Wikivoyage talk:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel/Archive 2014-2019

Registered users

Whilst I am happy to see our article numbers catching up to WT, the number we display for our registered users is highly misleading. The "new" Wikivoyage total reflects users who have signed up for ANY WMF website since WV was welcomed into the fold, even if they have never visited WV. Whereas WT's numbers are people who actually signed up for that site. I suggest either finding a way to track actual WV users, or removing this metric from the page. It's not apples to apples at all, and we don't want to risk being accused of the sort of numbers padding that other guides have been accused of.

Also, does anyone know if bot and admin edits can be removed from the Total Edits number? 250,000 more edits than WT seems... generous ;). And of course there was no WV in 2003... I just have a problem with the way this info is presented. We should not be trying to compete with a site that's 10 years older and more established, just to make ourselves seem legitimate. We should forge our own path. Perhaps we could discuss reworking or removing this page as a whole? --SpendrupsForAll (talk) 21:16, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Your suggestion of not including edits by admins or bots is ridiculous. Can you explain why you'd even think of excluding such edits? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:41, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

No objections to removing the misleading info. I will do so. SpendrupsForAll (talk) 21:56, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

I've reverted your edit as Ikan Kekek did object and asked for clarification from you. If you're prepared to answer his question and obtain a consensus, then I'll gladly implement your suggestions myself. --Nick ^talk 22:02, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

The objection, if you'll bother to read the few short lines above, was to the notion of removing bot/admin edits. Nobody objected to removing the misleading numbers of registered users, for one month now. If you have a solution that addresses this, we can implement gladly. Until then it's safer to stay strictly accurate with regard to such statistics. Cheers. SpendrupsForAll (talk) 22:10, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

But removal of the entire section was not what you suggested above either. If you wish to suggest that now, please feel free to, but you cannot cite the above as consensus. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but we need to garner more opinions on this issue, particularly when editing a page of this importance to the project. Let's talk about it and then act. --Nick ^talk 22:14, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

"removing this metric from the page" is a direct quote from my initial proposal. See here, now, you're just edit warring on something that has never been objected to for a month, just to be difficult. Leave it be unless there's an objection to the change on reasonable grounds. You're either not reading what has already been discussed, when you yourself had plenty of time to chime in, or you're deliberately holding up progress just for argument's sake. Leave it be or raise a reasonable objection already!SpendrupsForAll (talk) 22:20, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

The new user statistics on both sites are misleading - ours includes other Wikimedia users who link their account here, and "registered users" at WT have consisted overwhelmingly of spambots for a few years now ([1]). It probably doesn't hurt to remove that stat since it's essentially meaningless for both sites. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:24, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I was merely saying that you cannot state that you have a consensus when Ikan Kekek was attempting to engage with you, but you did not respond. I'm more than happy discuss this issue, but please don't take it as a personal affront. As I'm sure you'll appreciate, this page is currently of high importance to Wikivoyage and, as such, it's important that it is accurate and conveys that which the community desires. I understand that you feel the 'registered users' figure is unfairly high, given it counts users from across the WMF who have visited the site just once and I can understand that feeling, however, like Ikan, I can see little good in discounting the edits of admins or bots as both are measured by WT's software and included in that site's edit count. Would you be happier if we were to quote 'active' rather than 'registered' users? I'd hope that would provide a more accurate metric than the current one. --Nick ^talk 22:28, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Active users may be equally misleading as a user (spambot or valid) needs only a single edit in a 30 day period to appear on that list. Unfortunately I don't see a reliable statistic that would be an indication of the vitality of the community, which is what I think is desired. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:47, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right. This is tricky! I am not wholly opposed to losing that particular metric altogether, I merely objected to the initial interpretation of consensus, but I'm sorry if I was a bit overzealous. It's just, having seen how valuable a page like this is on Twitter (it's shared far more than any other page) and the fairly meticulous way in which it was created, I'd hate for its utility to be compromised. That said, if the data, as currently presented, is misleading or erroneous, then we don't want to be seen to be on the wrong side of this issue. Therefore, if a consensus is reached and no suitable alternative is available, I'm happy to lose that particular statistic. I'm sorry if I appeared a bit harsh initially. --Nick ^talk 22:56, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Reverted yet again, eh? It appears you've got to have an administrator title around here to meaningfully participate. I believe I'll give up. It's been decided that the statistics as shown are wrong, none of the (now four) people in this discussion have disagreed with that, and yet, there my edit is reverted to the status quo again. I don't think you people have a concept of how discouraging that is, to figure out how to edit, make a substantial contribution, including preapproval, make the change, and then have it reverted not once but thrice, by the very people who have no objection to said change. Just astounding. I leave you to it. SpendrupsForAll (talk) 22:50, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Don't be discouraged :-) There's no real point in having this general consensus rule when we don't allow a discussion to run it's course before acting. However, theidea to just remove that statistic seems a good one for the reasons Ryan states. I'd be happy to see it re-installed soon. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:54, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Please see above (and my message on your talk page). I am now happy to remove that statistic - I just wished for a broader survey of opinion. --Nick ^talk 22:56, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Given the animosity that I feel towards @SpendrupsForAll:, I have to say between clenched teeth that there is a great deal of merit in what he has written here. Not only the figures for registered users were grossly misleading but also the number of edits. Given the overwhelming number of spambot and counter-spambot edits over at Wikitravel, it really is a pity that we don't focus on a more meaningful metric such as the number of non-admin editors that have made more than 10 edits in the last 30 days. --118.93nzp (talk) 01:32, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Isn't this frankly an apples to oranges comparison? I'm not sure the chart is particularly meaningful anyway, so why quibble on the definition of registered users? I would just remove the metrics that can not be reasonably compared. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:18, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

If you mean the number of non-admin editors that have made more than 10 edits in the last 30 days, I think that is comparing Apples with Apples, or I would not have suggested it, Andrew.

My gut feeling is that there are very few registered editors indeed over at Wikitravel, that regularly participate each month who are not IBadmins. This would also hold true, I believe, if you changed the edit number to pretty well any number in the range 4 to 200 each month... --118.93nzp (talk) 02:25, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

And do you have a method of extracting that metric from the WT change logs? I guess if you can or if you want to manually do this then that's fine, I'm just not convinced it is a great use of your time either way.

Just looking at the WT recent changes page tells me all I need to know about the state of WT. Andrewssi2 (talk) 11:43, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

For future reference, edit wars are bad, okay? Spendrups made a change; it was reverted; that's where it should have stopped until discussion was resolved. Powers ^(talk) 15:25, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Merge Wikivoyage:Migration_to_Wikimedia into this page?

Should the above page be merged (or at least redirected) into this one? I've started a discussion here. --Nick ^talk 02:26, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Greater Manassas

I'd like to import content from the WT "Manassas" article to our "Greater Manassas" article. I'm bringing this here as this page says "discuss before moving content from Wikitravel to Wikivoyage". Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 05:54, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

These are the only changes that have been made to WT's article since we migrated. It would be better to rephrase that small amount of prose in your own words than to import. Powers ^(talk) 15:20, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I suck at that kind of thing, honestly I wouldn't trust myself to do that without committing mosaic plagiarism. Thease were the only significant edits. Couldn't we just import them one by one and give credit to the authors in the edit summery. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 11:17, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

More comparison data

Where would one go to find info on the growth in edits and articles numbers by woth wikis? As it is now both sites appear to be pretty similar, which doesn't reflect the difference in activity level in each one. --Canislupusarctos (talk) 17:22, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure IB releases that sort of data for WT, so someone would have had to be keeping track of it manually. Powers ^(talk) 21:24, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Maybe List of Wikivoyages and List of Wikitravel wikis --Alan ffm (talk) 23:42, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Attribution issues at WT

If anyone is still active at WT (@Koavf:? anyone else?) it would be appreciated if you could request that the IB admins there provide proper attribution for their use of our Template:Pagebanner, which was apparently imported by an IB admin via an XML import from Wikivoyage (revision dated 21:27, 30 March 2014 by‎ WOSlinker [2]) and is now being rolled out across that site. On a similar note, I was curious where they were getting their page banners, but the first page banner that I tried to track down was [3], which was added by an IB employee [4] but is neither under a CC-SA license [5] nor is it fully attributed on WT. I don't know if a request for attribution will accomplish much, but all of us write this content with the sole expectation that anyone using it will abide by the terms under which it has been licensed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 08:39, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

I added a comment in their pub. I wonder if they'll respond or delete it. Pashley (talk) 10:12, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Is it worth to create a page to record of such communications to WT? (with screenshots) It might prove useful in the future to have it all in one place. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 19:37, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@wrh2: I came here to post Pashley's diff. For what it's worth, I know that Wikitravel's AbuseFilter was changed several months back (I noticed due to discussion here at the Pub about this same issue) and users can actually attribute "wikivoyage" in edit summaries now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:47, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Interesting that they care little about copyright. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Copypasta from Wikitravel

Swept in from the pub

Hi, everyone. I've reverted at least a couple of instances of copypasta from Wikitravel in the last few days, maybe 3 instances, and others in the last few weeks. It's often easy to spot because lazy copypasta artists copy listing tags (we use templates now) and "Get out" headings where we now use "Go next". If you see any uncredited copypasta from Wikitravel, please revert it right away and post a note to the offender's user talk page. You can see an example of such a note here.

Note that it is OK to copy and paste from Wikitravel if the user doing the copypasta had actually posted all the content on Wikitravel him-/herself and directly and clearly states that in his/her edit summary. However, even in that case, the content has to be suitably edited as necessary for Wikivoyage style. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:59, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Even if it's not illegal to regurgitate WT content here (with attribution), it's not desirable from an SEO standpoint as it will get us penalised for duplicate content. We do not want to be a word-for-word identical WT mirror. K7L (talk) 14:36, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes of course, but there is (or was) at least one user who raised the issue of working on both sites here in the pub, therefore we should make clear how that is possible and that we advise against it for various reasons of which SEO is imho one of the less important ones... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:49, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Because of the SEO issues K7L and others have cited, and given what (ahem) usually happens when we come across users who edit on both sites, I for one think it's worth looking into establishing a policy of reverting any text added to our site that is identical to WT material, even if it's the same author in both instances. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:46, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Not all users who post to both sites are hostile. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:00, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

That may be true, though I haven't seen any who aren't. Nonetheless, I don't think it's unreasonable to require those who contribute to both sites, for SEO purposes, to at least not use identical text. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:52, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Or, at the very least, to have a policy of rewording-on-sight any new edits we find that copy WT material, regardless of which site it was posted on first. This is a wiki, after all, and any contributors have to know their text can be altered at any time and for a whole host of different reasons. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:01, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

How big is the issue in reality? And another thing: Can we create a thing like a program that automatically detects those copypasta things? Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:11, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

How big is the issue? Big enough for it to be brought up here in the pub, apparently. I don't know how feasible such a program would be, but I imagine we might be able to tackle the problem through regular Recent Changes patrols - all we would need to do is check any suspicious diffs against the analogous WT article. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:19, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

User:EranBot/Copyright is a bot that attempts to flag content copied from other sites. Anyone interested in catching copy/paste should add that page to their watchlist. Note that the bot is still in a beta state and that it relies on search engines (which are not updated instantly when a page changes), so if someone makes an edit to WT and then copies it to Wikivoyage a short time later the bot will be unlikely to flag the edit. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:25, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I think if we do it only for "suspicious" edits we might well not catch a lot of them. I know that some things are rather obvious (like the different section headings) but others won't imho be caught that easily unless somebody sees whether such a thing would be feasible. I am unfortunately very bad with this newfangled computer stuff, so I can't be of much assistance in that. Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:27, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm just coming across this, but it seem like the example note for the offender's user page is a little harsh. I'm not sure what folks above are referring to by "hostile" users, so maybe there's something going on I'm not aware of, but it seems like, for users just copying unaware, they should be informed of the policy assuming good faith rather than scolded, which is how the note comes across right now. - Sdkb (talk) 21:00, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Moving my contributions from Wikitravel to Wikivoyage

Swept in from the pub

I've been a contributor to Wikitravel for some time, and had no idea it was for-profit (I guess, shame on me.) I'd like to bring over my contributions, do I need to do anything special? The page says "make sure to match the licensing" but I don't understand what that means. Thanks. --Awiseman (talk) 19:28, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

If you are only copying content that you wrote yourself - and not text contributed by others - then you own the copyright to that text and can do with it whatever you want. To avoid confusion, when you add it to an article here simply use the edit summary to make others aware that you are the original author - something like "content copied from WT, but I am the original author". Be sure to only copy content that you directly authored, i.e. don't copy an entire article, since others will have contributed to that article and would need to be given proper credit in order to comply with license terms and re-use it here. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:38, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good, thanks!! --Awiseman (talk) 19:41, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

My favourite part of editing here is that as of a year ago we no longer need to really attribute any more (see https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Creditssource-credits#Policy_change). It’s very freeing to not have to credit the work of authors. Just keep in mind that your work isn’t really going to be credited, either. I’m cool with it. Now as to your point about “for profit” websites… maybe they’re not as bad as some people think? I mean, the Wikimedia Foundation is as bloated a bureaucracy as there is anywhere (paying $250,000 salaries to its top execs is a “nonprofit”?? See http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pay-us-our-salaries/) . They do at least as good of a job getting money as Wikitravel does. They just beg for it with banner ads instead of getting ad clicks. Same difference? Anyway – welcome aboard!Harlan888 (talk) 20:00, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

The previous user has yet to make a contribution on a non-policy page. Just fyi. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:06, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Best to speak clearly: He's an IB troll. Don't pay any attention to his nonsense. But more importantly, anything that you copy from Wikitravel to Wikivoyage must be formatted in Wikivoyage style. For example, we don't use listing tags, only listing templates, and we got rid of the unfriendly-sounding "Get out" subtitle and use "Go next" instead. Also, any kind of good paraphrasing you'd like to use would be welcome; a total ban on copying content from Wikitravel is currently under discussion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:15, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

You'll pardon me, but who is the troll? Ikan? You follow people around accusing them of this and that, and here is your a hominem attack, right on cue. Correct me if I am mistaken, but as of last year we no longer use a link back to source material, right? Undoing all the wikipedia, Wikitravel, and former wikivoyage precedent? Am I wrong? And also: a ban on Wikitravel content?? LOL. Whatever will be left here? We copied the ENTIRE SITE from Wikitravel! LOL again :) Harlan888 (talk) 20:24, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, for me a total ban would be bad, because I wouldn't be able to bring over what I had written already. I had no idea there was a fork, though I now understand that it was in 2012, and I have done a lot since then. --Awiseman (talk) 20:28, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Awiseman . I hope the troll from the other website didn't give you a bad experience. They are a commercial operation and are just concerned about losing advertising revenue. We are now 100% completely separate from Wikitravel, and there is no special attribution concerns regarding them. Any content that you derive from any Creative Commons source just needs attribution, although you may find it easier to start again in some cases. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 22:24, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

The proposed ban on duplication of new content from Wikitravel is only under discussion. Do feel free to insert your own content here, with the kind of edit summary Ryan previously mentioned and formatting changes as necessary. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:03, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Please provide an URL to where a "proposed ban on duplication of new content from Wikitravel" is under discussion. I edit on many Wikis and, if forced to choose, would have to choose where my contributions are most useful. Consequently, I'd vehemently oppose such a silly move until WV starts to take search engine optimisation more seriously. 175.138.99.217 01:12, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Um, what contributions? Your edit history only goes back about an hour. K7L (talk) 04:48, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub#Copypasta from Wikitravel. What's your username on other wikis? Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:29, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm surprised I need to remind people that travellers will often have changing IP addresses assigned to them by their service providers. Unlike with a registered anonymous account, it's not wise to assume that an IP editor's editing experience is confined to a particular IP address.

Amateur sleuthing can be wonderfully diverting but please try and remember the most important topic this past 900 days or so: increased readership (and hence participation). 175.138.99.217 12:51, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm surprised I need to remind travellers with changing IP addresses that it's difficult to have productive conversations with them when we don't know their history on the site. Especially so when we've had multiple registered and unregistered users espousing very similar viewpoints with very similar textual patterns. Powers ^(talk) 01:42, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Relatively recently, the practicalities have changed, Powers. It used to be only vandals that were blocked and gagged. Not editors genuinely trying to improve this travel guide - however much you might genuinely disagree with their edits! Even then, they were still allowed to edit their own User talk pages so that the possibility of communication (education?) was not prevented.

The rot started before the split from Wikitravel of course. First any mention of a split was censored and then the (justifiably) outraged long term editors lost their editing privileges. Now that was done out of a relatively justifiable motivation: to protect the financial position of IBadmins' employers.

Admins here seem to have learnt little from that nasty period. Some admins that should have learnt lessons from that experience have lost sight of why they have special privileges, Powers. They've taken to banning people that get under their (increasingly) thin skins and as a way to win policy arguments and avoid losing face rather than out of the justifiable motivation of protecting this Wiki from damage and degradation. They've even dreamt up spurious crimes after their ban (such as "Forum shopping" when crucially neglected topics are raised in the Pub!) Perhaps it's only those who have lived in dictatorships that understand the importance of the rule of law.

I am not a liar and I state very clearly

1. I'm not Werner Frank Buchholz
2. At the time I was banned, I had not edited here for many months. After I was blocked I could not even edit my own talk page to appeal the mistaken identity
3. The most important task is still to remove the Google duplicate/mirror site penalty. After more than two years now it should be obvious by now that you need to heed good advice.
4. It should be obvious that, unless you wish to drastically restrict all edits from users who have not created an account or choose not to use it, the present policy risks cutting off whole countries from editing Wikivoyage. That endpoint would be a tragedy because you'd cut yourself off from those many who have something to contribute off the cuff and may then go on to create an account. Rather than have that happen, I think I will shortly stop editing until wounds are less sore. I certainly don't wish every IP address in South East Asia to be successively blocked.

A wise person once wrote: "The fact that a lot of people who make unwanted edits are anonymous makes us act like scared children around a campfire, pointing our flashlights out into the dark and imagining things a lot worse than they actually are.

Wikitravel is an open, welcoming community, and I don't want that to change. I think the extremely easy task of cleaning up after the occasional self-promoter is much better than cultivating an environment of fear and distrust."

-- Alice^✉

User:Alice has been blocked since 18 Nov, but the block does not appear to prevent editing of User talk:Alice. Do you find this is not the case, or do I misunderstand? Nurg (talk) 11:45, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

I can't edit my own User talk page or any other page on Wikivoyage if I log on, Nurg. I stopped logging on months ago because I found that I was autoblocking IP's all over Asia and Oceania and I did not wish to be guilty of indirectly damaging our project in that way, Nurg. My signature is hand crafted from whichever IP address I am randomly assigned since I don't wish to mislead too much. -- Alice^✉

Further discussion about User Talk page editing is continuing at User talk:Alice. Nurg (talk) 23:02, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Article count comparision

I noticed in the latest update that WT has about 1,000 more articles than us.

This is kind of disappointing since I thought we were creating new articles on travel topics all the time, as well as creating more destination articles under large cities.

Is the WT growth around content farming with vaguely travel related topics, or is there a growth area we are missing? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:26, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

You can see the new articles on WT and judge for yourself. My first impression is that they have a lot of articles that would be merged & redirected if created here, as well as a lot of junk articles that have slipped through like [6]. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:35, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

There were a lot of junk article stubs which were imported from WT to WV in 2012, basically "X is in Y {{subst:smallcity skeleton}}". A heap of these were deleted from WV a while back, just to lose the "This article contains content from other websites" disclaimer in instances where WT contained no actual info of use to the traveller. Because they had the article template (one valid internal wikilink and a couple hundred bytes of filler text) they appeared in NUMPAGES as if they were articles, even though they were useless outlines. WT likely still has those empty outlines, which skews the figures, even if they contain no useful data. K7L (talk) 03:20, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Take a look at articles such as http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Khan_Yunis_governorate where phrases such as "its border with Zionist entity, airspace and maritime territory" make it clear that these articles are auto-translated from non-English sources. This source obviously denounces Israel, and is not Arabic Wikipedia; probably not open-source. /Yvwv (talk) 23:53, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks all. It does seem the majority of new articles on WT would not be acceptable on WV, so I guess we are not really missing out on something here. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:15, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Start date for count of edits

Is it possible for the table to show total edits (since 15 January 2013) in English, as well as "Total edits (since 2003) in English"? Nurg (talk) 02:05, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Convincing people at that other site to edit here

Swept in from the pub

It appears that that other side still has a handful of actual contributors that are neither touts nor spambots and it may well be that some are aware of the fork/migration and deliberately chose not to edit here for whichsoever reason. However, due to the google rank problem it may well be that some people edit there due to complete unawareness about WV. What can and should we possibly do about that? Nothing? Hope they find us on their own (And figure out the how and why of it all?) 79.194.23.48 22:39, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The "Email this user" link is the best bet. They're pretty diligent about scrubbing any reference to Wikivoyage from the site. And "Email this user" will only work if a) you're a registered user who isn't blocked and has an e-mail address in your Preferences; and b) the other user has "email this user" enabled. Powers ^(talk) 15:52, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia, which has a far stronger trademark and larger community than Wikivoyage, should be more actively used to promote Wikivoyage. Put a {{Wikivoyage}} template on every relevant Wikipedia article. /Yvwv (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

For that matter, if someone is actively editing WP and WT, it would be a good idea to contact them on WP to introduce them to Wikivoyage. K7L (talk) 20:28, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Blog post from Seat 17A

Thought this might be of mild interest: http://seat17a.com/wikitravel-vs-wikivoyage/ Powers ^(talk) 13:10, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

We need to improve our coverage on Phoenix, Arizona is all I am getting from that. Is there any place where the author justifies the scores? Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:10, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about justification, beyond the three five-point scales mentioned. As for Phoenix, it appears they've started to districtify it, though a lot of listings are still in the main article. For us it's still a Big City, not a Huge one. Powers ^(talk) 18:18, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

They haven't started dividing Phoenix into districts, Phoenix was (halfway?) districtified years ago. Our Phoenix article too used to be divided into districts until a few months ago. Per the outcome of this discussion, the content of the districts was merged to the main Phoenix article. ϒpsilon (talk) 19:19, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello, I am the author of the blog post in question from Seat17A. I didn't publish the full scoring matrix because I didn't want to influence the content of each site (sooo much copy and pasting). With that said, I think it is fair to talk about why I think WikiTravel beat Wikivoyage in Phoenix. It comes down to the recommendations by neighborhood, which Wikitravel has and wikivoyage does not. Since Phoenix is very large geographically, the neighborhoods come in handy. We are talking about a 2 point advantage, which is not much. I live in Phoenix, since there is so much sprawl, breaking it down into districts adds more context to the recommendations. That's my 2 cents, you can email me at: JamesM@Seat17a.com to verify that I am the author of this statement. —The preceding comment was added by 2600:8800:1283:0:c58c:b665:9373:fd28 (talk • contribs)

I (re-)started a discussion regarding districts here and absolutely encourage you to weigh in as local knowledge is always welcome here. At any rate, talk page posts should always be signed by post this symbol ~ four times in a row like this ~~~~ Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:28, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

I'd like to second Hobbitschuster's remarks and also to thank you for coming here to explain that. Yes, please elaborate at that thread in Talk:Phoenix with your opinions about how it would best serve the traveler to district Phoenix, and how it would be most useful to divide up the city, for the purposes of a travel guide. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:42, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

If you know that Dania beach is a really awesome article on WT then just go ahead and build it here. No need to import it it 'to work on' first. Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:46, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Not sure I understood you. You mean copy/paste the text? If we do that then there would need to be an attribution template in the body of the article linking to WT. That's not ideal.. Importing the whole history is safer license wise. Also, I don't know which articles are good and which aren't. That's why I wanted to import into userspace and then do a triage. FInally, importing an XML dump is much simpler/faster than copying hundreds of pages by hand.Acer (talk) 23:01, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

I think what was meant was that you can see what is in the WT article, verify it from sources outside WT and upgrade / create our article accordingly. I have to reiterate here that I do not think copying anything from that other site under any circumstances is a wise move. In my opinion we have made a lot of headway by things including random drift at our articles (IP editors or simple wording changes) that google recognizes. Importing or copying from that other site would hurt that more than even the most diligent work over years could help us. I would like a list of genuine travel topics that site has and we don't. Destination articles either come about by people with local knowledge showing up or they don't. Forcing it is not gonna help us. You can get a city article to "usable" without having been there if it is in a country with reasonable "on the internet percentage" for businesses, but those articles do not do much good besides completing regions and whatnot and should not be created just 'cause. The best impetus for new articles is someone with local knowledge starting them. Even if that someone has a limited grasp of English or has touty intentions. So, let's look through the three or four travel topics worth salvaging, create them here from scratch and for the most part forget that other site even exists. I am actually not sure we should even import this stuff to anybody's user page without clear consensus in favor. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:20, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Ryan, Hobbitschuster, and (particularly) Powers' arguments have convinced me we're playing with fire here. I think it might be useful to retain the list of articles present on WT and absent here, but beyond that I oppose in the strongest possible terms any notion of copying from the other site, and frankly (germane to Powers' comments) would love for this discussion to be brought to a speedy close, in case any prying eyes from over there are watching. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:29, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

I was trying hard to not give the impression that we would forbid this process, but the benefits are minuscule and we really need to keep away from the IB company if we can possibly help it.

Basically great intention, but there are safer and better ways to achieve new content. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:32, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

That's alright. I've been editing wikis for over a decade now. Sometimes you get your way, sometimes you don't. Archive away :) Acer (talk) 23:26, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Editcount

So forgive me if this had been raised before, but maybe we should have the editcount start from the date of the migration/fork or some other point in time? Or are there reasons against that? Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:44, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

I don't know any way to obtain that, unless someone remembers the edit count at the time of the fork. (If we have the latter number we can just subtract it from the total editcounts to get the number after the fork.) Powers ^(talk) 13:55, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Including literally everything (article edits, talk page edits, project pages, edits which were reverted or deleted, bots, everything)? We're just under a million edits from 2013 to now, based on the revision numbers https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage%3AWikivoyage_and_Wikitravel&type=revision&diff=3055593&oldid=2072055 indicating two million edits were imported or made just after the time of the fork and one million were made here later. Any edit to anything - even if it's later deleted - bumps the revision counter up by one, so these get racked up rather quickly. So an average of a quarter million edits annually over the eight years (2004-2012) with WV continuing at that rate (a million from 2013-2016). Nonetheless, since the split, for every two edits made at that other wiki five are made here. K7L (talk) 14:11, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Well I for one think that "our post fork edits outnumber theirs five to two" is more impressive than "two similar numbers in the three million range". Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:21, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Is there anything non WV:Obvious to say about traffic congestion in general as opposed to specific cities and regions? I think we do quite a good job of mentioning it in city articles, don't we? Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:05, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Sure. I'm not suggesting it's a good travel topic, just that on the face of it, it's travel-related. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:23, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

At any rate, we do have an article on Yellow fever and on some other diseases, too. I also don't think we should create a travel topic on "traffic congestion" but maybe a redirect on a section in tips for road trips or driving? Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:35, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't know if the term is worth a redirect and feel apathetic about it. :-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:24, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

I created a few redirects, including one for Congestion. I think we might wish to put a very limited number of those topics on our "wanted articles" list. Hobbitschuster (talk) 10:41, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

"Congestion" by itself means "nasal congestion" to me. Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, or in a travel context several other things. For example, when I think of congestion in Shanghai it is the million shoppers a day walking along Nanjing Road or the 10 million a day on the metro that come to mind. Pashley (talk) 12:40, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Foot traffic is traffic. Just like a critical mass is not holding up traffic, it is traffic. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:52, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

I see Culture shock on the list. I think that would be a really good article for us to have, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:55, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

It's on the list of requested articles. And if you think the congestion redirect shouldn't exist, vfd it. Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Provided that Wikitravel might not survive another year; it is not just about competitiveness and SEO. We should salvage useful ideas. Yvwv (talk) 16:16, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

I think Internet Brands will try and continue to extract some advertising revenue from it if at all possible. Only once the cost of webhosting exceeds the revenue gained will they shut it down. That said, we are capable of having genuinely good ideas on our own, yaknow? Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:42, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Traffic to travel sites is seasonal, usually plummeting in northern autumn (October-December). In the meantime, Wikitravel gets overwhelmed by spam (which requires moderation) and their productive community is dwindling. Wikitravel might pretty soon (probably before 2018) restrict access to new users. Thereby, their productive edits will get even fewer. The next step will be a closed wiki, or a passive mirror site; the downward spiral might go fast. /Yvwv (talk) 17:34, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Hobbitschuster, I still object to the redirect for "Congestion". If we lengthen it to "Traffic congestion", I'm fine with it. Any objection to that, considering that "congestion" by itself usually refers to nasal congestion? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:50, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

I am not sure that nasal congestion is the first association when talking about congestion, but sure, why not. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:10, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

It turns out, a redirect for Traffic congestion already exists. Shall we delete the redirect for "Congestion"? Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:32, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

I think congestion can refer to both of these concepts. Traffic is slightly more relevant in the world of travel but nasal congestion is something that can happen to you while when you travel. Congestion can also refer to phone/internet network congestion and other medical issues. Gizza ^(roam) 01:25, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Right, and the point is that the word is ambiguous, so having a single redirect doesn't seem very helpful to me. I also don't think the term is worth a disambiguation page. I'd still like to delete the redirect. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:03, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree completely with Ikan. Pashley (talk) 08:48, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Does no one edit on WT any longer?

According to "Recent changes" on WT, the only action that goes on is creation of spambots, deletion of spam, and blocking of spambots. Have all their productive users left? What does that make of WT and WV in the future? /Yvwv (talk) 14:38, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Wasn't that what we were saying would happen back when we forked? Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:04, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

WT still gets a far higher SEO ranking than we do. From a business owners perspective they are making decent advertising dollar revenue from hosting this wiki on slow servers and investing minimum wage 'editors' to stop the content getting too bad.

Sadly it does still attract sincere occasional contributors who regard it as the best place to update listings and content. Until Google gives us equal ranking then this general perception that WT is the main travel source will remain. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 22:39, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

How would one then get about and change said google ranking? Hobbitschuster (talk) 12:50, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Their travellers' pub had four edits this month. WT is essentially a walking corpse. / Yvwv (talk) 17:42, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe we should a "number of edits in [recent month]" category to our comparison? Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:25, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Hobbitschuster, there has been much discussion around this point and you should see Wikivoyage:Search_engine_optimization and Wikivoyage:Search_Expedition .

We now enter the realm of opinions, since nothing is known for sure. My opinion is that we are discriminated against by Google for having content still too similar to the longer held content of WT. Updating our content may help, and we have been crawling up the search rankings at a snail's pace. I suspect that there is a switch inside of the Google company somewhere that could help us significantly, but obviously that can't be accessed.

And to be fair, it is not just Google that ranks us low. I can't mandate how people spend their time on WV, but if I were king of WV for a day I would stop people (pointlessly) messing around with United States main article and thinking of new words for 'cow' in English language varieties and actively get people to fix articles in the hinterlands, most of which are still close copies of their WT counterparts. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:41, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

When I had more time (and better internet) I did quite a bit of that using copyscape.com Apparently get in and get around sections are among the prime targets. Anecdotal evidence also shows that articles that are created "from scratch" here fare not bad at all in search rankings. Hobbitschuster (talk) 12:36, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Presumably, most new readers find us through the major destination articles. Still, many of these articles (such as Moscow) are very similar to Wikitravel (compare https://unvis.it/wikitravel.org/en/Moscow ). Could we improve search engine results (and readers' first impression) by rewording the articles for the most famous cities and resorts; or at least the introduction? /Yvwv (talk) 13:17, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think that's a splendid idea, but when I had brought that up earlier, I felt something of a pushback against "lateral SEO edits" that "don't improve the article". I did however do some rewriting for places like Berlin, Central Europe or Europe. Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:22, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Did some rephrasing for Stockholm, Gothenburg, Copenhagen and Oslo /Yvwv (talk) 13:44, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Articles such as Helsinki are based on purple prose, remaining word by word from Wikitravel. [7] These passages make Wikivoyage look worse than it is. /Yvwv (talk) 13:56, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

True. Do we still have a resident Finn on hand? Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

IMO, purple prose should be kept to zero for all major destinations (countries, capitals, major resorts, etc) as they get too lengthy anyway. SEO and the impression of plagiarism (as new readers might not understand the backstory) are other reasons. Made a quick fix for Helsinki. /Yvwv (talk) 14:19, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Do Search engines rank entirely on a page basis or are there elements of site as well? So are they "negative" about WV as a whole or just those pages on WV that are close/identical to WT. I can understand new pages being better as there is no corresponding competition on WT e.g. create a page on "Unicycle Travel in East Grinstead" and anybody searching on "Unicycle" and "East Grinstead" is bound to find your page near the top of the list. But if e.g. WV and WT both created a new page "Skiing in Florida" with identical content, would the WT page always come out ahead of the WV page because WT is "preferred" over WV. (I suppose an easy experiment (but for something more sensible). PsamatheM (talk) 14:59, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

@Andrewssi2 your pointing to Wikivoyage:Search_engine_optimization was interesting, particularly the bit there about the value of adding links from Wikipedia to WV (for places in Wikipedia that have matching WV articles (using External links at the bottom ...) and the Special:UnconnectedPages listing WV pages with no corresponding Wikipedia links. I've created a few destination pages and built up some pages from virtually empty and not even thought about creating links in the corresponding Wikipedia page (my lack of awareness). PsamatheM (talk) 15:15, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

This edit to Helsinki starts off fine but then proceeds to neuter the lively tone of the lede. It's boring and wooden and I'm tempted to revert it. This is exactly why some of us oppose changing wording just to make it different; it nearly always results in a net regression of tone and liveliness. Powers ^(talk) 01:09, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Let me try again. /Yvwv (talk) 01:21, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

When it comes to users from Finland, @LPfi: is doing good work. When it comes to distinction from Wikitravel, a goal would be

* Every major article (continent, continental section, country, capital, huge city or other major destination (Mallorca etc)) should have a good intro paragraph different from Wikitravel.

* Delete or rework extravagant/purple prose from Wikitravel in major articles.

* Delete or rework Wikitravel prose that violates MoS in major articles.

Presumably there are about 600 of those articles; a minority of all our material. These goals would not just improve SEO, but also improve the quality of our most read article. Of course it does not conflict with work on minor articles. /Yvwv (talk) 01:34, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Just to add, we should fix out-of-date content from WT too. When e.g. the name, address, phone, etc. of a listing has changed, it is of course good to update it even if it was added post-fork, but I make fixing pre-fork content a priority because of the extra benefit of SEO. Gizza ^(roam) 23:29, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

How to add WT stats?

Given that Ryan is no longer editing here, how do we determine which stats from the WT site go into the table?

I made an attempt, but want to ensure it was consistent with previous practice. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:08, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Movie and TV tours on The other Site

Since the Exodus, very little substantial material has been added to Wikitravel; except copy-pasted geographic information. However, they have a series of "Movie and TV tours"; most of them added during recent years. Shall we copy those? Or paraphrase them, for better SEO? /Yvwv (talk) 17:22, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

We have several as well; Game of Thrones tourism The Wire Tour & Breaking Bad Tour are substantial articles. Pashley (talk) 19:25, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

There is an index at Fiction tourism. Pashley (talk) 20:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

The last thing we should be doing is copying anything from WT, verbatim or not. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:44, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

At a first glance, our list contains better known franchises. That might be good for SEO. /Yvwv (talk) 23:17, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Stepped up the game, by adding Star Wars tourism. /Yvwv (talk) 19:32, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Should we redirect Movie and TV Tours to Fiction tourism? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 13:32, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I'd say separate redirects for Movie tourism & TV tourism, lowercase 't' & may cover things other than tours. Pashley (talk) 13:59, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. But "Movie and TV Tours" is the title of the Wikitravel page. I'm thinking we should have a redirect, so that people who see the WT page can easily find our version of the page. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 14:09, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

"Movie and TV Tours" looks like a very unlikely search word. But I see no harm in redirects, as long as they lead no one astray. /Yvwv (talk) 14:11, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Can we outperform their Destination of the Month?

Our Destination of the Month is Milan. While it is a good article, it is very similar to the Wikitravel article. While Wikitravel no longer has a nomination process, they rotate their Destination of the Month; it is Larnaca now. Our Larnaca article is slightly more elaborate than theirs. Could we make a habit of copyediting our DOTM to make it different from Wikitravel, and possibly improving Wikitravel's DOTM, proving once and for all that our material is superior? /Yvwv (talk) 20:07, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

That might be taking things too far. We shouldn't become obsessed with Wikitravel. If we want to outperform Wikitravel: What we really need to do is build a good travel guide. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 20:25, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Agree completely & I'd even make it stronger; not only should we not be obsessed, we should mostly just ignore WT. Pashley (talk) 22:10, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Copyedits and checking whether text that hasn't been changed in five years needs updating is a good idea, though. Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:28, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

WT is a competitor for search engine hits, readers, and contributor. Since much WV material is identical to WT, search engines still favor WT over WV. In a reader's eyes, WV might also look like a mirror of WT. Every user who ends up at WT, is a user who does not come to WV with potential to write new, great articles. The struggle to differ from WT is a real one. /Yvwv (talk) 22:36, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, and while copyediting improves quality, it is very little use in distinguishing WV from WT in search engines. To make a significant difference WV articles need substantial new content and/or completely rewritten content. Nurg (talk) 09:21, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

An interesting exercise for a bot writer would be to find articles with little change since the split. This need not involve massive downloads & direct comparisons; instead look at how many edits or how many bytes added since the split.

Another interesting search would be for outdated info. e.g. I just searched for "2014" & found lots of old info. August & several other months are one example, Flying to Africa and Pyay have info "as of 2014", and so on. Pashley (talk) 02:20, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Frontier_Country#2008_Events, North_Shore_(Massachusetts) "$7 fee ... (summer of 2008, may increase in 2009)", & others. Pashley (talk) 02:26, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Are our travel topics better than theirs?

Looked through Wikitravel's list of travel topics. https://unvis.it/wikitravel.org/en/Travel_topics

Many of their post-exodus articles (created 2013 or later) are either the kind of advice that should not be left to wiki sites (yellow fever, etc), have nothing to do with travel (traffic congestion, preventing sexual assault, etc); the "staycation" article takes the cake, as by definition describing how not to travel. In the meantime, they don't have the new categories we created since the exodus, such as food, historical travel and religion and spirituality. Tell me if you find any relevant travel topic, which we can reverse-engineer to Wikivoyage. /Yvwv (talk) 16:46, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Without looking at the contents of those articles, one stands out as absolutely related to travel: Traffic congestion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:50, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

(Northern hemisphere) winter slump

or something else? Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:50, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

A graph of Alexa Rank development?

Given that we semi-regularly update the Alexa rank here, it might be interesting to see a graph based on the data stored in the edit history here. I think there are seasonal variations and recently apparently a "death-spiral" affecting Internet Brands, but what else could we learn from such a graph? Well, we might know if we have one. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:06, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I screenshot the Alexa graphs in September; these are however copyrighted, and cannot be posted here. /Yvwv (talk) 19:41, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I have to ask, what are actually trying to say with the Alexa ranking? Alexa has its own value of course, but is it that material to understanding the differences between the two sites? Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:09, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

The Alexa ranking is not a perfect quality measurement. One factor is that the global number of websites is growing; making a nominal rank at 25k in 2017 much more impressive than the same rank at 25k a few years earlier. The graph however implies that a) Wikivoyage's popularity improves b) Wikitravel's popularity falls quickly and c) both sites are highly season-dependent, with an annual minimum around late December. /Yvwv (talk) 20:28, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Common travel scams infographic

Swept in from the pub

http://www.relativelyinteresting.com/40-tourist-scams-avoid-travels/ It ends up citing the other travel wiki. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:20, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Only natural, since they still get more views than us, and are higher up the Alexa rankings. However, with every passing month we are slowly making up the ground. It's a shame just how slow progress is, but if the increased number of active editors on here since this time last year is anything to go by, the process is speeding up. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 15:55, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Conversation

Swept in from the pub

I've signed myself up for WT, made a useful contribution, and asked WT on their Travellers' pub the following:

I know and understand why Wikitravellers are not allowed to use the name of a competing travel guide on this website. However, the fork that happened more than five years ago is no longer an issue, so could it possible to allow users to use the name of that travel guide on user pages? For example, I'd like to say that I'm mainly a contributor to Wiki---age but am now signed up on Wikitravel as well. Any thoughts from Internet Brands? Just asking, I don't mind if you don't want to change that word ban. SelfieCity (talk) 16:28, 9 June 2018 (EDT)

Chances are, they're remove the info and perhaps ban me from that site, but I'm just interested to see what happens. After several years Internet Brands might have recovered from their hostilities toward us. But after looking at the history of the travellers' pub and seeing all the discussions they removed, I don't feel like the result will be good. Also, I would like to say that the WT website works pretty well now compared to how it used to be (I know this by looking through their travellers' pub archives). Selfie City (talk) 20:34, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

What will happen is they will ban you, then threaten you and possibly the WMF with legal action. It happened to me, and I never even visited WT. Three months on, and I'm still waiting for them to prove their claims that the person who vandalised their site is both me and a troublesome user both of our sites used to have called W.Frank. I'm also waiting for WT to fulfil their promise to get me banned from editing here using the Foundation's own lawyers. Honestly, Selfie City, you're wasting your time. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 20:56, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

That's crazy! You've got me worried now. I'm glad I've been pretty careful about my identity on WV and WT. Selfie City (talk) 21:12, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Well, in that situation, I think someone pretended to be you and one of the Internet Brands staff assumed that you were messing up the WT website. Still, I'll be careful. Selfie City (talk) 21:34, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

So far, so good. Nothing's happened. If nothing happens and they keep the ban, I don't really mind because I don't plan to be a regular editor on the WT website. Selfie City (talk) 21:49, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

WT still exists? Good heavens. Why? Ground Zero (talk) 21:53, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes. They still do DotMs, OtBPs, and so on, although they don't use the DotM system anymore but instead just do it on the travellers' pub. And the website works pretty well now; they don't seem to have many problems with vandalism (except for the alleged ThunderingTyphoons! vandalism) and the website is pretty fast, perhaps even faster than Wikivoyage. Selfie City (talk) 21:58, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

They also seem to have very little actual activity going on. Their pub is a quiet, empty place. There are relatively few edits to articles. I don't mean to gloat. I wasn't here when the split happened, so I have no grudge to bear, but it does make me wonder what motivates people to continue contributing there. Ground Zero (talk) 22:08, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Well, I would think a lot of the people on WT don't know about WV because WT doesn't allow mentions of Wikivoyage on its website. And I think WT's owners, Internet Brands, haven't been as bad as some Wikivoyagers make out. They have kept the Wikitravel website going and the WT website in itself now functions quite well. Just because they showed ads with pictures of people eating spiders doesn't mean it was their fault. And they have reason not to like us - we've taken away a lot of their business. Selfie City (talk) 01:13, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

This is a hornet’s nest that really needs to not be poked by anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Maybe one of the other editors who were around when this whole thing was going down could back me up with links to the appropriate talk page discussions or whatnot, but the long and short of it is 1) our argument with Internet Brands went far beyond placing advertising on the site and, more importantly, 2) the legal arguments that underpinned Internet Brands’ subsequent lawsuit against the WMF, and two of our editors individually, included wide-ranging allegations of defamation that, while they were eventually thrown out of court, were still litigation and as such expensive, time-consuming, and stressful. We were advised at that time to avoid broaching the subject of our breakup from Wikitravel whenever possible, and with the exception of Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel which was very carefully worded to avoid inspiring further litigation, we have continued to operate under the model of the less said about it the better. In fact, I’ve probably said too much myself in this comment. And aside from legal concerns, I hope that given the toll the whole thing took on the two editors who were personally sued, you can understand why statements like the one directly above this one might be perceived as insulting. — AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:03, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

A search for "Internet Brands sues Wikivoyage" turns up plenty of info like this:

• https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Internet_Brands_v._Holliday
• https://skift.com/2012/09/23/wikipedia-style-travel-wiki-goes-live-in-rebuff-to-internet-brands/
• https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/15/a-victory-for-wikivoyage-and-free-knowledge/
• https://www.pcworld.com/article/2028594/wikivoyage-emerges-from-legal-cloud-as-the-travel-site-grows.html
• https://www.cnet.com/news/wikimedia-internet-brands-settle-wikivoyage-lawsuits/

No need to comment, the thing speaks for itself. K7L (talk) 02:28, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm one of the old time editors who started off before WV was created. I must say that we have actually grown more productive since the WT days. One of the things that caused me to move over here was that I found it much more difficult to get a consensus from the old site, even when it was an edit that seemed like commonsense to me. Take the "Talk" section of the Switzerland article. Look at what you have on WT, and it's way too long-winded, such that unless you are a professional linguist, your will likely get bogged down in all that information that you'll miss the important points. What you see there is more or less what you had here before I trimmed it down to the much more manageable amount of text that we have over here while still retaining the important points for travellers (and of course, it's been further improved by other editors since I did the trimming down). When I did the same thing on WT, I just got reverted with the comment that "that's just your own very personal opinion" when I mentioned in my edit summary that it was too long-winded. And nobody entertained me on the talk page when I tried to get a consensus. So in short, while perhaps more could be done to improve our exposure, I think we are in general doing a good job here, and I'd say in terms of quality of content, we are actually better than WT for the most part. The dog2 (talk) 04:34, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

At this pace of editing and viewings, Wikivoyage improves relative to Wikitravel every week. Within a year, Wikitravel might no longer be a notable competitor anymore. /Yvwv (talk) 00:51, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Predictions of Wikitravel's imminent demise have proven many times in the past to be premature. I mention that mostly because I agree with Yvwv and don't want to jinx it :) -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:00, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

I would be cautiously optimistic. I don't think our Alexa ranking will quite surpass theirs within a year, maybe two years. And of course Alexa is only one measure of engagement and popularity and is far from perfect (though one of the best we have at our disposal). Gizza ^(roam) 00:28, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

As someone who went through the WT v WV thing, I don't think we should be playing with IB as an entity. After the site sale to IB, we struggled with absolutely zero engagement from them since the takeover. No upgrades, no features and no response to any of our enhancement requests. This kinda worked - the site was slow, but it could be run how the users wanted. Then once day they wanted to place a booking bar on every website to book hotels, etc. Not just ads. This was rejected by the consensus, and they started hacking around with the formatting of the articles - and made it clear that this was happening without discussion. Then the banning of discussions. The courting of vandals to become site curators, as long time contributors were censored. The decision to move. The legal action against individual administrators (not because they were more or less involved with the move, just that they made convenient targets). It must have been an immensely stressful thing for a corporate to being suing unpaid contributors to free open knowledge. Wikitravel want to keep their information on that site to monetise it. And they have shown themselves quite willing to take steps within their legal power to do so. That's their business model. --Inas (talk) 22:17, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't know what we're doing, but let's keep doing it.

Swept in from the pub

It's really astonishing that the edit-a-thon has been over for nearly two months yet our Alexa rank continues to improve. This is very different from what happened during the site launch in 2013, when the line on the graph shot up into the stratosphere briefly but came right back down afterward, without much if any lasting improvement. What do you all think might be behind that? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:02, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Probably the 2013 spike came from Wikimedians, who might have been interested in WV primarily as a new sister, while those who now found WV might be more interested in the subject matter. A curious thing: the fraction coming via a search engine fell drastically that month (so they came via other links), but the rank persisted after that effect was gone. Is this due to some technicality at Alexa? Another thing that puzzles me is that we share audience with wikitravel (more so than with lonelyplanet, tripadvisor & co). Does that mean Wikitravel users actually are aware of us? --LPfi (talk) 16:34, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

I am quite new here and I found Wikitravel before finding Wikivoyage. I actually found Wikivoyage after clicking on a Wikitravel editor's profile page and saw that they had said that they moved to Wikivoyage and I decided to check it out. I now prefer this over Wikitravel as it is obviously more kept up to date. However, I would say that most Wikitravel users are not aware of Wikivoyage because I had used (not edited until about two months ago) Wikitravel for probably two or three years with no knowledge of Wikivoyage. BrysonH44 (talk) 17:18, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

This is brilliant news! --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 17:35, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikitravel seems to have shifted to slower servers, as there is visible loading time for their images. I haven't seen that for years; at least not on a website which intends to be market leading. Their travellers' pub is mostly a charade between a few administrators, struggling not to mention the elephant in the room (Wikivoyage). /Yvwv (talk) 12:17, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

May is the critical month for us as Alexa uses a 90 day timeframe to measure the popularity of a website. We are still doing better than 2013 because 1) more editors have stayed on post edit-a-thon, 2) more original content was created, which is helps with the SEO and 3) the site itself is much more appealing with higher quality banners, adding a current events destination on the main page, adding dates to listings, removing poorly written and touty language and so on. Gizza ^(roam) 22:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikivoyage's Alexa ranking is now in freefall. The second honeymoon is well and truly over. While the edit-a-thon was still very beneficial, we should think about ways to improve a similar event in the future so that more readers and editors stick around in the long run. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of the increase in views in the month of February were just people going to the edit-a-thon page (2.7 million of them) and not exploring Wikivoyage any further. The main page would be a better starting point for readers and potential editors in terms of exploring the site but as stated earlier, the mobile version for the main page is not well designed. Gizza ^(roam) 23:00, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Please comment at #Mobile above if you want to see the main page for mobile re-designed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

The good news is that some of that decline can be attributed to the seasonal nature of the way our page views fluctuate, and that the overall trend is still up. March 2018's page view numbers were at 2.7M readers vs. 2.6M in March 2017; April 2018's were at 2.5M vs. 2.2M for April 2017; May 2018's projected number of 1.9M views is similarly a solid improvement over 1.7M in May '17. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 12:42, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Despite the fall, things are actually looking quite good now with our Alexa rank. Since January 2018, the rank hasn't fallen as much as it went up and the Alexa trend is now returning to an upward direction now. Hopefully we can soon overtake Wikitravel's rank, which seems to have a steady downward trend. Selfie City (talk) 14:23, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

I think it drew a lot of attention from the banner across different projects. It may not get as much attention in the next one (unless we're thinking about the 10th anniversary edit-a-thon). I agree that it should be held more frequently. Maybe once a year for one month? My first impression when I noticed the edit-a-thon was that it was slow at the beginning because not a lot of people were listing out what they were working on, which gave an impression that it wasn't well received or that not many people were participating in it (or many signed up but their entries were blank). The more people sign up and list out which article they improved, the more attention it draws. Perhaps someone reading the list will click on the link that they're familiar about and realize that some items were not mentioned and they decide to add that in.

I also thought about what held editors back. Having the extra click definitely stopped some from finding out how many people are participating. Maybe the 4000 bytes requirement was too steep (or new users don't know how to count 4000 bytes)? Maybe the initial requirements for 4 article improvements to qualify for a barnstar was too high? Maybe the changing deadline confused editors? Or perhaps restricting the latest sign-up date discourage some from participating?

So how can we do better? Entice them by showing how the barnstar looks like. Perhaps create special category awards like an award for the individual creating the most Africa content, one for microstates (and I would probably win this one with all the Andorra pages lol), one for most capital cities in the world, one for best picture/banner uploaded, one for non-destination articles (e.g. Rail travel in Great Britain or Round the world flights) or something else. A better tracking is also needed. It took me a long time to manually follow every editor that signed up and verify if the contribution reached 4000 requirement (and whether they forgot to list some that would qualify). WMF created a dashboard tool for education and events. The tool allows finer tracking and more statistics. It also tells you whether the editor stayed around and contribute after the edit-a-thon. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 02:36, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Improved

So I improved the Alexa rank links, so they now show in white and are formatted properly. Wikipedia has good information about link color formatting. --Comment by Selfie City (talk about my contributions) 17:20, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Big Congrats

Swept in from the pub

Similarweb states WV gets 4.13 M visits in Sept of 2.86 pageviews each.[8]

Similarweb states WT gets 3.9 M visits in Sept of 1.77 pageviews each.[9]

This means that Wikivoyage has surpassed the viewership of the old site. Congrats. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:50, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

According to the Alexa ranks, we’re currently a fairly small 3-4,000 in rank behind Wikitravel. However, Alexa also takes into account past data, so it’s not always completely accurate for current statistics. I follow Wikivoyage’s Alexa rank fairly closely and there has been a very solid increase in rank over the past year — quite different from the sudden rank increase several months ago that largely came back down later. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 02:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes Alexa looks at a 90-day period and WV's views may have been lower in July and August. Also, while Wikivoyage didn't get as much external promotion as in February when we had the edit-a-thon, the Russian version in particular received a lot of extra coverage from the Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 campaign. As it shows, views from Russia nearly increased by 500%. Gizza ^(roam) 03:13, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Alexa provides a good graph of Wikivoyage's past views, however, at [10]. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 05:06, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, because Russian Wikivoyage organizes Wiki Loves Monuments in Russia. But these views will decrease (or actually have decreased) after the campaign, so it's not the relevant statistics. --Alexander (talk) 07:07, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Wikivoyage's rank did go down for a while recently, though not by a huge amount, and then is currently going up again. But if that is permanent or not, can't be proved at the moment. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 17:55, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Alexa's new information

Alexa now provides gratis information about Wikivoyage and the other site. What can we learn? /Yvwv (talk) 23:18, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure, really. There's so much information, it's hard to take it all in. Have you noticed anything in particular? --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 23:43, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

While 873 websites link to Wikivoyage, 9,532 sites link to WT. Not sure how useful those links are, though. /Yvwv (talk) 23:49, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) The "Keyword gaps" are supposed to be words that are often searched by readers but are going to our competitors instead of here. Is that because the articles for e.g. China, Muscat, Sao Tome and Poland haven't changed much since the fork? It is possible. Overall, we get a lower percentage of site traffic from search than comparable sites. We should pay attention to the keywords in "Optimization opportunities" too. "Buyer keywords" are not that relevant because we are not a business looking to get sales. Also, the sites linking into WV is low compared to our competitors, which is not a surprise. To an extent, we still ride off getting links from Wikipedia but there are not many non-Wikimedian sites that refer to us. We should try to change that to take WV to the next level. Gizza ^(roam) 23:50, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Our bounce rate has always been above average too which is a concern. We need to think of ways to make people stick around and explore the site further after finding one of our articles or pages. Compared to other related wikis, our bounce rate is lower than Wikidata [11] which is understandable because nobody enters a rabbit hole reading data but it's lower than Wikipedia [12] when ideally our bounce rate should be the same as Wikipedia. Our articles should be as engaging on average. Perhaps another drive to improve outlines which make up the majority of the site? Gizza ^(roam) 23:57, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

The top keywords of the other site are also a good indicator of articles that have barely changed after the fork. Or articles which have improved substantially on that site but not here. When people type those countries or cities in Google, they end up at WT not WV. Gizza ^(roam) 00:00, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikivoyage's Alexa's global ranking has surpassed Wikitravel during 2018... in my opinion, the goal now should be to surpass all other travel sites for each language

Swept in from the pub

I am sure this has been mentioned here before, but I only found out in the recent months that Wikivoyage has surpassed Wikitravel in the Alexa global ranking:

• As Of July 5th 2019 Wikivoyage Alexa global rank is 15,780
• As Of July 5th 2019 Wikitravel Alexa global rank is 17,064

Congratualations to everyone whom contributed to this.

In my opnion, now that this goal has been met, each Wikivoyage edition should aim to surpass all the travel sites in Alexa's ranking for it's language (for example, the German Wikivoyage should have a page with a similar comparison between it's Alexa global ranking and the global ranking of all the major German travel websites, the Italian Wikivoyage should have a page with a similar comparison between it's Alexa global ranking and the global ranking of all the major Italian travel websites, and the English Wikivoyage should have a page with a similar comparison between it's Alexa global ranking and the global ranking of all the major English travel websites).

If you support this idea, I suggest that we should create a new page slightly similar to Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage_and_Wikitravel with the full comparison of the English Wikivoyage and the rest of the prominent English travel websites along with each website's Alexa's global ranking. (and hopefully the rest of the Wikivoyage editions would be inspired as a result to do the same in their websites). What do you think? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 13:19, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

It’s fine to keep tabs and celebrate milestones, but I think the most important thing is to stay focused on our core mission of providing the highest quality and most up-to-date information for travellers. If we do that, the rest will fall into place - and if we never become the biggest and most popular, that’s okay too. Not to mention the fact that, with a few exceptions, most of the other language versions of Wikivoyage have much more pressing needs to attend to, content-wise, before they need to start worrying about things like Alexa rank. — AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:41, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

In order to improve our Alexa rank much further, we need to have a much better cellphone interface. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:11, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with both sides here. Another page would be useful for comparison, but at the same time we should focus on improvement and new contributors as the priority. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 16:20, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

At the Hebrew Wikivoyage such a comparison is very needed (and I will probably end up creating it by myself for Hebvoy if no one at Engvoy will create one before me here), simply so that all the editors would know where we stand in comparison to our "competitors" and how much we improved the quality of the site in the opinion of the public over time. Such a comparison lets the editors also know for example at which periods of time certain mass implementations/changes have made a considerable contribution to the site (in order to know what actually works and what doesn't).

People whom experts in Alexa ranking... how do I check the Alexa ranking only for the Hebrew Wikivoyage? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:06, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

The Alexa ranking has some shortcomings, but it is still an indicator of success. Wikitravel still has stronger Alexa ranking for the United States (and implicitly for English-speaking users), so it is still a competitor. Wikivoyage was punished in the beginning, since the material was copied from Wikitravel. Over the years, the Wikivoyage material has however diverged enough from Wikitravel to be read by search engines as original. A conclusion might be that it has been a viable strategy to edit Wikivoyage just to diverge from Wikitravel. That might be a less meaningful goal now. /Yvwv

WT article import

Swept in from the pub

I managed to get a list of articles on WT that we're missing. There's about 2900 of them. I placed all the red links in my user space for reference.

I also have the XML dumps with full history for those pages. 58 Mb uncompressed. I read the policy pages and I know importing is discouraged for SEO reasons but I'm not sure it's really that relevant at this point. It's a small subset (there's 47000 total on WV) and we're adding new articles much faster than they are. There's about 3500 more articles on WV than WT right now. Since they have those 2900 unique to them that means 6400ish unique articles have been written here since the fork.

I'd also volunteer to curate the material, place them in my userspace at first and check each one individually to see if they're worth keeping. I had been doing similar work on EnWiki with a large list of machine translated pages. WT gets new contributors from time to time, well meaning people who don't know the background story. I dislike the idea that all their work will be wasted when that place gets inevitably overrun by spam bots. It already is to some extent... Is this is something that could be considered? Acer (talk) 22:23, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

I think the duplicate content penalty is definitely still an issue. We're making headway as the two sites' content diverges, but it's slow going and I would fear that importation would reverse some of those gains. Better to treat that list as a list of requested articles and write them from scratch. Powers ^(talk) 01:48, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

@Acer: @LtPowers: I agree that before we mass add content from Wikitravel we keep it somewhere separate. First off, it would be helpful to do some (semi-)automated replacements just for SEO purposes (like "extremely"->"very" and "tasty"->"delicious") and then have editors who are willing to look through the content individually before uploading. I would be willing to assist. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:09, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

There has been a great deal of work to up the quality of content on Wikivoyage, my first reaction would be a negative one to this. However the idea of a list of needed article is not a bad one. Could you remove from the list all the redirect pages and also order by country? --Traveler100 (talk) 06:43, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

@Traveler100: For what it's worth, I am working on redirects and removing them from the userpage now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:04, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

...And also deleting items at Wikitravel which should have been gone awhile ago there as well. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:12, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

@LtPowers: I just ran a search for #redirect on the XML dump and got 1259 hits. Then there's going to be empty husks, one liners, inadequate/inappropriate/unsuitable articles, spam pages and I even saw a misplaced user page. By the time we finish combing through I reckon there might be less than a thousand pages left. Given the SEO concern we could be even stricter in accepting these than we are with original pages here. And we'll implement Koavfs suggestion to replace words with synonyms. If we end up with a few hundred higher quality pages I feel that's a fair trade for a small penalty, if any. In fact I think our biggest problem is the number of sites that link to us. Per Alexa WT has incoming links from almost 17000 sites, we only have 2000...

@koavf: Yes, I already did some find/replace on the raw XML file. Replaced some templates, added edit comment attribution to each revision and modified usernames to include a WT prefix. While it would be very easy and quite practical to do what you suggest on the XML itself, it would break attribution. But it can be done with a script once the articles are uploaded (if there's agreement for importing)

@Traveler100:I share your concern with article quality, that's why I'm proposing importing all articles into my userspace at first. Then we can work through the list and decide on what's worth keeping. I'll commit to checking each one myself and doing any necessary fixes (see below). I'll see what I can think of to organize the list the way you suggested. I can't do it with simple terminal commands. Will need a script I think.

So, taking everyone's comments into consideration and the concerns about importing, I'll ask just to be allowed to import into my userspace (user talk actually as it's non-indexed) at first so there will be no quality or seo concerns. Me, User:Koavf and anyone else who wants to help would comb through and produce a much smaller list of of higher quality articles to be considered for permanent importation. We'll replace words with synonyms to lessen the SEO impact. We then would submit this refined list for evaluation and acceptance by the community. Nothing gets moved to article space before that. Would that alleviate some of the concerns? Acer (talk) 10:23, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't think there's an issue with importing to your user space as an experiment. I do agree with a "quality" standard, though. Apart from the SEO concerns, there has also been ample discussion about the many very small outlines. Even with a minimal intro and a listing or two, such outlines are not considered a gain by all. While we don't delete the existing ones, it has always been discouraged to mass-create them. The same would be possible by importing from Wikipedia, for example. I do think creating hundreds of such small articles should be avoided in this case too, then. So I think focussing on the larger, higher quality articles is the best way to go. Nice to see that list, though :) JuliasTravels (talk) 11:29, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Great, we're in agreement. Let's see if others are on board. Thanks! Acer (talk) 14:11, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

I have a number of thoughts about this effort but due to past history would prefer to stay out of this discussion. The only comment I would make is that if this effort does move forward there cannot be any failure whatsoever in ensuring that the imports comply 100% with every line of the CC-SA license - if there is ANY question about whether correct attribution has been provided then the imports should be deleted as quickly as possible. -- Ryan 22:22, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

I followed the model used when the fork happened, attribution in the edit summary of each revision (Import from wikitravel.org/en). I also added a WT prefix to usernames to differentiate them from any possible duplicate here. This was also done back then. A copy of the license is linked to at the bottom of every page here already and any changes we make after importing will be recorded in the history. That I think covers all attribution requirements in the license. The ShareAlike requirements are fully covered also. Did I miss anything? Acer (talk) 22:58, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

"(WT-en) " is the preferred username prefix; that matches what we used for migration. I guess my main concern is that doing this could lead to WT doing the reverse. Sure, we know they already have the legal right to do it, but why encourage it or tip them off? Powers ^(talk) 23:18, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

The only reason it was sufficient to attribute imports to a "(WT-en)" user during the initial import is because there is a corresponding user page with proper attribution; if the new import is done without the corresponding user page (and its corresponding references) then the attribution is probably insufficient. -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:13, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

But we will be providing the name/ pseudonym of the authors and also say that they were active in another website. This actually goes beyond the requirements. I reread the license terms and I can't find any issues. I placed the sections relevant to attribution here and bolded the relevant parts. What part do you think we are failing to comply with? Acer (talk) 09:47, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Creative Commons has, in the past at least, used the terminology "you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor". I believe they've changed this terminology in the human-readable versions of their licenses, but I'm not 100% clear on the history. Anyway, when we migrated, out of an abundance of caution, we interpreted "the manner specified by the author" to include not just the username proper, but a link to the author's user page, as well as attribution in the page footer according to one's preferred display name (as opposed to username). Neither of these can happen without importation of the user pages and preferences as well. Powers ^(talk) 20:26, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Let my register my oppose vote on any copying from WT. We might get inspiration what to do articles on, for sure, but they should be bottom up written by us with our own words (and better yet first hand experience) rather than copying a single comma from "that other site". Not only is there the concern with the fork/duplication penalty and the possibility that the three paid admins and five spambot IPs that still remain on that site might get similar ideas in reverse, I just don't think we need to do that. Our new content since the fork/migration is good. Sure, there might be a few nuggets of gold in what has happened over there since almost everybody left, but the main thing to copy are imho the ideas of what to write an article on and not an article itself. Besides, it would be interesting to see a split how many of those articles are destinations, how many are travel topics and so on. Probably a lot of them would just be redundant or have been axed with good reason over here. Hobbitschuster (talk) 01:52, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

I did a quick sampling of the list and thought about this a little more. I also oppose the idea of importing these articles. There is little point to having article with no listings and a just walking into controversy on copyrights. Maybe use this list to identify needed articles but then just add the location name to Wikivoyage:Requested articles‎ and add a red link to the appropriate region. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:30, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

That's not happening. The plan is for nothing to be transferred to article space unless it's of sufficient quality and has been properly formatted. I'm just asking here to have these pages into userspace so I and others can work on them. See these pages here, they are much better than the average article we have.. (hit Random pages a few times) Tychy Cirali Sinj Pian Camuno Luçon Dania beach and they already include information for the listings, just to need to format using the template. There are mony others like this, but not that many, a few hundred maybe. Everything else will be discarded Acer (talk) 08:51, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm struggling to understand the utility of such an import. If I wanted to do import any WT (or other CC licensed content) then I would just create that article directly in WV or in my user space. What do you actually get out of importing all of these articles?

WT database / XML dumps

Swept in from the pub

(related to the above but didn't want it to get lost in the discussions)

This is the complete database dump / back up of WT in all 21 languages. This includes all pages in all namespaces. Download here. The file is compressed using 7zip it's 370 MB in size. XML's are plain text files that can be edited in Notepad, but the uncompressed English language XML reaches 65 GB, so handle with care :) Acer (talk) 14:11, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Apologies if this question is answered somewhere in the discussion above, but what version / date of WT is this dump? How was it created? Thanks. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:48, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

@Andrewssi2: They were done between September 3rd and 9th. If you download the file, each language is in a separate folder with the date the archiving was started. Most took a few hours, English a couple days. They were made using Wikiteam's tools, specifically the Dumpgenerator. It's a a script that interfaces with MediaWiki's API. Acer (talk) 22:29, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

(talk) 13:53, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

I am trying to do a comparison of the difference in Alexa rankings between all Hebrew travel sites, but unfortunately it seems that you must be a paying member to get that info. Does anyone here have access to Wikivoyage's Alexa Israel rank? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:15, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Wikivoyage is most popular in Germany and Italy because the German and Italian versions of WV were the first to fork. Because they forked much earlier than the other WV sites, they have had more time to diverge from WT and there was not that much duplicate material that was carried over into WV in the first place. This isn't the case with other languages and countries. I still notice that for the majority of articles on English Wikivoyage, WT outperforms WV in search. A challenging but realistic long term goal would be to get Wikivoyage's Alexa ranking in all major countries around the globe to a ranking similar to what it is in Italy. You can no longer see its ranking with Alexa's new style, but it was just in the top 3000 websites in Italy. That should be our goal worldwide. Gizza ^(roam) 00:45, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Just for some comparison: Lonely Planet's Alexa rank is 3,296 and Tripadvisor's is 240. That's obviously a long way to go for us, but hopefully they will help us in our aim to reach the next level of online travel guides. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 01:06, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

And I just noticed that WV surpassed WT in the USA ranking for the first time July 14, and has widened its lead since then. It still amazes me that Americans are still being led to WT by search engines more than to us when there is so little guide-building activity going on. Thanks to User: SelfieCity for keeping this updated. Ground Zero (talk) 01:27, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

I am surprised about the search engines. I just tried DuckDuckGo for "united states travel guide" and after a little while Wikitravel came up. I didn't see Wikivoyage.

I don't think the search engines are purposely trying to promote Wikitravel. I think they see duplicate content on Wikivoyage and assume there is a copyright violation. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 12:34, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

On the other hand, when I search DGG for "pleasanton travel guide," Pleasanton comes up almost immediately. That's because most of that article is different from Wikitravel. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 12:37, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

• Going to a separate but similar note: I have started the Rewriting Expedition so we can make Wikivoyage's content more original. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 19:22, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Does anyone here have access to Wikivoyage's Alexa Israel rank?

I am trying to do a comparison of the difference in Alexa rankings between all Hebrew travel sites, but unfortunately it seems that you must be a paying member to get that info. Does anyone here have access to Wikivoyage's Alexa Israel rank? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:14, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, not in my case. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 15:24, 6 July 2019 (UTC)