should be done with these? Delete on sight? In some cases it seems clear that the author on both sites is the same person, but in the case of an article like Beveren the contributor here is an anon while on WT it was a registered user.

I'd suggest requiring that the creator state that they are the same author on the article's talk page, otherwise these articles should be speedy deleted as copyvios. With proper attribution we are legally allowed to copy WT articles, but given their propensity to unleash lawyers I'd suggest we do everything possible to avoid giving them an excuse to send nasty letters. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:50, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good. LtPowers (talk) 14:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

See also [14], added with an edit summary of "Copied from http://wikitravel.org/en/Salkantay_trek". I'd strongly suggest that we either come up with some standards for bring article content over from WT, or else we agree to some guidelines for disallowing such copying. Having been sued I would prefer to be super, super cautious in this area, but would appreciate suggestions and opinions from others on what the policy should be, and if we do allow copying how WT should be attributed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:58, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

The copyleft license that WTravel uses says that one needs to give attribution to the creators. I don't know how that could possibly be done in any other practical way than adding a link to the version of the WT article that one has copied the content from. I think everyone here would abhor putting links in our articles to WT's corresponding ones :P , in other words I don't think we should allow copying of content. On the other hand I believe that it would be OK to translate text from other language versions of WT. Also, I think that there wouldn't be any problem copying listings after deleting the content in description, price and direction sections. ϒpsilon (talk) 19:43, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I am of the opinion that the above edit summary is sufficient. It is the edit summary we use when content is moved around Wikipedia and has been deemed good enough there. We have an agreement that they will not sue again. As WT is coming content from us (which I am fine with as long as they give attribution) we should agree to do the same the other way around. The whole point of the lawsuit was to defend the CC BY SA license. Us not using CC BY SA content is us acting like we have lost when in fact we have won. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:09, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Having to click to see attribution is no different than what is required to see attribution for an image. No one is putting image attribution into the main article. I do not think anyone is stupid enough to launch legal attacks over this and if they do I am confident that we would win. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:48, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

It would be better practice to link to the specific revision from which content was taken, I think. LtPowers (talk) 14:28, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

You mean in the edit summary? Sure would be happy to do that. Can deleted the version I added and add it again with the specific link like here [15] Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:00, 28 August 2013 (UTC)