Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub

Shortcut: Pub The Travellers' pub is the place to ask questions when you're confused, lost, afraid, tired, annoyed, thoughtful, or helpful. Please check the FAQ and Help page before asking a question though, since that may save your time and others'. Please add new questions at the bottom of the page and sign your post by appending four tildes (~~~~) to it, but otherwise plunge forward! If you have a question or suggestion about a particular article, use the article's talk page to keep the discussion associated with that article. If you are having a problem that you think has to do with the MediaWiki software, please post that on Bugzilla instead. If you want to celebrate a significant contribution to Wikivoyage by yourself or others, hold a party at Celebrate a contribution. Issues related to more than one language version of Wikivoyage are discussed in the Wikivoyage Lounge on Meta. Please sweep the pub Keeping the pub clean is a group effort. If we have too many conversations on this page, it gets too noisy and hard to read. If you see an old conversation (i.e. a month dormant) that could be moved to a talk page, please do so, and add "{{swept}}" there, to note that it has been swept in from the pub. Place it on the talk page roughly in chronological order. A question regarding a destination article should be swept to the article talk page. A discussion regarding a policy or the subject of an expedition can be swept to the policy or expedition talk page. A simple question asked by a user can be swept to that user's talk page, but consider if the documentation needs updating to make it clearer for the next user with the same question. A pointer to a discussion going on elsewhere, such as a notice of a star nomination or a request to comment on another talk page, can be removed when it is old. Any discussion that occurred in the pub can be swept to where the main discussion took place. Any discussions that do not fall into any of these categories, and are not of any special importance for posterity, should be archived to Travellers' pub/Archives and removed from here. If you are not sure where to put a discussion, let it be—better to spend your efforts on those that you do know where to place.

How to link from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage?

Wikipedia's Paris article has a "Travel guide from Wikivoyage" link to Wikivoyage. But surprisingly, I can't find "voyage" nor "wv" in its source.

What's the magic? The linkage info is not on Wikidata either. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

It's in w:Template:Sister project links, used in that article as {{Sister project links|voy=Paris}}. --Peter ^Talk 07:06, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

The information cannot be stored on Wikidata right now; it is planned, but there are many other things that have to be done first. --Rschen7754 09:03, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I am still confused: which one is the preferred way? w:Template:Sister project links, w:Template:Wikivoyage or w:Template:Wikivoyage-inline? Danapit (talk) 06:32, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

w:Template:Wikivoyage is the preferred way. w:Template:Wikivoyage-inline is for times when the other template causes layout problems. w:Template:Sister project links links to the search pages on other projects. 86.41.185.241 12:04, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Yep, that's correct. At this stage, don't even worry about w:Template:Sister project links as other Wikipedians already would've taken care of any instance of there being too many individual sister project links. JamesA ^>talk 13:07, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Conversions to PDF

Am having difficulty converting some articles...after completion reported, clicking on "download file" results in modest pause, then display of raw HTML. Example article: "Honfleur". Creation of a "Book" not attempted...not relevant. Using W7 Pro (all updates) & latest version of Firefox. Suggestions? Thanks Hennejohn (talk) 18:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Honfleur worked fine for me just now. Can you give more information? LtPowers (talk) 18:59, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

As it just did for me. Seems to be spotty; occurred with a few other articles, then they worked. Thanks for the "help". Hennejohn (talk) 23:48, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Just worked for me...Firefox 21.0, Windows 7. AHeneen (talk) 00:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage Logo

Hi!

I was just messing around a bit and thought I'd have a go at making a Wikivoyage logo. I've created a new symbol (right) and wordmark. You can see the full selection, with (rather pretentious!) explanation here. There's also a mock-up of the site's portal using the logo here. Any comments or suggestions would be very welcome! --Nick ^talk 22:29, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

There's a little bit of discussion about this at User talk:LtPowers#Logo. I'll happily say I'm a big fan of this! It suggests a V for Voyage, flight, a compass, and even a bit of ocean waves, while being very simple and sleek. --Peter ^Talk 22:32, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I like it, though I think the color is just a shade or two bright. But please start a thread at the meta lounge. Texugo (talk) 23:08, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I've created a thread on Meta for this here. Please comment there! Thanks! :) --Nick ^talk 23:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Cool. Since you've got the files and fonts all ready you might want to make mockups for the folks from Wikiviajes to evaluate (es: renamed itself). Texugo (talk) 23:19, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I've darkened all of the logos slightly and have put 2 Wikiviajes versions up on the page. :) --Nick ^talk 23:41, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Great. I've posted about it in the pub on pt: and will do so for es: as well. You might just post about it in English on the other versions to give them a heads up. Texugo (talk) 23:44, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much! I will do! --Nick ^talk 23:48, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Posted on es:. Texugo (talk) 23:53, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Should I tell the others that there is a problem with the current logo? --Nick ^talk 23:59, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

What kind of problem is there with the current logo that requires it to be changed, and what makes it a priority over other issues. I have just seen Pullman Hotels decide to change their logo as a possible distraction of themselves and investors from their true problems, and am perhaps quite wary. PrinceGloria (talk) 00:02, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Something's come up and a logo change is now necessary; keeping the current iteration of our logo is not an option. Either way, the "contest" to decide our logo was poorly run and many Wikivoyagers feel the result was not fair, due to a huge proportion of Wikipedians voting even though they never even bothered to contribute here. Just as a note to all, further comments should be posted at the Meta lounge which is where a decision will ultimately be made. JamesA ^>talk 10:20, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah -- like what I said in some of the previous different-related discussions, I think we should keep creating logos and other things until they are perfectly nice. curtaintoad | chat me! 10:37, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

The official announcement has been made. Texugo (talk) 16:46, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I was just coming over to announce this. If there's a better place than this to get the word out to the Wikivoyage community, please let me know. I want to be sure that as many people as possible can take part in refining the process and also selecting a new logo. --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 16:52, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I imagine we'll be wanting to set up a sitenotice at some point. Texugo (talk) 16:58, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

You can either have sitenotices on all Wikivoyage editions, or a m:CentralNotice. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Do you think it's good to do that during the discussion of the process, or to do it when the process begins officially, around June 10th? :) --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

If you want to do a CentralNotice, you have to add it in advance to m:CentralNotice/Calendar. Not sure if it should be before the contest or just during it. Jamesofur is more experienced with CentralNotice, you can ask him about this if you want to. Sitenotice is an okay solution as well, but it needs to go on every Wikivoyage. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:20, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

What about the message delivery system to add a statement in the Travellers' Pub equivalent of every Wikivoyage version? That seems enough until the contest is ready. AHeneen (talk) 19:00, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea. Thanks. I'll get that going now and talk to James Alexander about sitenotice when the contest (by whatever name, in whatever form) gets going. :) --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I've changed the wordmark colour to blue - any thoughts? :) --Nick ^talk 17:48, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I think that blue clashes a bit with the logo's blue, which is purer and has less green. But really, we should discuss the logo in a more central location. LtPowers (talk) 18:57, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

While some Wikivoyagers don't like the contest proposal, I think I would be better to wait until the contest to begin discussions like this in earnest. The reason is that the contest allows us to get a large number of proposals to comment on and then concern ourselves with aspects like color shade. The problem with a lot of discussion before the contest is that a lot of Wikivoyagers will get predisposed to the couple of designs that have been worked out and less open to other, new proposals. If we spend the next two weeks fine-tuning one or two designs, it will be harder to be open to a new design where the color or edges aren't quite right and need spruced up. While there are concerns about the contest being over-run by non-Wikivoyagers, I'd rather wait and see the variety of designs proposed before working to fine-tune a design...there are many people over at Commons who could produce a great logo design, despite their outsider status. There are better things to do over the next couple of weeks than work too hard on a couple designs. AHeneen (talk) 19:00, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

New logo selection procedure

Please everyone take a look over meta:Logo contest procedure and the corresponding talk page. I'm personally a little concerned that we'll again have pretty minimal input over the selection of our own logo... :( --Peter ^Talk 17:16, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi. We're actually talking about this in the section above. Your input there would be very welcome. :) --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Decision open only to Wikivoyagers

Having had a good discussion with Maggie, it looks like the WMF would be prepared to let us run this selection process with a vote or consensus process open only to Wikivoyage editors after the submission and discussion stages. If this is something that we would want, we need to demonstrate that there is a clear consensus on this issue by posting here. Whatever your opinion is, your input would be very welcome. I would hope that, if this particular system were implemented, it would go some way to addressing the concerns of Peter (above) and others, whilst keeping the whole thing open and accountable. --Nick ^talk 10:18, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Who counts as a Wikivoyager? PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:37, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi? PiRSquared17 (talk) 05:27, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

We don't know yet. Most likely, anyone who's made any non-trivial contributions to any language version of Wikivoyage would be eligible. LtPowers (talk) 13:13, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

A reasonable criterion, so long as we can decide what is non-trivial... I would suggest anyone who was registered before the news of the new logo requirement was announced, and anyone who has made at least N mainspace edits if they register after the announcement, where N is a number suggesting that they take WV seriously, though I would prefer to see some sort of non-trivial content contribution from anyone who wants to be part of the process. Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 17:19, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

I do not think any attempt to exclude people is a good idea. Of course some things that have the effect of restrictions are natural and inevitable — most people with no interest in WV will exclude themselves, anyone who has been on the net a while can recognise trolls and knows not to feed them, and most people will give more weight to opinions from regular contributors than from random visitors or unidentified IP addresses. Beyond that, we should not go. There may well be people outside the "usual suspects" list with useful contributions to make. Examples that occur to me are people with expertise in relevant areas of graphics or law, or people with some sort of global interest in WMF sites that includes WV; no doubt there are more that I have not thought of. Pashley (talk) 17:48, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Pashley, you don't think that people who can actually demonstrate they participate on Wikivoyage should have more of a say in the logo we see every day? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:57, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

The last logo contest has already proven that if we don't limit it to people involved with WV, we get completely overrun with Wikimedians, who will be happy to overwhelm any consensus among Wikivoyagers, make the decision for us, and move on and forget about WV. Happened before, and will happen again if we don't guarantee more weight for the people who actually care about and contribute to this place. Texugo (talk) 22:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree that regular contributors should have more influence than others, but I'm suspicious of setting up policies and procedures to ensure that. For one thing, I think it is inevitable anyway. More important, I have spent enough time at Citizendium (main page critical appraisal) to be deeply suspicious of rule-making and bureaucracy as methods for improving a wiki. Pashley (talk) 22:28, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage logo issues; logo selection procedure

Hello, all.

Earlier today, I posted an announcement by the Wikimedia Foundation's legal department on Meta (m:Wikivoyage/Logo_announcement) about the Wikivoyage logo - unfortunately, for legal reasons, we're going to have to choose a new one.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, we will need to select a new Wikivoyage logo, but first I'm hoping to get feedback and assistance in making the best process for that possible. We had been considering ways to optimize logo selection by the community, with the idea that we would have plenty of time to talk about the process before needing it. Unfortunately, we now need something quite quickly. Accordingly, I'd be really grateful for feedback on the process, which has been posted here: m:Logo contest procedure. You can read a little more about it here: m:talk:Logo contest procedure. I hope you will share your questions, comments and suggestions there.

I'm truly sorry for the complication with the existing logo and hope that you will help with creating and selecting a new one, as well as helping to refine the process itself. --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Redirecting Mediawiki software help pages

Following up from a discussion started at Wikivoyage talk:Recent changes help#Do we need this page?, almost all of the pages listed on Wikivoyage:Software features are about Mediawiki software features and are not specific to Wikivoyage. Having local descriptions of Mediawiki functionality might have made sense when we weren't running the latest version, but now that we are guaranteed to be on the latest versions these pages are just out-of-date and incomplete versions of Mediawiki documentation. Given our poor track record of keeping documentation pages up-to-date, and since we have plenty of examples of referring to www.mediawiki.org for software documentation (example: Wikivoyage:Using MediaWiki templates refers to mw:Help:Templates for documentation on template syntax), I would propose turning the following into soft redirects:

• Wikivoyage:User preferences help → mw:Help:Preferences
• Wikivoyage:Watchlist help → mw:Help:Watchlist
• Wikivoyage:Page history help → there is no corresponding page on mediawiki.org, although there is on meta: meta:Help:Page history
• Wikivoyage:Recent changes help → mw:Help:Tracking changes
• Wikivoyage:User page help - this is actually about how user pages are used on Wikivoyage and can be kept local
• Wikivoyage:Search help → mw:Help:Searching
• Wikivoyage:Special pages help → mw:Help:Special pages
• Wikivoyage:Namespaces → mw:Help:Namespaces
• Wikivoyage:Single sign-on help → mw:Help:Logging in (note that the current page is hopelessly out of date)

Comments, concerns? -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:28, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Seems like a good idea to me. --Rschen7754 01:22, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Pages redirected. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:37, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Trademark discussion

Hi, apologies for posting this in English, but I wanted to alert your community to a discussion on Meta about potential changes to the Wikimedia Trademark Policy. Please translate this statement if you can. We hope that you will all participate in the discussion; we also welcome translations of the legal team’s statement into as many languages as possible and encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please see the Trademark practices discussion (on Meta-Wiki) for more information. Thank you! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk)

Docents?

After reading the article on this subject and offering myself as one for Oakland - I have to ask, after looking through the 101 other articles that have the hasDocent tag - how the heck does the end-user even tell that a page has a docent in the first place? If there's some link on the page or TOC or the new banner, I am sure not seeing it. L. Challenger (talk) 06:31, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there is. On pages with a docent, it creates a new section in the left sidebar called "Destination Docents", just under the toolbox section. Texugo (talk) 11:27, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

I see it now - oops! L. Challenger (talk) 13:57, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Site tour

Sparked by the idea to make the Wikivoyage:Tourist Office more findable, I thought it might be nice to create a site tour, linked from the site notice, e.g., Take a tour of Wikivoyage! It would be a graphically friendly presentation of what we do, showing off some of our best work (article features, star articles, collaboration pages like the pub, new features either just implemented or in development like Wikivoyage:Books, the Tourist Office, dynamic maps, etc.), as well as ways to help the site, like a video tutorial on how to add/edit a listing, perhaps. --Peter ^Talk 20:15, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

A great idea! I'd been thinking of creating a site map for WV that was laid out like a real plan (perhaps of an airport?). Maybe something like that could be found at Wikivoyage:Site tour and we could use the imagemap technique (as seen on the Main Page) to send people to the tour's various subsections?

I think some sort of video tutorial would also be a great addition, though things like that can be a little tricky. We'd have to decide if we wanted an in-vision presenter or just a voiceover as well as who we'd want to fulfil either of these roles. Definitely something to work towards though! I'd been mulling over the possibility of a Welcome video for some time now, so I have a few ideas that we could perhaps use.

The only slight difficulty might be that we don't presently have a usable logo, so some finer points of branding and colour selection might be a little hard, but shouldn't really be a barrier.

--Nick ^talk 20:33, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a idea worth pursuing. One of the let-downs of all our new initiatives and features is that people don't know they exist! A tour would allay that problem and make it clear that we're much more forward-thinking than that other travel site! Maybe it would be worth taking a look at mw:Extension:GuidedTour. That seems to be what we're aiming for, allowing users to cross to multiple pages with popups and balloons providing guidance. We could create an "Introduction" tour that goes through all the main features and works of our site, then specialised tours on particular topics; eg, "Creating printable books" or "Asking a question at the Tourist Office". We'd need word from some developers though whether that extension is ready for implementation, because it doesn't seem to have been updated since last year and is still in beta. James A ▪ talk 02:46, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I'm the lead developer of GuidedTour. The extension is already installed on major wikis, including Commons, several Wikipedias (including English), and MediaWiki.org. I apologize for the outdated infobox at mw:Extension:GuidedTour, which is fixed now. The extension is actively developed, and was last updated Friday. It has already been used for significant projects, such as the Editor Engagement Experiments team's efforts to aid new editors. However, development is still moving, including new features and refactoring. If Wikivoyage chooses to install it, I am willing to help with implementing a tour. If consensus is reached, you can file a Bugzilla bug requesting it be installed. Superm401 - Talk 03:33, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Your help implementing it would be awesome. Putting consensus and Bugzilla aside for a moment, how would we best help you in doing so (i.e., how should we go about mocking up what the tour should include/should look like). Also, could you provide a link or two to existing guided tours for inspiration? --Peter ^Talk 04:30, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, a breakdown of the planned steps is a good start. Figure out which steps (you can have more than one per page) should show on each page, and how you get from page to page. There are a few existing tours you can look at. A simple demonstration is test (code). To see the GettingStarted tours (used to help new editors get started), go to Special:GettingStarted, and click one of the rectangular buttons. You will see a one-step tour (code). When that's closed, you can click the help button to see additional steps (code). Those all happen to be extension tours. Wikivoyage will probably use on-wiki tours, which have the same features but don't have built-in internationalization. An example of an on-wiki tour is The Wikipedia Adventure (code). Superm401 - Talk 21:38, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Those examples you provided look really great! I think it would be worth brainstorming a list of pages/features we would like to introduce in a tour, as well as confirming what the tour's goal would be. If we're going to have a few tours for different purposes, maybe it'd be good to have a page to organise them on. Possibly a Wikivoyage:Tour Agency to keep in line with our place-based system of naming. And we could discuss all the ideas surrounding tours on the talk page, instead of them drowning out here. James A ▪ talk 07:56, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Discussions seem to have slowed, so I thought it best if we created the page and started to get some ideas going. if it's decided it's not the best solution/name, we can change it later. For now, let's discuss future "tours" at Wikivoyage talk:Tour Agency. James A ▪ talk 06:11, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

It would nice to be get some more ideas on board at Wikivoyage talk:Tour Agency - any thoughts? --Nick ^talk 22:17, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:30, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Help with interwiki map

Can anyone help me adjust the interwiki map on pt:? We don't know how to do it. When we put the wikipedia interwiki [[wikipedia:Pagename]] at the bottom of articles to create the sidebar links, it automatically goes to English wikipedia unless we put "pt:" before the page name every time. I'd like to set it to go to the corresponding WP:pt: page every time without having to specify the language every time. Does anyone know how to do that? Any help would be greatly appreciated... Texugo (talk) 02:13, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

I assume this needs to be a Bugzilla request, but a post at meta:Wikivoyage/Lounge will probably get a definite answer. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:03, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

We checked it in the very beginning. The interwiki map is fixed for all WMF projects. We are not allowed to change it. Therefore, you have to replace all instances of [[wikipedia: with [[wikipedia:pt --Alexander (talk) 07:53, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Script to find all Wikivoyage articles which are not linked from their respective Wikipedia article

I am thinking of writing a script to find all Wikivoyage articles which are not linked from their respective Wikipedia article. Below is how I am planning to do:

1. Out of a Wikivoyage dump, filter all [[WikiPedia:XXX]] and [[Wikipedia:XXX]] strings.
2. For each XXX, check whether http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXX contains the string "Wikivoyage" or "Sister project links|voy".

The result will probably contain a few false positive, but it is not a worry as this is a one-time execution.

Please let me know if I misunderstood something, or if this has already been done somewhere, thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:17, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Could the results be sorted by status (star, guide, usable, outline)? --Peter ^Talk 05:32, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

This (and more) is actually being done now at Wikipedia: w:Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Interwikilinks_to_Wikivoyage w:Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 22. I have asked there if this could be done after being informed above that it is highly unlikely and almost impossible, beyond any imagination, it ever could. I wanted to wait with the announcement once the bot is in full swing.

I have full confidence that Hazard-SJ is doing a mightily fine job here, so I guess if you have bot-making skills Nick, how about some other bot ideas:

1. A bot making a nice table of articles within a category, with a status for each and whether it includes a banner or a warning notice of some sort
2. A simpler bot, making a list of articles in the category that have a unique banner, a default banner, and do not have a banner, also highlighting the ones whose banner is also used someplace else
3. An even simpler bot only highlighting the articles whose banner is also used someplace else, but only if it is not one of the default banners.

How about those?

Kindest regards, PrinceGloria (talk) 07:09, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

PS. Actually, I've got a better idea! It seems that many Wikivoyage articles are NOT linked to their respective Wikipedia articles, even if the connection is obvious. Perhaps a bot could run a search for such pages by category to help us link those before HazardSJ's bot is in full swing?

PrinceGloria, thanks for pointing me to Hazard-Bot 22, you just saved me hours (days?) of duplicated work! I will give the "better idea" a try ;-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:17, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Social Media Policy

Now that we have both Facebook and Twitter accounts up and running is it worth re-evaluating and eventually implementing this policy? There are a few points that perhaps need tweaking, but it's probably worth having something written down on the subject. --Nick ^talk 20:35, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Spambots

It would be greatly appreciated if spambots were reported at m:SRG so that the accounts could be locked globally and so that a CU could be done to block the underlying IP addresses - I think this would help cut down on the number of spambots that keep hitting en.wikivoyage. --Rschen7754 22:53, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Could you update Wikivoyage:How to handle unwanted edits#WikiSpam with this info so it is documented? Most of us who are new to Wikimedia are relatively unaware of these sorts of processes, so it would be great to get them incorporated into our existing policies. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:12, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Done, though it was changed to spambots. --Rschen7754 23:36, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Is there any way that this reporting could be automated, such that any time a user is blocked as a spambot, a report is automatically generated to that place? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:34, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately I think that the automated tool that did this is down, and it only worked if the account was blocked on two wikis or more. Stewards can be flagged down on IRC as well, or you could save the account names until the end of the day and make one big post then. --Rschen7754 23:36, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Rschen. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Articles on unimportant or minor locations vs. subregions

I often encounter this issue and have been thinking about it recently - some regions have almost-empty or empty articles created for cities, towns, municipalities and villages that are relatively unimportant, minor and have very little of tourist interest. Not only are they unlikely to ever be covered by anybody, but even if covered well, they would make for short articles (as those places are admittedly lousy tourist destinations).

The supposed "palace" in the "park" of Nowy Dwór Królewski

One example is Kujawsko-Pomorskie, which has many minor towns and cities, and there were articles created for a relatively random subgroup of those, e.g. for Nowy Dwór Królewski which is a village so small that there isn't even an ATM there and the only thing of interest are the almost inaccessible ruins of a long-forgotten "palace". This may be a secret find to somebody, but it is actually quite misleading to highlight this place as a destination, as it is hard to reach and will be a disappointment to most.

Some other articles were created for places that are legitimate, if minor destinations. Most have only a few accommodation opportunities, no public transportation and the general information relating to "get in", "understand" and such is largely the same for many of the neigbouring places. There are 52 cities and towns in the region, and each has its share of historic buildings and, at least minor, attractions.

My idea would be to keep the articles for the major destionations (by size or touristic interest) and have the latter combined into a few articles for subregions of the voivodship (province). Going by administrative divisions would be impractical, as the next level is quite small and would warrant no less than 23 articles. Therefore, I thought of going by the historic / cultural regions, curbing the number of articles to a maximum of six regions, six cities and two special destinations. Then if one day we would have enough content to warrant separate articles for some destinations, they could easily be carved out.

I am unsure if this does not violate some important Wikivoyage policies, as it would mean submitting a few articles for deletion, merging others and having the lowest-level articles in the breadcrumb trail covering an area larger than a city in some cases. Do let me know if I should heed some warning or plunge forward. Thanks a lot in advance, PrinceGloria (talk) 08:54, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Each article should be proposed for merge and redirect. This gives others a chance to comment. After a consensus has been reached, or after a week or two if nobody bothers to comment you can reasonably assume no objections then you go ahead with the merge and redirect. You should explain on the talk page why you think the article does not justify its own article, to save time, as someone will ask. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:50, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

PrinceGloria, you may have stumbled upon what I think could be one of the great strengths of wikivoyage, the ability to find and expand upon smaller areas that simply are overlooked in other travel guidebooks and commercial websites. Some of the most interesting gems that I have discovered were in small towns in areas that I thought I knew well but discovered a wealth of info while developing articles and I would encourage you to dig deeper if you have the patience. Home on the Kitsap Peninsula for example is a small sleepy town with not much to offer tourists but upon further investigation I dug up a fascinating history of Anarchy and assassination. Olalla isn't much more than a gas station, but also turned up an interesting history and a plethora of parks and beaches that I didn't know about. My list of other fascinating areas I've uncovered is long, including Fox Island, Lakebay, Oysterville etc that time and the internet have simply forgotten. As a traveler I love the off the beaten path towns and out of the way destinations and I don't think that anywhere classifies as 'unimportant', I hope you can find enough info to develop some of these articles further. --Lumpytrout (talk) 13:20, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage never had any consistent policy regarding small and relatively unimportant destinations. Many people think that every tiny place merits its own article, although in reality we get nothing but hundreds of useless stubs. Some less-known places are indeed hidden gems, but most of them are simply boring. Anyway, the lack of strict policy and the huge difference in our opinions make vfd requests of this type rather hopeless. My discreet suggestion is that you describe minor destinations of Kujawsko-Pomorskie in its regional article and see what happens. Once you put the information, it may be easier to convince people for replacing stub articles with redirects. And of course, if you want to discuss the layout of a specific region, use the relevant talk page. --Alexander (talk) 15:10, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

There should not be any "vfd requests of this type" since policy is to redirect real places rather than deleting them. There's a judgement call involved, so of course we'll sometimes disagree and sometimes get it wrong, but the choices are clear. If a reasonable article on the small place is possible and someone here cares enough and knows enough to write one, then keep the article and link to it elsewhere. If not, turn it into a redirect. Pashley (talk) 15:54, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to weigh in and explain it to me, guys! It seems the right thing to do is for the particular village that is my pet peeve to be redirected (without merging, as there is little to merge), and then cover the area of KujPom not covered by larger city articles by several sub-regional articles, with mentions of interesting localities in all of them, and see how it pans out. Perhaps one day enthusiastic editors will turn many of them into full-fledged guides to places we never heard about or thought nobody will ever go to... PrinceGloria (talk) 07:39, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

That sounds about right, as long as there is some mention of the redirected place at the article you redirect to otherwise people will think the redirect is an error.

If you decide to just plunge in and do it without previous discussion, I suggest a short explanation so the next person along knows what you have done and why. Saves explaining later. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:27, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Dynamic maps working inside wiki!

The tech people thought that the Widget extension would take too long to review, and suggested a different method: inserting iframes using Javascript. I've got it working! Could someone test the code by copying User:Torty3/common.js into their common.js? Then check how it looks like in Singapore/Chinatown and Wheaton. Those without the code will see a tiny empty square, but in future that empty square could be a screenshot of the map which will be replaced by the real thing if one has the proper Javascript. This would give a static map to those who may be on a crappy computer somewhere and full mapping to others. -- torty3 (talk) 10:15, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! Can one make the map itself clickable instead of putting the link into the caption? --Alexander (talk) 10:27, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

That's really fantastic! This is definitely something worth rolling out site-wide if we can! --Nick ^talk 10:40, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Wow, this is fantastic! A big well done to all involved. A few more niggles to work out and then I think we're set for a wider test. Alexander, I'm not sure that would be possible, as the embedded map is draggable and you can click on individual listings, rather than clicking to expand. James A ▪ talk 10:41, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Woo-hoo! It looks perfect, and simple! I even tried replacing the map at Tokyo/Roppongi, and it looks approximately 17.3 times better than what we had before. What we still need to work out then is what changes the listing template will need, i.e. how to keep the listings numbered. It would be great if we would get them to automatically number themselves in ascending order as they appear in the article, possibly starting over with "1" for each section. I don't think manually inserting numbers is a good option at all, and I really want to avoid having the numbers in the article appear in random order. Texugo (talk) 14:07, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

What tiny empty square is that? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 15:09, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

I think the code was modified so that a static, "Wikivoyage-style" map will appear when a user's JS is disabled or there is some kind of other error. So now no one should see a tiny empty square! James A ▪ talk 02:19, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

The statistics of the WV-ev server counts only 1 per 1.000 visitors without Javascript. For this a symbol image (linked to the dynamic map) would be enough, I think. -- Mey2008 (talk) 05:17, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Auto-numbered listings and iframe map

Lots of exclamation marks here! There's still a tiny empty square in Wheaton, though a symbol image would work great too. Ok, for auto-numbering, there's a really elegant solution using CSS. If an admin is happy with that, it would be best to copy that quick because otherwise there's an extra space before listings with coordinates (couldn't find another way). -- torty3 (talk) 09:56, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Looks good. However, I think the auto-numbering should continue across headers, rather than restarting for each section. It will assist those printing in black and white or those with colour vision difficulties. I haven't copied the code across yet, because some temporary, minor display issues on two pages isn't much of a problem while we're discussing. James A ▪ talk 12:18, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

For continuous auto-numbering by article I already have a new PoiMap2 version [1]. -- Mey2008 (talk) 13:09, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

I actually think continuous numbering across section headers would make things harder for people with color blindness in a way, since it would be easier to confuse numbered icons with preceding numbered icons. Shouldn't different shaped icons take care of James' concern? --Peter ^Talk 18:21, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Not quite sure what you mean. Wouldn't it be easier to confuse numbered icons with previous ones if they were the same numbers, rather than if they were different? Shapes are a possibility, but I'd like to see what it looks like. Will the shapes also be present on the actual article, as well as the map? If not, there would be inconsistency. I suspect having lots of different shapes may look a little odd and disorganised. Lonely Planet, Frommers and other guidebook writers have used B&W, continuously numbered, non-shape listings for years, and no one seems to complain about that. James A ▪ talk 12:08, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, I do complain (quietly). Numbers above 100 are difficult to comprehend, and even with two-digit numbers LP maps are not very easy to use (this is partly because they mix POIs shown on different maps). Personally, I prefer to use separate numbering for each section. But it is a matter of taste, and perhaps a general decision: do we want to be similar to printed travel guides, or rather different from them? --Alexander (talk) 13:29, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

I am with Atsilirn on this, and I would much prefer to limit the number of features in each section displayed on the map to 10. Anything more and we are better off splitting into districts. With four major sections with POIs featured on the map, it is already almost 40 POIs to track.

As concerns clearly linking the shapes on the map with particular sections in the article, a subsection banner with an icon included would do the work brilliantly, as we discussed at Wikivoyage talk:Banner expedition. Perhaps a workaround could be found to make those available despite MediaWiki not supporting sectional headings and TOCs. PrinceGloria (talk) 14:38, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

10 listings per section is ridiculously small for most of our travel guides. Our district articles aren't even that restrictive. Look at San Francisco/Civic Center-Tenderloin, for instance. LtPowers (talk) 14:44, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, 10 POI's/section is way too small. The idea is to have a reasonable number of districts according to local history and geography, not to the POI density on the map. Our current situation is such that big cities described in a single article, or districts of big cities will easily run above 100 POI's. Therefore, we either accept three-digit numbers (requires some designer work on the map symbols!) or keep individual numbering in each section. --Alexander (talk) 14:54, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

That only adds to the argument of keeping individual numbering per each section. PrinceGloria (talk) 15:03, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Wonderful! Of course it is not ready yet, but when it is ready, is deploying this JavaScript for all users something that can be easily done? I guess it will require some "paperwork" as well, right? A good thing is that JavaScript can recognize the browser, and for instance show something different for mobile browsers. I guess JavaScript could do the numbering, too. If JavaScript and maps.wikivoyage-ev.org use the same numbering convention, there is nothing really difficult I guess. Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:24, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Isn't deploying it for all users a simple matter of plopping it into Mediawiki:Common.js? Texugo (talk) 14:45, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

S'ok, should have really made it clearer that what I did affected more than two articles. Was trying to sandbox it but also didn't realise that the change was that disruptive (empty pink boxes). The hard part is testing it in tandem, the CSS automatically finds and numbers the template, so they both have to be done together. So that's combined deployment into Mediawiki:Common.js, Mediawiki:Common.css and Template:Listing.

I would lean towards non-continuous numbering, though I'm fine with whatever everybody agrees upon. -- torty3 (talk) 01:01, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

I think different icon shapes on the map should allay any concern about usability. I personally think that the fewer double-digit icons we have to use, the less noisy and more easy-to-use the map will be, plus there is just something random about continuing the number from wherever a previous section left off. I fail to see how that could be better. Texugo (talk) 01:30, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Continuous and non-continuous both have advantages, anyone feel free to decide. I implemented the new kind of map on Tokyo/Roppongi, below the static+link map (which I let for users who haven't modified their Common.js). Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:27, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Hey this is crazy and this is crazy but this is crazy so this is crazy - how do I access and modify my commons.js? I want to see Nicholas's map :( PrinceGloria (talk) 07:03, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

If you go to 'Preferences' and then click the 'Appearance' tab, the 'Custom JavaScript' link should take you to a page where you can just copy the code in at the bottom. Hope this helps! --Nick ^talk 09:48, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

It sure did! Works and looks brilliantly, thank you Nicholas and everybody involved! PrinceGloria (talk) 15:35, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Offline/printed guides and use on mobile devices

The dynamic maps look nice and will certainly be a great/useful addition to Wikivoyage. However, dynamic maps will only (easily) be useful when connected to the internet. Here are the goals of Wikivoyage (numbers added for ease of discussion) from Wikivoyage:Goals and non-goals:

1. Online use by travellers on the road – for example, travellers huddled in a late-night internet café in some dark jungle, who need up-to-date information on lodging, transportation, food, nightlife, and other necessities.
2. Offline use by travellers on the road – for example, travellers sitting in a train with a subset of Wikivoyage on their mobile device.
3. Online use by travellers still planning – for intending travellers who want to review destinations, plan itineraries, make reservations, and get excited about their trip.
4. Individual article print-outs – for people who want to print, say, a list of museums or karaoke bars and put it in their back pocket for when they need it.
5. Ad-hoc travel guides – for people who want a small fit-to-purpose travel books that match a particular itinerary.
6. Inclusion in other travel publications – for travel-guide publishers and advisers who want up-to-date information.

As far as I can tell, dynamic maps do not meet goals 2, 4, & 5 and don't work with goal 6 in print and some web reuse (only ok for reuse online and where the editor has the ability/knowledge to add the code to create a dynamic map). This isn't an attempt to derail the addition of dynamic maps, but rather to think through all implications before rolling out on more articles. The following situations need to be addressed in the code before being rolled out:

• Compatibility with mobile devices (Android, iOS, Windows phone...any other systems worth catering to?) and the mobile version of Wikivoyage. Will the presence of a dynamic map slow down the time it takes for a page to load on a mobile phone data network and/or increase the download size of the webpage on a mobile device significantly. Depending on mobile network and whether at home, roaming abroad, or using a local pre-paid SIM abroad, there can be significant charges for data traffic...if a dynamic map changes a page size from 50KB to 1MB, that can make a big difference in terms of cost and download time (like on a 2G network).
• Download time and ease of use on slower connections. How slow of a network is reasonable enough to cater to? 56kb/s? 100kb/s? 500kb/s? (Not just on a computer, but on a mobile phone network as mentioned above).
• Use in print and offline, including the under-used & under-developed books extension.

With regards to the last situation, could a program be written that would allow a user to define 4 point (coordinates) that would serve as the corners of a map which would be downloaded at an appropriate scale and saved as a PDF file or .png/.jpg image (offline use on electronic devices) or printed at a reasonably legible scale? This would take a lot of work, but it's at least a reasonable suggestion...any solution will probably require a lot of effort to develop. Existing maps could be displayed on the mobile Wikivoyage and when printing or using the books extension as an interim fix, but that won't work if dynamic maps are added to a large number of article where there is no existing map. AHeneen (talk) 03:21, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Mobile on-line use: The maps should not embedded in the articles in the mobile version. They can be loaded on demand via a link. The load volume is about 300 kB per view on a 7-inch device. A static map of the same size is about 1000 kB - 3500 kB because you always have to load the complete file. - The mobile application "PoiMap2" was successfully tested on many current mobile devices.

Mobile off-line use and printing: With a simple PDF printer driver, you can save the article as a PDF file [2] . Map sections in A4 format are also possible [3] .

Mobile maps not want to imitate hand-drawn maps. They have advantages and disadvantages. Mobile maps are much better than no maps for most articles now. Extensions are later also possible. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 05:55, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

I have geographic data for every classified road in the UK and Ireland (examples here here here) and I'm working on some code (for another project) that will take a lat, lon, zoom and polyline trace file and return a static image centred on OpenStreetMap with the lat / lon at the zoom provided and draw the trace on top. The idea being a bot can then scrape relevant geodata and produce static images that would then be available for an app to cache online. Preliminary discussions and a bit of code [here]. Ritchie333 (talk) 08:25, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Interesting project and ideas Ritchie333. That would definitely make static maps much easier. Care to join in at Wikivoyage:Dynamic maps Expedition and possibly post updates there? Though I'll keep tabs on it myself. -- torty3 (talk) 11:57, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Ritchie333, you seem to be able to save us all! Batch-generating static maps would solve all problems :-) Each article would contain the static map, and JavaScript would load the dynamic one. That way, the article is still totally usable by mobile users, people who turned JavaScript off can still, people who printed the article, people who save the article as HTML+images. Let's get started! Is there a server somewhere that can generate a static map from the dynamic map linked in the article Tokyo/Roppongi, for instance? Depending on the load of the server, we could re-generate static maps at every edit of the corresponding article, or once a week, or on demand. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:53, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I have quickly knocked something up for your Roppongi example at www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/static.php?lat=35.66262&lon=139.73060&zoom=16. That should have put the map on lat 35.66262 lon 139.73060 zoom 16. There's no javascript, it's vanilla html (provided your browser can handle absolutely positioned divs, which most can), and will always be up to date with respect to OpenStreetMap. Currently, you can only get a 384x384 map - to get anything larger requires "spidering" the tiles out to more than the 2x2 matrix I have currently, but hopefully that's not rocket science. However, on a mobile device, 384 square is probably an acceptable maximum, I would have thought, and it keeps OSM usage down to a minimum. Ritchie333 (talk) 11:18, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Nice! But it is 4 different images, right? So we will need a script that combines the 4 images into a single one. ImageMagick (available in PHP) is probably able to do this. In fact, the PHP script should be able to deliver just the image (in PNG format), not an HTML page. The "Data CC-By-SA by OpenStreetMap" mention could be added via a template, so no need to worry about it, I think. Also, any chance you can get the POI (Point Of Interest) marks in the image as well? Mey2008's source code would be very helpful to implement this. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:36, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Here is a Leaflet extension whose purpose is to generate a PNG image of a given map: https://github.com/tegansnyder/Leaflet-Save-Map-to-PNG Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:55, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi I created page about ShareMap tool (I am on its developers) that has features mentioned above. Please visit Wikivoyage:ShareMap an leave you feedback or map request for article. Thanks --Jkan997 (talk) 00:05, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Re-using Wikivoyage guides

This page stating that if somebody wants to re-use the Wikivoyage guides, Xe will need to "attribute the authors of the content (Not just Wikivoyage)" but how can that person find who the author(s) are when there's no credit and author information available at the footer of articles. --Saqib (talk) 19:19, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Edit history. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:44, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

So that means one will have to attribute all the authors who were involved in the editing of that particular article since the article created? --Saqib (talk) 19:55, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

In importing pages from Wikitravel servers during the fork, we inserted the following text at the bottom of all imported articles:

"More details and the full list of contributors can be found on the associated history page. (Wikitravel contributors are marked by the prefix WT-en.)"

...with the text "history page" linking to the edit history of the page in question. In any event, I suppose that implies that directing readers to the URL of the edit history of the pages you're reusing would be sufficient per copyleft.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:36, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Of course, if that's not true, I'd love someone else to chime in. I think it is, though. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:38, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

That has long been the assumption on Wikipedia. Linking to the automatically-generated history page is usually considered sufficient attribution. LtPowers (talk) 01:45, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Back in the day, our project interpreted the attribution requirement to be more onerous than WMF projects have, and requested that re-users print the names of all contributors. To aid, we listed these names through &action=credits and at the bottom of every article. I think it's fair to say (especially after moving to CC-by-SA-3.0) that we have adopted the position of Wikipedia and other projects that a pointer to the attribution history here is sufficient. I'll update the policy page to reflect this more clearly. --Peter ^Talk 03:25, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

So why the quick reverts?

I attempted to create a pagebanner for White Sands National Monument, but it was reverted almost immediately. The aspect ratio of the photo used was roughly correct, but it wasn't the exact recommended size. Since the images get scaled automatically, I have a hard time seeing that my edit needed to be immediately reverted. --Footwarrior (talk) 21:08, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

I've added the page banner, image is now 2100 x 300 pixels. And sorry if I annoyed you. --Saqib (talk) 21:18, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be 2100 x 300, just larger than 1800px wide and with a ratio of 7:1. Unfortunately the images don't scale 7:1 automatically at present, so we have to do that bit, but thanks very much for joining in! You can find out more here: Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition. :) --Nick ^talk 21:25, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Also, if you would like a quick guide to cropping and scaling images appropriately, please see Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition#How do I help? --Peter ^Talk 21:58, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Empty/Category-less regions

Some may have noticed, but I just wanted to point out that I created two new maintenance categories. I changed {{Outlineregion}} so that:

• regions whose categories do not contain anything are added to Category:Empty regions
• regions for which no category has been created yet are added to both Category:Empty regions and Category:Regions with no category

Hopefully these categories may help us spot regions which need work and/or have been prematurely over-regionified. Texugo (talk) 17:53, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Admins list

I more or less replaced special:listadmins with a voluntary list of current admins at Wikivoyage:Administrators#Current administrators. If you are an admin and would like to be on the shortlist of admins to contact with policy, practice, or whatever other questions, please add your name there. --Peter ^Talk 17:08, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Link from Wikipedia not showing

The link from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawai%CA%BBi_Volcanoes_National_Park#External_links to WV is not showing. Anyone know how to troubleshoot it? Nurg (talk) 08:40, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I played around with it and couldn't get it to show up no matter what I tried. Try asking at w:Template talk:Sister project links. The way the template displays Wikivoyage links was changed on 30 May; that may have introduced a bug. LtPowers (talk) 14:46, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Actually it seems they changed it so that Wikivoyage link is only displayed if the article's Wikidata contains a parameter declaring it as a geographic feature, which I think is wrong on many accounts - not only seems like the Wikidata is unreliable (the national park would qualify as "geographic feature" to me), and we have topics covered here which are not "geographic features" (like Hotels and Flying). I believe we should express this on the template's talk page. In the meantime, we can use the standalone Wikivoyage template to interwikilink. PrinceGloria (talk) 21:42, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

The intent was to only show it by default if the Wikipedia article is a geographic feature. That is, if the Sister Projects template has no "voy=" parameter, what is the behavior? Originally, the behavior was "don't show a Wikivoyage link", which makes sense for the vast majority of articles, but makes it much harder to get links to us. So we asked for and got it change to "show a Wikivoyage link", which was great for us but looked dumb on a lot of articles. So the intent of the change was to change that to "show the link only if it's a geographic feature as defined by Wikidata" -- but all this only applies if the voy parameter is omitted. If the voy parameter is present, it should use it regardless of what Wikidata says. LtPowers (talk) 01:23, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I boldly added the park as a geographical feature: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q205952&diff=prev&oldid=51488511 Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:44, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Either way, we should always try to make manual, direct links, rather than default ones. The default links use "Special:Search/" which I believe does not help us in terms of Google juice. The manually-inserted "voy=" do add to our incoming links and help increase our ranking. James A ▪ talk 05:14, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

News from the Twittersphere

Hi there! I've already posted some of this in Wikivoyage talk:Tourism Bureau Expedition, but I thought it would get a wider audience here. There are also a few updates since that was posted that I'd like to include.

So far both The Hague and Eindhoven have expressed an interest in tweaking our guides, and the former in particular seems keen to help out. I have now sent both of them my email address and am now in contact with Maurice at Den Haag Marketing (The Hague). He's sent me a link to some great photos on their Flickr page that are CC licensed, but only for non-commercial use. Is there any way we can get round this issue or do I need to ask if they'd be prepared to change the licence?

Copenhagen said that our guide to their city was 'lovely and informative', whilst Pittsburgh retweeted the fact that their city was our destination of the month. Meanwhile, Cleartrip appears to be considering changing to using WV as their source material, though I've not weighed in as I wasn't quite sure what we'd want to do; see their tweets here.

Hopefully the above should herald the way for many partnerships formed through the social network. A quick reminder: if you'd like to see a particular article mentioned on Twitter or tweeted '@' a particular tourism organisation, please post here. Thanks! --Nick ^talk 13:59, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

"Hopefully the above should herald the way for many partnerships formed through the social network" - not to mention more traffic to the site! -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 14:26, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely! I think that's priority number 1 at the moment and hopefully Twitter will have an impact! --Nick ^talk 14:38, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

That's wonderful news! I guess we cannot really "work around" the non-commercial thing, but then again most of the photos is this gallery are of current events, and we are more after photos of landmarks, interiors, maps and such. Perhaps Maurice could procure some free ones? I guess that could be easier, as the event pics might be restricted for commercial use due to the parties appearing in the photos.

More importantly, it would be great if Maurice could ask somebody from VVV Den Haag to peruse the listings (see, do, sleep, eat, drink, buy) and update them with all the details, plus add the ones we missed. And if either Maurice and/or other people from DH Marketing or the VVV could become contributors to the article, it would simply be most dandy.

Kindest, PrinceGloria (talk) 20:35, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

PS. While the Twitter presence is a smashing success, I can smell a problem in that we are not quite regular, pun not intended.

Yes, sorry it's not a regular as it might be. I'm a little rushed off my feet at the moment with work and things, but after next week things should calm down a bit and I'll be able to provide a more stable tweeting schedule. At present I try to do it at least once a day, though I know this doesn't always happen!

I've invited Maurice to join our ranks and let him know about the issues with the images. He's provided me with links to their lists on Foursquare which provide lots of listing details:

https://foursquare.com/haagsuitburo/list/welcome-to-the-hague-4sqcities

https://foursquare.com/haagsuitburo/list/museums-in-the-hague

https://foursquare.com/haagsuitburo/list/theaters-and-performing-arts-venues-in-the-hague

--Nick ^talk 20:53, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Our regards to Maurice! It would be good, however, to make it clear to tourist bureaus and such that we do expect of them to take the lead and plunge forward in updating listings. This is what they are pretty much paid for, and WV is just as good and important medium for that as any other they use. I believe we might start talking to them about potentially integrating our listing systems with their software, so that it could be easier to exchange data, but this is still the number one thing I would expect the tourism bureaus to help us with, otherwise our guides will remain pretty sketchy. Few people (except for myself) find pleasure in listing all of the hotels or restaurants in the city, and we are then only limited to the knowledge imparted upon us by fellow travellers who decided to edit and article and share, for the most part, a particular experience. It might take years before the sections get filled with reasonably large and diverse, as well as representative number of options, by which time half of them might be outdated. I believe a tourism bureau might do a much better job of it. PrinceGloria (talk) 21:36, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

That's all great news, Nick. Thanks so much for your work on this. I might have the Twitter credentials, but my contribution to it is sorely lacking! Regarding the photos, they will need to be changed. I recently made a similar mistake; a conversation about NC images can be read here. If you asked him for specific ones that could be helpful, he could possibly change the license just on those images. It's great that some tourism bureaus, like The Hague's, are very responsive and enthusiastic. I send emails to ones about towns near me, and I don't even get a reply. I guess they just assume I'm "spam". Phone calls to enquire about the lack of a response just lead to "we'll look into it". To convince difficult bureaus about our benefits, I suggest highlighting examples of successes and current bureau's we're working with. For example, when a country town like Bendigo continually ignores me when I offer to help them with Wikivoyage, I plan to later respond informing them that I'm already working with the Victoria (state) tourism department, a much larger organisation that Bendigo can ever hope to be. James A ▪ talk 06:57, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

There's no need to thank me; I enjoy it! :) Maurice has said that he's paid for some of those photos, so he'd probably prefer to leave the licensing as it is, but we should be able to find alternatives.

I agree with you that it's really nice to hear from people who are so keen; I've been in the same situation and it is difficult! I think you're right about mentioning other organisations as well - hopefully where one has gone, the rest will follow! --Nick ^talk 13:53, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Are we ok to retweet this or is it a bit too confrontational? --Nick ^talk 18:58, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if I'd RT it, but by all means reply and welcome him. =) LtPowers (talk) 02:18, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Cleartrip

I can confirm that Cleartrip is indeed pulling from Wikivoyage and not WT, as they reported via Twitter. But they are not attributing properly. Obviously, they need to change the WT logo to be a WV logo (which is problematic at the moment, but never mind). But that alone is not enough. They need to link to the original source here on WV, preferably the history page, to provide proper attribution. LtPowers (talk) 01:22, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

It is good news that they're using our content, though as you say, the logo situation is a bit of an issue at the moment. Do we need to send them an email asking that they attribute the content properly? It looks like the situation is the same with Wikipedia as the link there just takes you to the portal. --Nick ^talk 13:35, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

If that's the case, we might want to coordinate with WMF. I have no idea what the proper forum for that would be; we can try asking Maggie Dennis, the WMF's community liaison, and see if she can point us in the right direction. LtPowers (talk) 18:11, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Is anybody pursuing this? I believe this would be absolutely crucial to upping our PageRank with Google. Is there a tool that would allow sites porting out content to automatically link back to WV? PrinceGloria (talk) 07:01, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I imagine that a linkback to the article is better for our search juice than to the history page, no? --Peter ^Talk 07:38, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Most definitely. James A ▪ talk 10:03, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I am happy to inform you all that Cleartrip now indeed DOES link to Wikivoyage - they were quick to implement the change, kudos to them. They also removed the Wikitravel logo, but did not replace it with any Wikivoyage logo - we could use one badly now, how is the selection process going on? I somehow lost track of it...

At any rate, this means that our content DOES get reused, so we'd better double the efforts on quality control and standardization so that those who decide to import it en masse don't end up with it en mess. Also, if you see a site that does use what looks like our content, do remember to kindly remind them to link back as per our license, and if they are using older versions of Wikivoyage content, it may be worthwhile to inform them that newer versions are available at Wikivoyage.

Cheerio and let's start this week with this cool news in mind. It is getting better, even if ever so slightly and slowly. PrinceGloria (talk) 04:50, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

WV and WT page

Separated from News from the Twittersphere

We've just been asked what the difference is between us and WT - should we just link here (Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage_and_Wikitravel) or is there a more appropriate answer? I don't want to get us into trouble! --Nick ^talk 15:15, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Right, I've posted a fairly bland tweet with a link which you can find here. It would be nice if we could agree on a 'standard response' to this sort of question as I imagine it will come up many times, both on Twitter and Facebook. --Nick ^talk 15:28, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

It's a question we do get, and will get, asked a lot. It really needs to be a place that (passively and fairly) touts Wikivoyage as the better site. I think it may be a good idea to redesign that page to make it more visual and intuitive, with less text. A column format with Wikivoyage on one side and Wikitravel on the other may work. Furthermore, sourcing our remarks would ensure we don't get challenged for various claims. For example, a claim like "More active involvement" should have links to the number of active users on both sites. But that may be a discussion for its talk page. James A ▪ talk 05:07, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I think you're right; that's definitely worth doing. This question is going to come up again and again and we want an answer that definitively supports WV, but not one that could be considered unfair. I'll take a look at that page later on and see what I can do. --Nick ^talk 06:44, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I've separated this topic out and created a copy of the page here to work on, I hope you don't mind! Please feel free to edit it. --Nick ^talk 18:34, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Frontpage/2- column in wide screens

What about 2-column frontpage for wide screens? I mean two travel destinations next to each other. Currently they are all placed under. --Olli (talk) 15:43, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

If you can figure out how to do it, give it a try. =) LtPowers (talk) 18:13, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

That would be really good if we could make it adapt to the user's screen size: vertically stacked (as it is presently) for smaller screens and 2 columns for wide screens. :) --Nick ^talk 18:21, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Position of edittools on the page

WP has the edittools immediately below the editing window, which is very handy. Any chance we could do the same here? Nurg (talk) 09:39, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

If compare to WP, we've sizeable edit-tools so I think current position of edit-tools is perfectly fine. --Saqib (talk) 18:21, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

If we made it into a drop-down list like Wikipedia's, it might work better. A lot of rubbish in edittools can be removed anyhow. James A ▪ talk 10:07, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

X!'s Edit Counter

(Sorry for writing in English. You can translate the proposal.)

Should X!'s edit counter retain the opt-in requirement? Your input is strongly encouraged. Voice your input here.——cyberpower ^Chat_Automation 04:22, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery. (Wrong page? Fix here.)

Geobatcher

Got Geobatcher working with templates. Copy and paste listings into the textbox and search for up to 100 coordinates all at one go. It's now new and improved with drag-and-drop icons that will automatically insert coordinates into the wikitext when adjusted. Needs a little bit of patience (say 30s) waiting for results to be found and mapped. It's also not as accurate as I would like, but setting it to search by name usually returns good enough results. POI name matching could be automated in the future, though probably only after a listing/vcard database gets set up. If you want a challenge, set it to search by address, which is hit and miss depending on whether the block addresses are present in OpenStreetMap, and you'll need to check if the addresses are correct and not say 1 Main Street instead of 50 Main Street.

If there are any problems or ideas, just bring them up at Wikivoyage:Dynamic maps Expedition. It should work for de and ru, but needs tweaking for other languages. Have also noticed little bugs such as Mapquest not liking umlauts.

PS also any more refinements for the dynamic maps in-wiki? What's a good target for deployment? -- torty3 (talk) 17:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I think what's remaining is really a guide for how to create them. I'm pretty sure everything we want to be able to do is now doable, but it's a little hard to judge without seeing the step-by-step process for getting them set up (defining boundaries, drawing boundaries, finding and entering listings coordinates, etc.). --Peter ^Talk 19:47, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Still many things to do before we can switch on dynamic maps for everyone: 1) Test it on many desktop browsers (anyone can help, please report any bug) 2) Write offline generation of map images for mobiles 3) Write the code that displays these static images on mobiles 4) Write some code to do automatic POI number incrementation 5) Merge the PoiMap2 and see/eat/etc templates 6) As Peter said, document how to transform an article that has zero maps into an article that uses dynamic maps 7) Get Mey2008 to release the wikivoyage-ev source code as open source. Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:02, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Number 3 is done since it falls into the general no-javascript area where a static map will show. Number 4 is done except for decision on continuous/non-continuous, and the fact that once this is included, every single listing with coordinates will be numbered. Number 5 is tied in with number 4, so it will effectively be merged (if this is what you mean). To me, number 2 is nice to have but low priority and a current weak workaround is taking a screenshot.

But yes, testing is a major problem, but now we're stuck in limbo where it cannot be implemented because it could affect the entire site, yet the entire site cannot test it because it is not being implemented. Furthermore we are trying to jump straight from zero to full deployment. I think the Javascript for Mapframe has to be added, or there won't be any further movement.

I'll start up a firmer proposal in Wikivoyage talk:Dynamic maps Expedition#In-wiki testing, about targets and implementations, etc etc. -- torty3 (talk) 17:29, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Help with mysterious TOC change

I apologize for posting this here rather than at Meta, but I figured I might get help quicker here than there. This doesn't seem to have affected en:, especially because of the page banners, but on pt: today, suddenly all TOCs are appearing fully expanded, making a huge TOC on many pages, and the text no longer flows around it (see pt:São Paulo for example). No settings have been changed recently in this regard, and I don't really have any idea how to trace the root of the problem. Can anyone offer any help with this? Texugo (talk) 18:53, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

On my PC it looks normal. Jjtkk (talk) 18:58, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

For me it's normal as well. --Alexander (talk) 19:02, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Weird, it is back to normal here too. Texugo (talk) 19:03, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I find that sometimes happens if the page doesn't finish loading. --Peter ^Talk 19:43, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, yeah, but it was doing that on every page, while pages on other versions were loading normally. Texugo (talk) 19:45, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

You could always blame Dilma ;p PrinceGloria (talk) 20:07, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Templates

Folks, I have a serious problem if we're going to allow silly templates like Template:Done to proliferate. We have always tried to keep template usage to a minimum, and now I see that being thrown out the window for no good reason aside from "some people might expect us to have this template". Now it's another thing we have to keep track of, another layer of complexity added on top of our site that removes people another step from the process of writing travel guides, which is what we're all here for, isn't it? LtPowers (talk) 02:07, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, despite the fact that (exactly) two weeks passed, I feel like the vfd was ended a bit hastily as I don't think there was a clear enough consensus to keep. I also do not believe "some people might expect us to have them" is a good enough reason to start allowing things we have always tried to avoid. There are lots of other things that people might expect us to have too (refs, montages, etc.), but that doesn't automatically mean we should stop discouraging them. I refuse to believe any worthwhile editor is going to stop coming here once they figure out that we discourage little discussion page decoration templates. Texugo (talk) 03:27, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Actually, the reason that process went south is because there isn't supposed to be a vfd. The proper process is described at Wikivoyage:Using MediaWiki templates#New Mediawiki Template proposals. Per policy, the template should have been tagged as experimental, should not have been added to more than one article, and any decision of whether to use it should have been discussed on the template talk page. I don't really care enough about this instance, but I think we should be more careful to follow the prescribed process. --Peter ^Talk 03:52, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

I apologize for introducing the VfD, then. They were both tagged experimental, but for utility templates like that I don't know if the one-article restriction makes sense. (Though, strictly speaking, it wasn't in use on any articles, as it was only used on talk pages.) Should I have reverted uses of the template rather than start a discussion? LtPowers (talk) 14:25, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

I think so, although you're right that we hadn't applied this policy yet to talk pages—that hasn't come up before. --Peter ^Talk 17:38, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

If VfD is not the right place, how do we catch a template that has already jumped the fence and started running? Have we already lost the status quo of not using talk page ornamentation, just because some people used to them from other wikis created them and started using them without due process of discussion? Texugo (talk) 17:55, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

I think the right process is to revert their addition to more than one article, and bring it up on the template talk page. --Peter ^Talk 18:28, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

We've generally done that with mainspace templates, but have (rightly, IMHO) been less strict with non-mainspace templates. My understanding was that the template creator should argue for the template's merits on the template talk page (per Template:Experimental), but objectors also need to raise their concerns on the template talk page so that they can be addressed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:56, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

For the record, my concern with talk page templates like this is that they introduce unnecessary complexity into what are routine interactions, and that makes working on our site (even just asking questions) more intimidating for people unfamiliar with any sort of code/markup. Many potential contributors are scared off by things like brackets and colons, and that's something we should always keep in mind—travel knowledge and computer knowledge often do not go hand in hand. When I first started editing Wikipedia in 2004, I was bewildered by this sort of stuff, and it made me less inclined to add information because I was worried I would be doing something wrong. --Peter ^Talk 19:29, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

To the point about wiki markup, the visual editor will be here very soon, which will completely eliminate the need for new editors to deal with wiki markup: [4]. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:44, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Last I tried it, Visual Editor was not able to edit templated content. That's another factor to weigh in deciding which templates make Wikivoyage more usable and which less. --Rogerhc (talk) 22:02, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

It actually does on the latest version on the English Wikipedia... but Wikipedias are being given the priority as other WMF sites may have compatibility issues. That being said, if I had to guess, Wikivoyage would be high up on the list as there's no unusual namespaces or functionality here (as shown by Wikidata's choice to focus on us next). --Rschen7754 22:35, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Please, please let's not get Visual Editor here until it's finished. I'm pretty annoyed with WP inflicting it on me when it is not finished and very problematic. Nurg (talk) 00:24, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

More barncompasses

As you're all aware, recently WikiLove extension has been enabled on this wiki so I think we probably should have few more customised travel-themed barn-compasses such as admin's barncompass, anti-vandalism, graphic designer's, editor's barncompass etc. Nick is willing to create few more barn-compasses if community have no objection. Ideas for derivatives would be appreciated. --Saqib (talk) 07:05, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

No, I wasn't aware, actually. Where was it announced? LtPowers (talk) 11:13, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

It wasn't. It was automatically installed in a MediaWiki update. It's fairly standard on other Wikimedia projects. James A ▪ talk 11:32, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Are you sure, James? I did see someone propose adding it here just a few days before it showed up (though I didn't know what it was at the time), and it hasn't magically appeared on the other language versions.

I'm not sure how much I like wikilove, as it encourages people to waste time exchanging more frivolous things, pictures of kittens and hamburgers, etc. When someone wants to express appreciation, I don't necessarily think it is too much to ask for them to make the effort to go to the barncompass page and find the appropriate code or find their own unique image. I don't think our community is so huge that this will or should be used every day or even every week, and if the little heart icon up there encourages people to share silly little pictures just because it's fun to decorate each other's pages, the whole barncompass idea is kind of cheapened. I think the bright icon may also encourage trolls/newbies exploring the site to play around with it, and premature barnstarring from people who barely know what's going on kind of causes some of the special meaning to be lost. I think wikilove was implemented rather too quickly and without enough input from the community and should probably be uninstalled until a wider consensus is reached. I personally find it pretty cheesy and MySpace-like.

Wikilove aside, I do have a couple of ideas for barncompass variations:

• Cartographer's barncompass - for work on mapmaking
• Trailblazer's barncompass - for work on implementing routebox navigation

Texugo (talk) 11:54, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I have proposed it in passing a few times, but never made a tech request, nor did anyone else I believe. Last I saw, WikiLove was one of those "bundled" extensions of MediaWiki that all Wikimedia sites get. As for whether WikiLove is worth implementing/keeping, I'd like to see a discussion. As for more barncompasses, a few more would be good. Some that Wikipedia have won't be necessary, though. I'm not sure we have enough active admins to warrant an admin's barncompass. James A ▪ talk 12:36, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, it has never been automatically enabled on pt: or es: at least, and was apparently turned on at it: before it was ever brought up here, so I assumed someone here subsequently did something to specifically enable it. How would we go about disabling it until there is consensus for it? Texugo (talk) 13:06, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Texugo, I personally don't liked to receive images of kittens and food as barn-stars, I've stated here that we can delete the kittens and food interface entirely. --Saqib (talk) 10:52, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I am still not really convinced our community is big enough that it can and should give awards often enough to warrant always having the little red heart icon at hand, and even if were were, I'm not convinced we need an extra special function to automate the small handful of barncompass variations we are likely to have (and we only have the one right now). I am also concerned they will start being handed out more lightly. I think the greater point, though, is that it should be brought to everyone's attention and consensus reached before implementing it. I am not sure why it was not felt important enough to bring up in the pub from the beginning or, indeed, whether it was somehow automatically enabled here and not on other versions or whether someone plunged forward and did something to enable it, but I feel it should be undone and we should discuss first about whether and exactly how to implement it. Those including myself who do not necessarily like the new feature should not be put in the position of having to fight to remove or change something which was implemented without wide consensus and which therefore already has inertia on its side. Texugo (talk) 11:21, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Texugo. I think its better to spread WikiLove and share barncompasses rather than not at all. I guess we've always ignored barnstars in the past here. I don't see any big harm if we start giving barncompasses to even new Wikivoyagers as long they're contributing constructively here, everyone likes to feel appreciated for their good contributions and barncompasses will only encourage the recipients. If you're afraid of extension misuse, maybe we can set a criteria. And btw, yes I feel sorry for not getting enough consensus first and requested to install the extension on this wiki without well informing the community. --Saqib (talk) 15:59, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting that barnstars not be given at all, but that's not how barnstars have traditionally been used here, and if you are proposing to cheapen them by encouraging them to be given to any new user who added a few paragraphs, I am not really on board with that. I think that in those cases, a few kind words of thanks and encouragement will suffice, and we usually save barnstars for greater more sustained achievements. I am not very interested in changing that with a cheesy pink heart on every user page. I'd really like to hear more opinions from other long-time or heavy contributors and discuss this first. If there is indeed a landslide of support for introducing it, I will gladly concede the point, but I would appreciate it if you would remove the extension for the time being, or at least make it opt-in, until such time as we have a clear sitewide consensus for introducing it. Texugo (talk) 17:20, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

While the discussion maybe could have been moved to a more prominent location, there was no objection to installing the extension over several months at Wikivoyage talk:Barncompasses#Installing the WikiLove extension, so disabling it at this point without further discussion seems like the wrong approach. While I may not personally use this new functionality, I think the argument that it will make it easier to provide encouragement to contributors (whether new or old), combined with the fact that this approach will be familiar to users of other wikis, is a compelling argument in its favor, barring a better alternative. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:17, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

There was no objection there exactly because it was not discussed at or pointed to from a prominent location. I don't think that is a good justification for dropping the need to get wider consensus first. Texugo (talk) 18:29, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Well in response to your point above, there's nothing stopping people from giving out barnstars whenever they want, even without the extension. And regulating when barnstars can be given out is a bit of instruction creep... --Rschen7754 08:47, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not calling for regulation, but I definitely don't want to encourage trivialization by putting a glowing pink heart on every user page. Texugo (talk) 16:54, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Google ranking improving

FYI, I have noticed a few of our locations appearing after normal searches (re: "Town travel") on the 1st page of Google results. They are places that I added information for, so wherever those discussions are about us not showing up, things are changing. As some had mentioned in those discussions, we will appear on the results when we have original guides. Just thought I'd mention it as a tiny bit of encouragement for those who have been worried about it. Cheers. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:45, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

"Town travel" doesn't show any Wikivoyage results on the first page for me, even with personalized searching turned off. It does show WT's Cape Town article. LtPowers (talk) 14:21, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I certainly didn't mean that it is widespread and much of the high-content guides here are the same high-content guides on the other site, so they still don't show. Has Cape Town had a lot of work done recently on it?

I was trying cities that I had recently added content to, and to be honest the content isn't even that great but it is enough to make them show up. The cities are Imabari, Kasaoka, and also Japan's Top 100 Cherry Blossom Spots shows up on the first page of results (at least for me). My point is that it seems things may be starting to change. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:31, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Just tried, for Kasaoka WV is before WT, but opposite for Imabari. Google adds some randomness so we should not take exact rank that seriously, but I am glad meticulous content enhancement starts proving to be a good strategy! Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:08, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

As I've stated before, it may be a reason to put a small group of users together to collaborate in making significant wording changes to our most popular articles. I know some in the past have been resistant, especially modifying our stars. But, as some of the above shows, it's proven to work in ensuring people are actually reading our content. It may also give us a chance to improve some of our popular articles that are severely lacking (eg, Trekking in Nepal, which I just recently wrote a new lede for) James A ▪ talk 07:59, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Major cities

We now have a list at Wikivoyage:World cities/Large showing the world's 50 largest cities (at least by one measure :-) and the status of their WV articles. Many of them need help of various sorts; some things need local knowledge but others, such as finding banner images, do not. Pashley (talk) 19:48, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I kept looking at this and wondering how the heck only one of them is a star. Then it dawned upon me that for some reason we haven't starred Bangkok ;) --Peter ^Talk 03:55, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

My main worry is that more than half of them, including 8 of the top 12, are only at usable status & in many cases getting them to guide would be hard because that requires all district articles to be at usable. Pashley (talk) 06:42, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Nice list and lots of work to be done :-) It would be interesting to see a list of the most visited cities in the world. I wonder if that would be more favourable in terms of our coverage... I imagine and hope it would be? :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 12:26, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it would be. Population is far from the ideal criterion for us; data is easy to get, but If you lose your keys it is not a good idea to walk 20 m from where you dropped them to look under the streetlight because the light is better there. Also, it is a bit ambiguous depending how you define "city"; WP gives three different lists for three definitions.

I do not know where to find info on visitors per year for cities. WP has w:Lists of tourist attractions and that has dozens of links, but I see no statistics. w:World Tourism rankings has rankings by number of visitors and by tourism receipts, but those are by country.

There are other criteria that might be added to determine the most important cities; they might be put into the table as extra columns, but all the ones I can think of have odd biases. Does it have an international airport? But in China, fairly important cities like Suzhou or Dongguan don't, though there are others nearby. Does it have high-speed rail service? Most European or Chinese cities do, but nothing in Africa or North America. Do major bands, say the Stones, include it on tours? They go to many cities in Europe and the US, only a few of the biggest in Asia. Pashley (talk) 13:27, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I added columns for national rankings by number of visitors and by tourism receipts. Also increased it to 104 rows so Spain, Italy, Australia & Macau, which all rank in the top ten by at least one of those measures, would be in the table. Pashley (talk) 16:47, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

The table now has a column showing one a list of the world's 20 most visited cities according to Forbes magazine. It would be great to get all the top ones to Star status, but most are now at Guide. Discussion at Wikivoyage_talk:Collaboration_of_the_month#Outdated.2C_again. Pashley (talk) 13:55, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata migration

Wikidata should be enabled (initially for interwiki links only) on Wikivoyage on July 25th. Also see:

• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-tech/2013-June/000076.html
• wikidata:Wikidata:Wikivoyage migration

—Ruud 12:20, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Sorry folks. I am going to make the appropriate announcements in due time and will give you all the necessary information as soon as I have it confirmed. These days are not set in stone yet. Please let me know if you have any pressing questions until then. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:04, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good, but there are some things that should be considered:

• Although Commons and Wikipedia interwikis will be transferred, how about the numerous guides with dMoz (Open Directory) links? Personally, if dMoz isn't willing to help us get links up en masse on their site, I'm all for removing them completely.
• Some of our guides like New York City can be automatically added to current Wikidata entries. But what about some traveller-themed districts/regions that are unique to Wikivoyage and do not have Wikipedia equivalents?
• Will the interwikis still be displayed under RelatedSites, or will they be moved?

James A ▪ talk 02:57, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

• dMoz will remain here.
• Items can be created for those pages, which would require an update to the Wikidata notability policy, but I don't see why it wouldn't be done.
• Only links in between Wikivoyages will be handled now - links to Wikipedia will come later. --Rschen7754 05:28, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

The Big Bus Company

Should we have an article on sightseeing bus company The Big Bus Company? They're currently providing tour bus service in 13 cities worldwide. --Saqib (talk) 14:00, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

That wouldn't jive too well with our policy of not making articles about individual companies. Texugo (talk) 14:07, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) We could perhaps have one on Sightseeing bus tours, but I'd be against having one on any particular company: I'm not sure that's really in the spirit of WV. There are many different companies offering similar services and, whilst 'The Big Bus Company' may merit a mention, I doubt its services are so much different from those of other operators that it merits its own page. --Nick ^talk 14:08, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

I think an overview article on this type of tour would be fine, which could touch on the advantages and drawbacks. Maybe making it even broader would be better though. Something like Guided city tours, which could give advice regarding bus tours, walking tours, segway tours, bicycle tours, and what have you. We discourage listing these things in destination guides per Wikivoyage:Activity listings#Tour listings, so it would be nice to have somewhere to discuss them (if not list them). --Peter ^Talk 19:38, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Automatic updates by sites reusing our content

One of the ways Wikivoyage is great is that other travel sites can reuse our quality content under the CC license. This is also great for us, because it means they have to link to every article from every article they reuse, which in turns boosts our Google PageRank.

That said, I was recently in touch with Cleartrip, with whom I discussed why they would not update their content regularly, as our articles have moved many versions forward since their last dump. The answer was that they had some issues with changing markup that made it require a lot of manual corrections after each update, so they've given up on that. I was wondering what can they be referring to and whether the issue is resolved (I have not experienced changes in Wiki markup, but I guess they are referring to how the HTML / whatever pages behind the wiki are coded).

Do we have a quickie guide for other sites who want to reuse content on how to upload and then update content regularly? PrinceGloria (talk) 05:13, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Bump! PrinceGloria (talk) 21:18, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

As far as I know we do not. There are so many ways of re-using the content that it would not be practicable to provide instructions. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:00, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

It all boils down to another site downloading the Wikivoyage content en masse, either all of it or selected destinations (e.g. all that is in Category:Austria and descendants, or fitting a predetermined list of article names), and later updating it to the newest versions available. I do not mean people using specific pieces manually, this, I believe, is quite rare and does not require any instructions. I do believe folks using our content in a massive, automated way, like Cleartrip does, could use instructions and facilitation, as this is what is going to give us the most links.

Secondly - does our markup change behind the scenes, or might it have been a thing of the past? If so, is there a handy guide on how to handle the current mark-up if the target site is not a Wiki? PrinceGloria (talk) 07:56, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

If it is to be loaded onto a site with the same version of Mediawiki software and the same extensions and setup as WV there should be minimal problems, but if any of these things differ it may open a major can of worms. I don't know enough to make predictions. That is if they are using dumps with wikimarkup. I imagine it is possible to gather the html which should be more resilient. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:17, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Again, I do not mean other Wikis, that's simple (and I'd rather no other Wikis used our content anyway, it's better to wikiedit all content in one place). It is about those sites that convert to HTML using our Wikimarkups, but not in the Wiki way - i.e. bold is bold and section headings remain so (not to mention tables, images, listings et. al.), but not displayed via the MediaWiki engine. And I know it is a can of worms, but we need to open and resolve it, especially that I have been asked personally by a very cooperative partner/recycler of our content. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:32, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if someone is downloading a content dump for use on their own site, they are responsible for importing that content. It is most definitely not our job to provide guidance for converting wiki markup to HTML; anyone needing to do so can find tools online to help out with that work, but it is way outside of the scope of Wikivoyage to provide that information. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:39, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Not quite, because by reusing our content they are linking to our webpages (while we are not linking to those), majorly boosting our PageRank, which we need dearly. BTW, the ability to reuse the content freely (but with appropriate attribution) is one of the founding principles of all MediaWiki project, so I believe we should make it easy and think about it as one of the ways our content is being used (because it indeed is). We could have just as well said we don't care if people can't navigate through our articles, because it's free anyway and we don't care. But we do. PrinceGloria (talk) 16:51, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that they are asking whether our wikimarkup will change dramatically again anytime soon so they can at least fix their own parsing issues. Using the HTML would have been far more resilient, but in this case they may be referring to the major change in May when we switched from tags to templates, I don't think there has been any other major change nor anything else in the pipeline. They may have run into trouble with that (they should have been checking for template code anyway, hard to tell). We have Wikivoyage:How_to_re-use_Wikivoyage_guides, which could do with some additional technical hints such as the use of hCards and Geo microformats, though that itself is covered mostly in Wikivoyage:Listings. -- torty3 (talk) 17:04, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

PrinceGloria - what you're asking for is way, way outside of the scope of a travel guide. You or anyone else is welcome to start a project to develop tools to easily convert a Mediawiki XML site dump to HTML, or PDF, or any other format, or detailed instructions could be created on Meta to explain how to do so with existing tools (if such information doesn't exist already), but developing or defining a process for doing so on Wikivoyage itself isn't something we should be worrying about. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:35, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Maybe we should just have something similar to w:Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content. LtPowers (talk) 21:04, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata is coming soon

Heya folks :)

So Wikidata is finally starting to get real with this sister projects thing. We'll be starting with Wikivoyage since this is comparatively similar to Wikipedia. We'll take it easy at the beginning and just go for the language links between the different language editions of Wikivoyage.

On July 18th we will change test.wikidata.org to be able to store links to Wikivoyage in addition to Wikipedia. You can test it there then and make sure there are no huge issues we have not noticed yet. On July 22 we will enable this on wikidata.org and the Wikivoyages.

Some things to keep in mind:

• This is only for links between Wikivoyages for now. More will follow later.
• Access to the other data like timezones, airport codes and so on will not be enabled yet. That will follow later as well.
• There will be no automatic links to/from Wikipedia for now.

Some specific things about the language links:

• It'll no longer be needed to keep them in the wikitext like it is currently.
• It'll still be possible to do so however but this will overwrite the links coming from Wikidata.
• With the magicword noexternallanglinks links from Wikidata can be turned off on an article either for all languages or only specific ones.

A page on Wikidata has been created where you can find someone to help you in case of issues and as usual I am available to answer any questions you might have.

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:36, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

With respect to the transition to Wikidata, is there anything people here should be more involved with? My understanding is that bot writers are going to be launching bots to move interwiki links to Wikidata, and our job is basically just to make sure things don't go haywire - is that about right, or should we be joining in discussions or actually updating our articles in some way? I think everyone has just been passively observing this transition, but if there is more to be done please let us know. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:20, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the main issue will be resolving any interwiki conflicts that come up, since different Wikivoyages tend to split articles up into different ways, and Wikipedia does as well. The deployment was delayed until Tuesday, due to the VisualEditor launch (that was subsequently delayed until Wednesday). --Rschen7754 04:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Are the global bot authors aware of this change? Special:Contributions/CarsracBot is still adding interwiki links - should we begin blocking such bots? -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:08, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I notified them on Sunday, and we should block them if they keep restoring links - all other wikivoyages are global sysop wikis so we can get stewards or GS to block there. --Rschen7754 20:12, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Universal Language Selector will be enabled on 2013-07-09

On July 9, 2013, Universal Language Selector (ULS) will be enabled on this wiki. The ULS provides a flexible way to configure and deliver language settings like interface language, fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). Making it available here is the last phase of making ULS available on all Wikimedia wikis.

Please read the announcement on Meta-Wiki for more information. Siebrand 12:22, 4 July 2013 (UTC) (via Global message delivery).

OSM

Mates, are you having problems to export maps from OSM as well? In the last two days almost all times i only had an error message that the server is over capacity. Does anyelse experienced that? jan (talk) 09:28, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Jan, just tried and OSM is successfully exporting maps for me. --Saqib (talk) 09:37, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Saqib, seems that server connection to your side is better: https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/21192/error-export-load-average-on-the-server-is-too-high-at-the-moment In Europe servers are busy. I was trying to export the city for Travemünde, if you by chance have a spare minute it would be great if you could export it. The dimensions are 53.9726 - 53.95409 and 10.85484 - 10.88758 and export in png or svg. Thanks! jan (talk) 11:51, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for late response Jan. Was travelling from Dubai to Karachi. Anyway, I've sent you the map by e-mail. --Saqib (talk) 20:59, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Saqib, thank you. The map is in the article. jan (talk) 10:08, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Bad Banners

As people begin to swap the default banners to actual destination pictures, I can't help but feel that many of them are not being placed with much thought. Many of them are either unattractive/show the destination in a bad light and/or unrepresentative of what the destination is about.

The first instance this came up was with New York State where it was pointed out that the chosen image looks smoggy, which I completely agree with. I also feel that Wuhan has a similar feel and in addition, the same picture used as the lead image for the city is also the banner. Senegal falls in this category too. I brought up on the talk page of Osaka that the banner is completely unrepresentative of the city's vibe and what draws people to it. I now notice Nagoya now has an image, but it looks like a parking lot or construction site. Even Tokyo's picture isn't exactly the best representation of Tokyo with its focus on Mount Fuji which is far away.

Can we reign these in a little? I like the idea of the banners, and pages like Paris and Israel use attractive and representative images but in the cases I've listed above and I fear many more, I would personally much prefer the default no-image banner over strange/ugly/unrepresentative banners. Better to leave the page as-is than to force a random image in there. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 15:03, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I must agree, though is this kind of blurring our mission of providing the on-the-ground truth and being frank about what a destination is really like? I'm sure there are very pretty places in Somalia and Lagos, but at the end of the day, they're pretty much hellholes, and our policy is to tell travellers that. James A ▪ talk 15:17, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

@CW: We have two problems: Bad and/or wrong sized banners. The whole change is a bit out of control and several user try to find solutions for the wrong sized banner. Your topic is true for German articles as well e.g. Travemünde and Kassel are good examples of it. The main problem is that most users are inexperienced to do banners (including me). I think we need a good template and guidance on how to do it. There is a lot of frustration at the moment and we need to find a way to regain control. jan (talk) 15:18, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

A few ideas as to banner guidelines (excluding the imperative that its dimensions are 7:1):

• Banners should showcase the character or scenery and landmarks of a particular destination.
• Banners should aim to look distinctive and different to others on the site.
• Banners need not represent their destination as an unrealistic idyll, but should be interesting to look at; for better or for worse.
• Banners should not feature the same subject as an article's main image. If possible the two should offer contrasting or at least different views of a destination.
• The use of skyline images should be limited - there are often much better indicators of a city's character.
• An article's lead image is sometimes a better place for a destination's iconic attraction; try to convey some of the 'feel' of the place through the banner.

Those are just a few thoughts; please feel free to disagree! --Nick ^talk 17:07, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, the bit about the lead picture can always be resolved by moving, replacing, or eliminating the lead picture, but yes, it should be mentioned. Anyway, to these I might add:

• Avoid pictures with excessive fog/smog/dark clouds/dust clouds/mist unless this is truly representative of the destination and does not overly obscure the subject of the picture
• Avoid pictures where the most interesting aspect is in the upper left where it may be covered by the title

Texugo (talk) 17:25, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Nicholas' points for the most part, as for Texugo's, I would rephrase:

• Make sure the picture is of appropriate quality, e.g. not overly blurred or obscured
• Remember that the page name will go into a black box in the top left quarter of the picture, and the bottom of the picture will be obscured by the box with links. Make sure your banner will look alright with them as well

PrinceGloria (talk) 17:40, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I was more specifically referring to the weather actually though, and not just the picture quality. Texugo (talk) 17:46, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I believe we need to appeal to the user's common sense and not create rules like "do not use photographs taken in rainy weather unless it rains in this location often enough that it is representative, but then not when people only go there when it is not raining, although if the picture looks good with the rain, then you can use it, but not when it's September 6th and past 5:56 PM". Kindest PrinceGloria (talk) 17:55, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I am not suggesting we get that specific, but photo quality does not address several of the ones Chubbywimbus pointed out above, such as the New York image. And using a needlessly cloudy shot can make the place look excessively gloomy - people may feel compelled to post shots like this last one if they are the only panorama in the commons category, but they really shouldn't use them. Texugo (talk) 18:27, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I do not agree with all the points Chubby raised above, and I actually think some of the examples he used are of the contrary (Israel is not really that good - it is a banner for Jerusalem, and Israel is far more than just that), but I agree the one that you pointed to is not stellar. How about:

• Make sure the banner is an attractive, inviting representation of the destination or topic.

This should cover everything mentioned and more. PrinceGloria (talk) 18:46, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Also, if it is not obvious what is in the picture, it should have a caption (that will be seen on mouse-over). I hope the {{crop}} templates won't have to stay long on the pages that have them. It reminds me of the mid-90s when a lot of web pages had "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" slapped across them. It would be good if there was a less obtrusive way of giving the crop message. Nurg (talk) 21:58, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Could we make 'CROP!' the mouse-over caption on offending banners? --Nick ^talk 22:08, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I prefer obtrusive. I don't want to see us get lazy about fixing these things, and the "obtrusive" message is a real motivator. Texugo (talk) 22:31, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

More than half have already been fixed. There are 35 left out of a peak value of 98. Another day or so should see them all done - until the next time... Quite a large percentage were made before the aspect ratio was fixed, (mostly for Austrian articles), a fair number were original panoramas, uncropped, and maybe a third were badly cropped. A few were undersize but the right aspect ratio. Cheers • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:13, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Terrific progress Peter. I'm not worried about the obtrusive crop message now, given there are not many instances and they are disappearing fast. Nurg (talk) 21:54, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Kudos to the other editors working on them too. I found most of them, but certainly haven't done all the fixing. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:29, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Done. Thanks to all who helped. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:54, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm late to the party, but I've also been biting my tongue at questioning addition of some pretty inscrutable choices of dull images—ones that almost seem like they were picked at random, then cropped and added. Compare all the gorgeous images available of Canada with the current banner [5], for just one rather prominent example (of many). It's great to see all the custom banners going up, but why bother if the image isn't beautiful, illustrative of something important, or just generally meaningful in some way? What's going on? I find myself replacing custom banners more often than I replace default banners, because I don't want to see something lifeless be presented as an example of the work we do. --Peter ^Talk 04:12, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

There are hundreds of banners of very low quality that make the destinations uninspiring and boring. I tried to replace some of them, but this often leads to reverting by the one adding the previous banner who still is under the impression it's a better image. Just look at Veneto, Macau, Corsica, Poland, and I'd even say Nice, which I tried to replace with File:Nice banner.jpg, but was reverted with the reason that the original is better. It's kind of ironic how this feature, which was supposed to make Wikivoyage look more professional, makes the site and its destinations look dull and amateuristic. Can't we just take these banners down, or at least categorize them somehow? I rather have the default banner than these banners. And while I have replaced dozens of them, this will take a long time considering there are so many bad quality ones. Globe-trotter (talk) 13:05, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Like everything else, banner disagreements will have to be hashed out on talk pages. It may not be pretty, but that's how we work. For the record, while I agree the Nice banner is a bit hazy, I much prefer its composition. And even though it's a bit hazy, it's still 10 times better than some of the banners I've seen. LtPowers (talk) 14:15, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

The thing I find so confusing is why anyone would take the time (which granted isn't a ton of time, but still significant) to download, crop, and re-upload when the original image is of such low quality. We're not talking about banners for places where it's hard to find good images, either—I'm talking about banners for entire countries, U.S. states, etc. Instead of using the multitudes of beautiful works out there, we're getting grainy, dark, and unbelievably dull banners. Why? It makes us look like we hardly care. --Peter ^Talk 18:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Possibly because they actually think they have produced an acceptable banner. We may be viewing on much better screens. Also aesthetic values vary. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 21:05, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

That's what surprises me, too. To take the time to make a banner out of these pictures blows my mind. Honestly, I cringe whenever I read something about an added banner in the edit description. The rules outlined above seem reasonable to me, although I like PrinceGloria's "Make sure the banner is an attractive, inviting representation of the destination or topic." rather than the "for better or worse" part. I would say the banners should always be attractive and let the text address the 'worse' part of the destination. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:34, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I would go with that as a general principle. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 14:29, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I also think banners should try to be inviting (show the destination in a positive light). Our policy is "provide honest information", but just because X is foggy most of the time does not mean we should show a foggy picture of X. The best articles are written by local people who are proud of their town, and a uninviting picture makes these local people hate the article they see (and can't change because changing a banner is not easy for Wikivoyage newcomers). Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Another banner problem that hurts my eyes is the amount of awfully tilted horizons, it really shows in the 7:1 aspect ratio. Just look at United Arab Emirates and Florida. Armigo (talk) 09:25, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Do you wish to propose a solution? At present there is no policy, guideline or rule requiring the content of a banner to be aligned in any specific way. On the other hand a banner image is just like any other content. You are free to produce and substitute a banner which you think is better than the current banner. If more people agree with you than the original banner proponent, your banner will be the new banner for that page, until someone else comes up with a better one again. You could also make a comment on the talk page, maybe some will do something about it. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:48, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I also think those banners need to be replaced... Globe-trotter (talk) 11:29, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I have no problem with tilted images if there's an arty thought behind it, but usually there's not. And in those cases the horizon should be horizontal, since it is IRL. Pros use a spirit level when they shoot landscape. Armigo (talk) 12:32, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Not many pros making banners for us, but go ahead and replace as many as you like. I think part of the problem is that many users don't have software to make small rotations. If it can be done with Gimp, I have yet to find out how. Photoshop will do it, but is there any freeware? If we can put some instructions on how to do it into the instructions for making a banner, maybe there will be fewer tilted horizon banners.• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 17:24, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

In Gimp it is Shift+R or Tools->Transform tools->Rotate. Gimp can do pretty much anything, if you know its secrets, so we should keep adding tips in the tutorial as we discover new needs/common problems. (While I'm no pro photo editor, I'm familiar with most of its features, so please feel free to ask.) --Peter ^Talk 17:32, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, and it works so easily too. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:55, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

IrfanView does tiny rotations, and it also has lossless JPG cropping and lossless JPG rotation (though only increments of 90 degrees can be lossless). It's a smaller program than the Gimp so it's good for quick stuff like that. The only drawback is you have to guess what rotation factor you need. I'll try Gimp next time I need to do a rotation. LtPowers (talk) 00:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Logo selection procedure -- needs your input

We need to select a new Wikivoyage logo because our current logo too much resembles[6] the World Trade Organization's logo. How should we select a new Wikivoyage logo? Please see the proposed selection procedure--it needs final touches--and give your input. Especially, we need community consensus to establish who our Wikivoyage community is and if we will limit newcomer voting to 50%; otherwise we may risk our community identity, and logo selection, being swamped by newcomers. We need your input at m:Talk:Logo_selection_procedure#Proposed_changes. (Please talk about it there on Meta, not here, as it affects all language versions of Wikivoyage.) Thanks! --Rogerhc (talk) 05:11, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Urgent--it is proposed that we start the actual logo selection process this week! Your input on the voting procedure is urgent now. Especially, we need community consensus to establish who our Wikivoyage community is and if we will limit newcomer voting to 50%; otherwise we may risk our community identity, and logo selection, being swamped by newcomers. Failure to reach consensus now on this vote weighing will drop it from the procedure; it obviously cannot fairly be added after the vote. So it is urgent that you weigh in on this at m:Talk:Logo_selection_procedure#Proposed_changes now. Sorry for not making that clear yesterday. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:19, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

This should go on a site notice. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:35, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Now on site notice. Please check if message suitable. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:40, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

All languages have been notified in pub equivalent. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:05, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

10 years of WT/WV

WV anniversary cake

WV anniversary cake

As a certain other page prides itself on being the "original, reliable etc. etc. etc. travel guide since 2003", I went and looked when exactly it has been launched. According to the revision history of its main page Evan created the Main Page on July 24th 2003 (presumably the first page), which means exactly ten years ago after a couple of weeks. Would it be a good idea to observe/celebrate it somehow? ϒpsilon (talk) 17:59, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I'd noticed this too, though it is a somewhat sensitive point. It'll be interesting that we'll have a 10th birthday this month and a first birthday next January! If were to mention it, might it be best to say 'It's 10 years since our community began'? --Nick ^talk 22:43, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Evan created his user page 3 hours before the main page. The oldest edit of mine that I can find (before I created account) was on 5 Oct 2003. Any active WV editors go back further than that? Nurg (talk) 11:33, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Are we going to celebrate this 24th the anniversary of Wikivoyage? --Saqib (talk) 00:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

If so, do we want a message on the Main Page or in the site notice? Perhaps 'Celebrating 10 years of the Wikivoyage community'? --Nick ^talk 01:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Am I the only one who feels a little strange about celebrating this as the 10th anniversary of Wikivoyage? It just feels awkward to me. I think it might be better if it's phrased as "Wikivoyage celebrates 10 years of sharing free online travel information" or something like that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree - it is a little odd. That's why I've been keen to emphasise that it's our community that's 10, if we do mention it at all. Maybe we keep this occasion for editors only and wait until next January for our big, public celebration? --Nick ^talk 02:28, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm with Ikan - a ten year anniversary is an exciting milestone, but I think publicizing that fact is likely to lead to another pissing match with WT, and the fact that we would again have to deal with that takes the fun out of it for me. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:49, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, we can celebrate the introduction of Wikidata! --Rschen7754 03:02, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Let's celebrate this occasion with a quiet 'pint' in the Pub, but bring out the bunting and party poppers for the Wikidata tie-up: a real cause for celebration. We can have a proper birthday party next January, when hopefully this project will be bigger and better than ever! :) --Nick ^talk 03:17, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. 10 years since Evan and Maj founded the community is an important milestone. And the project is already bigger and better than ever, so why wait? LtPowers (talk) 17:22, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

I'm going to celebrate the WV 10th anniversary with my family today during Iftar dinner. Congratulations to everyone! --Saqib (talk) 13:36, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

What an awesome cake! Texugo (talk) 13:43, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Its a homemade cake baked by my wife. Sorry for the incorrect logo, it was hardest part for her. --Saqib (talk) 13:53, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

That cake is fantastic! Your wife has done an amazing job! :) Should we tweet about this anniversary or (as above) are we keeping celebrations in-house? --Nick ^talk 15:33, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Congrats to all involved :-) Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a seriously awesome looking cake and I'm sure it tastes good as well! I'm celebrating by testing out a couple of articles in practice and updating them. Today I saw that infamous WTO logo at the gates of their head office here in Geneva... ϒpsilon (talk) 18:32, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

WT is celebrating by displaying a "Happy birthday" banner on their main page, where we can celebrate this day by adding some more value content to Wikivoyage. We still have some time to celebrate this day even in a better way than them. --Saqib (talk) 20:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

The bright red notice in MediaWiki:Recentchangestext looked a bit garish to my eye [7]. If there is a desire to promote this milestone, an update to MediaWiki:Sitenotice that follows the existing format might make more sense. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:06, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Technical Tweet

Hi! We've just received this tweet, but it's about what I'd think to be a pretty technical issue - is there anything could do and what should our response be? --Nick ^talk 20:36, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Makes no sense to me. Why would there be a page at that address? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 21:03, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Was that how Wikitravel was set up? --Rschen7754 21:06, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I didn't really understand it either - any ideas as to how we should respond? --Nick ^talk 22:02, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we need to respond to every tweet - if it's important the requester can make a request here or on Bugzilla. As to what the tweet is about, the user appears to be asking us to make it easier to convert a site that was previously using URLs of the form "www.oldsite.org/language" to "language.newsite.org/wiki" by setting up redirects on Wikivoyage so that "www.newsite.org/language" will work here. To do so someone would have to open a bugzilla request and someone from WMF would need to set up redirects, which I don't think is warranted. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:16, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Having delved a little deeper, it looks like the Tweeter is involved with http://couchwiki.org and is referring, more specifically, to this - is it worth us saying 'hello'? --Nick ^talk 22:19, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, not for nothing, but we have the same attribution requirements as WT. If this fellow isn't keen on following them, switching to WV doesn't really resolve his problem. LtPowers (talk) 00:29, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

It shouldn't be difficult to convert anyway. I assume he wants to change all instances of "wikitravel" to "wikivoyage". Instead, why can't he change "http://wikitravel.org/en/" to "http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/"? Either way, it'd be great to have his wiki using our superior content, but we would want to remind him that he'd need to attribute as well by adding a link in the footer. James A ▪ talk 03:19, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi folks! I'm the original tweeter. About the original tweet: meanwhile I fixed all links with a bot. There might be a couple of other sites linking to wikivoyage.org/en/ though, and possibly not. Would be worth to look into, could be quite some link juice there.

re attribution. I'm not so happy with giving attribution to a project that is being milked by a company that is keen on taking people to court. I prefer simply removing whatever content they have an issue with. I'm okay with attributing friendlier projects like WV. But overall I don't think WV content should be copied to couchwiki in the first place. It makes more sense for general travel info to be here on this wiki.

There were many links to WT though (not related to attribution), and I replaced almost all of them with working links to WV. Guaka (talk) 09:11, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Sounds all good to me. Thanks for your support of our project, Guaka! You are welcome to edit here when you have the time. James A ▪ talk 09:27, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I 100% approve Guaka's redirect request. There are many wikivoyage.org/en/Xyz links around, and they are broken, which is terrible both in terms of user experience and SEO link juice. Very related problem I told Wikimedia about 2 months ago: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48318 Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:24, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Important unresolved issue

Hey guys, there is something important I posted sometime ago that got lost along the way, and still needs discussion and reply, I guess. Please see Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#Automatic updates by sites reusing our content. Thanks, PrinceGloria (talk) 05:41, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage talk:Internet Brands

I was just looking at some of the historical pages and noticed that Wikivoyage talk:Internet Brands is rather confusing. I know that the notice at the top states that I should not assume content on this page is still correct or up-to-date but with the change of very occurence of wikitraval with wikivoyage, it has lost all it's original meaning. That edit should either be undone or the page should be deleted. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:31, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage:Votes for deletion. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:48, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I've fixed it so it once more makes sense. I had thought we already tracked down the couple instances where that bot change made everything nonsensical, but we clearly did not! --Peter ^Talk 04:34, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

wts.wv-old pub

Per User talk:Peterfitzgerald#Category:Pages to be imported from wts, we still need to import the pub from wts-old, as an archive of a zillion important discussions from the history of our project. (It's more or less the last thing that still needs to be imported from wv-old, and it would be nice to have that task finished.) But the exported XML file, obtained by special:export, is too large to import here via special:import (a tool limited to importers)—it's way over the WMF's filesize limit on imports, because of the long page history. Does anyone know who to contact for help? --Peter ^Talk 04:43, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

This would need to be tested first, but I believe that you can edit the file by hand to split it into smaller chunks and import it that way. Each chunk will need the <mediawiki> and <page> elements copied from the original (huge) file, but you can then split up the <revision> elements:

<!-- EVERYTHING BETWEEN THESE TWO COMMENTS MUST ALWAYS BE PRESENT - START -->
<mediawiki xmlns...>
  <siteinfo>
    <!-- trimmed for readability... -->
  </siteinfo>
  <page>
    <title>Page name</title>
    <ns>0</ns>
    <id>1507255</id>
<!-- EVERYTHING BETWEEN THESE TWO COMMENTS MUST ALWAYS BE PRESENT - END -->
    <revision>
      <!-- trimmed for readability... -->
    </revision>
    <revision>
      <!-- trimmed for readability... -->
    </revision>
    <revision>
      <!-- trimmed for readability... -->
    </revision>
<!-- EVERYTHING BETWEEN THESE TWO COMMENTS MUST ALWAYS BE PRESENT - START -->
  </page>
</mediawiki>
<!-- EVERYTHING BETWEEN THESE TWO COMMENTS MUST ALWAYS BE PRESENT - END -->

Note that the above is for illustration only - copy the actual <mediawiki> and <page> elements from the (huge) pub export file. Again, you would need to test this, but I think that should work. If it doesn't, bugzilla might be the best option as they could temporarily disable the import limits and import the file for you. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:59, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I figure that could work, but wouldn't we then need to somehow merge the pages that were imported as chunks of the larger page history? --Peter ^Talk 08:09, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I believe page merging is possible by putting page A at the intended destination, then deleting. Put page B at intended destination, then delete. Rinse and repeat with as many separations as necessary. Then you will need to undelete/restore all of the page revisions which will now appear together. That's the pagehistory sorted, but there may be a need to fix how the actual page displays. It definitely works in smaller cases, but this is a big job so couldn't be certain. James A ▪ talk 09:31, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

My understanding was that if you split up the file and then import the pieces to the same page name that the histories would be merged. From [8]:

If a page name exists already, importing revisions of a page with that name causes the page histories to be merged

Again, I don't know if that works in practice, but the docs claim it is doable. -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:27, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this did work (thanks!), happy to have it done. --Peter ^Talk 05:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Spelling change

I'm working on an entry for Hartstine island however it appears that the correct spelling should be Harstine Island, I'm sure there is an easy way to correct this, but I'm not sure what it is. There is some debate over the correct spelling, but it seems that Harstine is the most widely accepted spelling. --Lumpytrout (talk) 13:07, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

"Harstine Island" seems to be correct. --Saqib (talk) 13:10, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

If the article name is wrong you can move the page to the right name. Not much else can be done about it. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:35, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Right, the article has already been renamed to Harstine Island. --Saqib (talk) 13:37, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Interlingual Summits

I have started meta:Wikivoyage/Summit, per the discussion at meta:Wikivoyage/Lounge#Interlingual liaisons. It will be a place to share goings-ons from individual language versions with the entire Wikivoyage community, in the hopes of fostering more cross-wiki coordination, cooperation, and creativity. I wrote an initial [en] report, which hopefully serves as a decent example of what we want to share. If others would help publicize this idea on other Wikivoyage versions, I'd much appreciate it! --Peter ^Talk 20:01, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Peter, good report! The bugzilla issue is really an issue and if you hadn't read your report some good articles would be missing. Regards, jan (talk) 20:15, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Great overview, Peter. I was missing one thing: there was some social media activity recently involving facebook and twitter, which is rather trendy and important in a sense of promoting WV, but I can't say how serious the progress is, because I am rather asocial myself. Perhaps this can go to the next month :) Danapit (talk) 20:25, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Process for hacked account reports

Does anyone know what to do if there is a report of a hacked account? We have had our first such report, but I can't find any documentation anywhere about how to follow up. I tried emailing a few stewards, but have for whatever reason been completely ignored. Where else should I try asking this question? --Peter ^Talk 21:26, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Try poking them on Meta, or on IRC... sometimes they miss emails :) --Rschen7754 00:09, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Logo selection process opening

As announced in May, a new logo needs to be selected for Wikivoyage. After several weeks of process discussion, the submission period for the logo selection process will be opening today, Wednesday 10 July, with the first round of voting set to launch on 24 July. The final logo should be selected and announced by 31 August. All contributors are welcome to submit their designs for a new Wikivoyage logo before 24 July, to discuss design proposals, and (if registered by 31 May) to join in on voting for the logo at each stage. Please see the 2013 Wikivoyage logo selection page for details. Thank you! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Item in regard to Gay Travel

[9]

Hope you don't mind me linking this Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

If the situation described in that article is correct then I think it's definitely worth a mention in the Russia article. --Nick ^talk 21:32, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Stunningly, the Russia article makes no mention of GLBT travelers at all. From what news reports I've read, the situation is indeed as stated; the Kremlin in the last week has taken an extremely hard line against homosexuality. LtPowers (talk) 23:34, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Pagebanner nomenclature

I've noticed I huge renaming activity on the pagebanner. Could you tell me where is the nomenclature policy? I'd like to translate it in Italian to integrate our manuals. Thanks, --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:28, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Andyrom75, It is not actually a policy, in that it could not be enforced. It is just a recommendation that should make the banner names easier to use.

The relevant discussion is ongoing on Wikivoyage talk:Banner Expedition and other places and is summarised at Wikivoyage_talk:Banner_Expedition#MOS_Page_banners. It will probably be rehashed before it is final.

The rationale is that there are three functions for the banner name:

1. Identify it as a banner. The word banner is suitable for this purpose and has been used as default. Two positions were independently chosen for this. One was at the beginning of the name, and the other at about the end.
2. Another part of the name is usually to identify a destination or region for which the banner applies. This is also useful. I have chosen to put it as the first part of the filename for easier searching, which means that "banner" must go after it. This part is most useful if it identifies the lowest level article where it would be applicable, so it would be the destination, in most cases a city, but sometimes a geographical or architectural feature. In some cases disambiguation is desirable, I recommend in parentheses (), so it is clear that it is disambiguation or similar regional identification.
3. There is a strong feeling among some of our members that more description of the actual image is useful. So far this has not been included in the name very often, and so I have put it in third position. It is up to the uploader what to put here, and as it may be in any language, putting it after the word "banner" helps to identify it as non-critical information if one cannot read the language.

In this way the word "banner" is used to both identify the file as a page banner file, and to separate the critical regional information from the less critical description, and by standardising on a single word over all languages, it would make inter-language use of the files more convenient.

The destination name is likely to be recognized even by people who know nothing else of the language. Even English speakers will generally recognize the native names for cities, as long as they are in a roman type font. It will be more of a problem with Greek, Cyrillic, middle eastern and Asian fonts, but at least we will all know that the text that comes before "banner" is the part we need to translate to use the file in the right place.

Using separate words with conventional capitals makes the names easier to identify for people who may not be familiar with them A foreign name made up of several unfamiliar words strung together with no spaces and no capitals is difficult to recognize, particularly as place names do not always follow logical structure.

I hope I have not caused any problems at it: with the name changes. All the cases I checked made correct redirects.

I hope this helps, Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 22:34, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Just few comments:

1. Considering that the renaming activity has already started I suggest you to systhetize the nomenclature rule somewhere to help all the users to put the right name on the banner. We have just add one few hours ago but this rule hasn't shared earlier.
2. Once done, please send me the link in my it:voy talk page, so that I can spread it in our policy too
3. Generally speaking, before starting an activity that involve more than just one wiki could be nice to let those wikis aware about it. Also inviting people in the discussion could be nice, because we can give the chance to contribute with ideas. ....don't get me wrong, it was easy understandable what you were doing, and I agree with it, it's just a matter of form, because I've received several question via talk and IRC.

I'm sure next time we'll have a great cooperation ;-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 23:30, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Andyrom, Better communications would be great. Sometimes we slip up for obscure reasons. In this case we started a project on en:, which was taken up by other languages. That is a good thing, because it spreads the effort. It would also be helpful if someone from the other language Wikivoyages which choose to use banners would join our discussions, even if only as an observer, so what we do does not come as a surprise. Obviously this can only work if they can read and write English, but a plan can be made. I started to do maintenance work on this project, and didn't think of the possible effect on other language projects. For this I apologize, but communication works both ways. I suggest you put this page and the expedition page on your watchlist. If you think a centralized discussion off en: would be appropriate, go ahead and propose it.

The nomenclature rule is still under discussion: the current suggestion is at Wikivoyage_talk:Banner_Expedition#Banner file names, Once it has been adequately discussed it will probably be moved to the project page. Cheers,• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

To monitor all the wikis it's quite difficult for anyone. Maybe in el:voy they are creating something great but me and and you don't know anything about it. So my suggestion, in order to enforce the sense of interlingual community, is to share proactively the relevant news and/or activities. I think it makes sense. --Andyrom75 (talk) 12:31, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you, but who should do the notification? this is a wiki and somewhat anarchic. Also the matter of when to notify. Not every idea gets off the ground. Some look like great ideas and never happen, others just suddenly leap into life and before you know it everyone is running around making changes and no-one thinks of the other languages until they find out by accident. This is not because we don't want them to know or don't care, it often happens that no-one thinks of it or assumes someone else will do it. I was not even one of the original expedition, It never entered my mind that I should notify other languages. Peter Fitzgerald has alreadystarted a monthly announcement system at the meta:Wikivoyage/Summit for this kind of notification. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:56, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

In fact I'm glad that Peter F. has taken the lead of the summit initiative, it could be a small step towards the change of everyone's attitude (obviously me included). --Andyrom75 (talk) 13:50, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I just read through the reports from the other languages at Summit, and took a look at a few pages on it: Your people are doing some nice work.

I also think that the summit reports are a good place for this sort of notification. It makes it easier when you know where and when to look. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 14:48, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your appreciation, but the path to reach, what I consider, a "stable situation" is still long, but we are doing our best :-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 18:06, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Shorter than it was, perhaps. Where we can share we can save resources. I don't know about on it:, but on en: more constructive change may happen in a month than in a year back on WT. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:24, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree, because at the end, wikis like companies, is made by people and not by brands. I can say the same for it:voy. As you have read by my report, since January I've introduce more changes than in the last few years (trying to repair at the same time to some anarchy disaster that has occurred...). A further organic grow could come from an interlingual wikis organization and cooperation where is possible; for example, keeping the focus on the banner, when someone add a new Pagebanner it could be add into the other wikis that are currently implementing them. It's a similar logic of the one that I was expressing above: who introduce something news, should feel the ownership of spreading it. Personally, I'm doing this with tehc. aspects (JS & Template) when an improvement is "so obvious" I just implement it in en:voy, when it's a matter of choice (or when the change affect pages that only a sysop can change) I ask in talks. --Andyrom75 (talk) 06:55, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Andyrom, Are you suggesting that if someone creates a new custom page banner and substitutes it for the default banner (or adds it if there is none) they should click through the language links for that page and substitute or add it in all languages which do not already have a custom banner for that page? I like the idea, but if a language does not use banners we should probably not push it on them, so I would limit this to substituting for default banner, on the principle that if there is a template, the language has opted in. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 14:34, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

You have exactly expressed what I was thinking: cooperation between the wiki that shares the same idea (on a specific topic) but don't push the others as far as they prefer to proceed with their different opinions/approaches. I've seen that you have already amended the guide, and I'm fine with that. Question: once "completed" which is the best place for the guide? Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition? The top of Wikivoyage talk:Banner Expedition? Other places? --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:22, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we might have the guide on the Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition page, with links from the Wikivoyage:Manual of style and Wikivoyage:Policies which is linked from the sidebar, but this is just my guess. It may be more appropriate to create a new Wikivoyage:Page banners article, linked from the same places. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition sounds good, because it gives a panorama of the expedition and it could give also the rules to support it, unless it's not intended somewhere else that the rules/policy should stay in other dedicated pages. In that case Wikivoyage:Page banners or maybe better Wikivoyage:Pagebanners (like the name of the template) could be a good candidate. Who could be the best people to clarify this doubt? --Andyrom75 (talk) 12:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

These things happen by consensus. We all have to wait and see. My opinion is as weighty as anyone else's, and so is yours for that matter. Whether my guess is good remains to be seen, but those look like the logical options. My personal preference is for Wikivoyage:Page banners as it describes what it is about and should be an easy guess for a search string. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I'll reformulate. I was wondering if someone knows where these kind of info are supposed to be because maybe it has been already decided a sort of framework. If not, clearly it must be discussed and maybe not only for the pagebanner but for all the expedition (just to speed up future activities). --Andyrom75 (talk) 15:21, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Not that I know of, but I might have missed it. There seems to be a general reluctance to formalize processes if it can be avoided, though again, that might just be my interpretation. I spent a lot of time and effort before and during the migration working on rationalizing the policy documentation on en: with the intention of making it easier for new users to find out what the policies actually are, and the Wikivoyage:Policies page is largely the result of that work. The Wikivoyage:Manual of Style document is also more of a directory to component style guides and cut and paste article framework templates. I think you could reasonably say that most of our policies and guidelines are relatively short documents, tied together reasonably coherently by those two directory pages, so I would expect more of the same. I would say that any policy or guideline should be linked to from Wikivoyage:Policies, and any article style guideline should be linked from the Wikivoyage:Manual of Style directory, but occasionally we find one which is not. In those cases we generally add a summary and links to one or both of those pages. We try to keep the linkage to any given document as shallow and obvious as possible. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:40, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

In it:voy the situation is similar, but my interpretation is that writing policy is so boring (and I agree :-D), but it's necessary to avoid misunderstanding and waste of time. --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:24, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

We are very creative when it comes to misunderstanding and wasting time ;-) • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:02, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Definitely! :-D --Andyrom75 (talk) 22:50, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Would someone please add the recommended naming convention to Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition#Standards. I've halted with my banner uploads because I don't know how to go about this now, and don't want to create more work for Peter S. --Peter ^Talk 04:50, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I have looked it up at Wikivoyage talk:Banner Expedition#Banner file names, but that is really a ton of guidance for just how to name the uploads! I'm pretty overwhelmed by it. --Peter ^Talk 04:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I have revised the explanation to make it simpler and added a nutshell version as below: • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:10, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Nutshell

A banner file name is in three parts in ordinary text:

The required first part is the location name with optional clarification in parentheses, so we know where it can be used.

The required second part is the word banner

The optional but recommended third part is a short description of the image, so users can have some idea of what the banner looks like.

this is followed by the file type suffix, usually .jpg.

Banners for travel topics, itineraries and phrasebooks may use the same structure, or may be adapted as necessary. Try to follow precedent or create a more useful alternative.

Those rules look way too restrictive to me. Is there a reason to format the filenames so rigorously? LtPowers (talk) 17:04, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

That is the current recommendation as it makes them more portable between languages and more easily and reliably useful. Very few actually meet the ideal. "Locationname banner.jpg" is about average, and at present accepted without comment. That doesn't mean we shouldn't aim high. Its not as if following these guidelines is much work - were only talking about two to maybe ten words at a stretch.

When it comes to the crunch we have no way of stopping people from calling them anything they like, and not bothering to categorize them at all. We will still use them if the image is good for the job, and will probably fix them after the fact to make them more usable.

A strong set of logical guidelines and maybe most of them will be named usefully. We can but try.

On the other hand, If you have a better idea, go ahead and suggest it. First though, put yourself in the place of someone who doesn't read English, who wants to find a banner for a little known destination in a country that uses a third language, also unfamiliar, and bear in mind that machine translation is not very good with obscure place names. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:57, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, there is no requirement to use English names or descriptions, nor even latin characters (except for the word banner which is a marker).• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

The best way for non-English speakers to find images is via Commons' category system. I would be wary of anything that makes it too easy for all Wikivoyage versions to have the same banners for every location. LtPowers (talk) 01:41, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

The category system gets you to the country, occasionally to the region, and in a few cases the city. Then you have to select based on the file name, and depending on the country there may be anything from half a dozen or more suitable files for your target destination, to, more commonly, none at all. Unless you can reasonably easily identify the destination from the file name it would on average, be less work to create a new banner from scratch.

I think it is in the spirit of the project and of free wiki culture in general to accept whatever the other versions choose to use for banners with equanimity. If they use the same banner that we do, it suggests that the banner is widely acceptable. This also works the other way, other languages may create excellent banners which we would like to use, and we have more need for banners than the others as we have more articles. Any system that helps both ways should be seen as evidence of willingness to cooperate and share. Any effort we can save each other is effort that can be redirected to other constructive areas. Many of us are active on several WMF projects, and prefer to see useful things being spread around a bit.• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:30, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Another point. The easiest way to find a usable banner is to click on the article in another language, and just copy that banner to your own. Making it easier to identify appropriate banners from the file name actually makes it easier to find suitable banners that have been created but not yet used, which might otherwise be completely neglected. There are quite a few. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:35, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

What's wrong with different WV versions having the same banners for the same locations? Jjtkk (talk) 12:38, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

It reduces our individuality, and makes it more of an uphill battle for one version to buck the trend if they want to. LtPowers (talk) 13:59, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Any language version could buck the trend very effectively by either not using banners or by specifying a different banner aspect ratio, layout or something like that. It goes against commons policy to try to stop your images from being used by other projects, on or off WMF - once a banner is licensed CC-by-sa or similar it is out of your hands. If we wanted something exclusive we would have had to go a different route. By going this way we implicitly agreed that it is available for anyone else to use who wants to use it. :::::::::Incidentally I am very happy to see other projects using the banners, either on the equivalent article or anywhere else, and would have no objection at all to all of the language versions using identical banners for the same article if they wanted to do that. Equally I am not going to try to convince any other language project either to use or not to use banners, but I will do anything I consider reasonable to help them if they want to work together with us. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:31, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Greek islands = regions or cities?

Just doing some work on Skiathos and can't quite decide if it should be classed as a region or a city. Wikivoyage:Region_article_template says "Regions are somewhat nebulous organizational groupings we use on Wikivoyage to organize all the many cities in a country into some kind of navigable and comprehensible hierarchy." On Skiathos, and many other Greek islands, there is no way the individual settlements would warrant their own city guides - there's simply not enough to fill a page and the distinction between the settlements is practically non-existent. So by that logic, Skiathos should be classed as a city guide, right? Is there a policy for islands like this, or has there been a similar discussion for other Greek islands? --Tsandell (talk) 09:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

You're right, in that case we'd classify it as a city. Globe-trotter (talk) 11:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

City article names in the United States

I feel all city names should have the state in parenthesis after them, some do and some don't. When I've added cities to the Go Next section, I never know if the link has to have the state name after it or not like this edit [10]. I thought oh - there must be only one Bainbridge then in the United States but there are several worldwide. What do others feel about this? Like I said, I believe all cities should have the state name after them and that Bainbridge should be renamed Bainbridge (Georgia) and a disambig page created. --Mjrmtg (talk) 12:54, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

What for? The breadcrumb trail identifies the geographical associations of each city. Do you think this is inadequate? If there are more than one article of the same name a disambiguator is technically necessary as only one article can be identified by any one name.• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:57, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Peter. There is no need to disambiguate in the vast majority of cases, and I think simple and clean titles are far more preferable when possible. Adding extra disambiguation where it is not necessary will only make the breadcrumb looks more convoluted, and the info is already contained there anyway. Texugo (talk) 14:27, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

So, you're saying I shouldn't bother asking Bainbridge to be moved to Bainbridge (Georgia) so a Bainbridge disambig page could be created so other Bainbridge cities can be created off of that disambig page? --Mjrmtg (talk) 18:22, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

No, they're saying that disambiguations should not be used when not necessary. If Bainbridge does need a disambiguation page, you don't need to ask, just move it yourself - that doesn't require any special account permissions here. -- D. Guillaume (talk) 18:28, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

That's about it, but please leave an edit summary explaining the move. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:32, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

m:Wikivoyage/Lounge#Phrasebooks

Please share your ideas. --Andyrom75 (talk) 16:56, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

broken breadcrumbs due to move

Anyone see a method of identifying broken breadcrumbs due to a page being moved? For example Winter sports in Switzerland no longer working because of renaming of Winter sports. There are also cities and regions in this state, which I have correct when come across but have not found a method of identifying either in a template or via a bot. --Traveler100 (talk) 11:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I've done a few edits to fix this. -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:29, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

thanks but fixing these in not the issue, it is how to find them without having to read the page?--Traveler100 (talk) 12:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I could add some coding to the {{RegionCat}} template to check if the related page is a redirect and then add that category to a maintenance category to then be sorted out. Can't do it this minute though but will look soon and then you can see if it would be useful. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:08, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I've added some code to {{TopicCat}} which checks for categories with a main page that is a redirect and adds it to Category:Categories with articles needing breadcrumbs fixing after page move if the category contains pages. I could also check for categories without pages and flag them for possible deletion if that was also useful. If this does what you want then I could also update {{RegionCat}} as well. -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Awesome, did not know about that invoke function. Actually brings up more things to fix that I was expecting. More work for the gnomes. --Traveler100 (talk) 18:55, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks great to me. Let's add it to RegionCat too. I'm curious too see how many things come up...Texugo (talk) 19:19, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I've done that and it's currently up to 26 items. -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:38, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I've also done a separate category which includes the empty categories where the page is a redirect and there is 47 in total. Category:Categories where article is a redirect -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:56, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

47 out of 25,000 is not bad, They are also easy to fix. Nice work. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Great work! Globe-trotter (talk) 16:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, this was a great idea. I've already stolen it and implemented it on pt: as well...Texugo (talk) 17:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Just to make sure—empty categories with the message "X is a redirect, probably due to a page move" should be deleted right? E.g., I should delete Category:Soccsksargen now that I've updated the crumbs to SOCCSKSARGEN on the appropriate pages? --Peter ^Talk 04:11, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I would say yes, absolutely. Empty categories outside the breadcrumb trail are completely useless. I don't think we need to go through vfd discussions everytime a link in the breadcrumb chain is renamed. Texugo (talk) 17:30, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

X is a redirect is likely only a usable category in the one oddball case where a redirect has breadcrumbs of its own, for instance "Russia isPartOf Europe" and "Russia (Asia) #REDIRECT Russia isPartOf Asia" was a trick to get "Asia > Russia (Asia) > Siberia" into the breadcrumb trail. Otherwise, if these are empty they should be shoot-on-sight as useless. K7L (talk) 18:10, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Related sites title appearing large

I noticed it first on pt:, but it appears to happen here too: On pages with links to wikipedia, commons, etc. (including this page, scroll up), the title for the "Related sites" section in the sidebar is now big, black, bold, and uncollapsable, unlike the titles for the other sections. Anyone know what happened to change it? Texugo (talk) 17:18, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You're right. Not a good look. --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 17:59, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Anyone know how to fix it? Texugo (talk) 21:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm almost certain we're stuck with a bugzilla request. Anyone feel like filing it?  ;) --Peter ^Talk 04:15, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Very very quick fix for now:

div.portal h5 {
    color: rgb(77, 77, 77);
    font-size: 0.75em;
    font-weight: normal;
    padding-left: 1.5em;
    padding-bottom: 0px;
}

But yep, definitely needs bugzilla request, maybe to change RelatedSites heading to <h3>. Not that I'm volunteering to file it. -- torty3 (talk) 04:33, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I gave that a try, but to no avail. Where did I go wrong? --Peter ^Talk 19:23, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I haven't a clue, but we're going to need to do a bugzilla request for it one way or another because it affects all language versions and that fix, if it worked, still wouldn't make it collapsible like the other headers. I've never done a bugzilla request before, so I don't really know what it entails. Is it really so complicated that no one wants to do it? Texugo (talk) 20:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Kind of, yes ;) --Peter ^Talk 21:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The CSS works fine for me, maybe have to Ctrl+R to clear cache. Looks like Rillke at de filed and fixed the bug, Bugzilla: 51517. It's been merged but might take a while to filter through. -- torty3 (talk) 04:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any difference here, even after clearing the cache. Both "Related pages" and "Related sites" headings are different from the others. Texugo (talk) 14:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Also the "Destination Docents" heading seems to have had growth hormones for breakfast. ϒpsilon (talk) 16:13, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Well looks like all the custom extensions were affected by the same highup change and the same fix in Bugzilla: 51517 has to be applied to mw:Extension:RelatedArticles and mw:Extension:Insider. I double checked that the temporary CSS fix works, but it has been reverted at Mediawiki:Common.css. -- torty3 (talk) 16:31, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I put it back in, but still have yet to see any results. I'll be really happy when I get to flip that switch of yours, btw ;) --Peter ^Talk 04:44, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Supersized headline in left sidebar

The headline "Related sites" used to be written with the same text size as "Get involved" and "In other languages" and indeed the rest of the text in the left sidebar but since yesterday I've noticed it's grown bigger and bolder and now looks like this:

Related sites

on all pages having that headline, including this page. The same goes for at least "Destination docents" and "Related pages" (click on Melbourne to see all three). I can see this in Safari, Firefox and Torbrowser. Has anyone else noticed it or is it just me? Is someone somewhere "experimenting" on the Wiki software or what? ϒpsilon (talk) 15:59, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

→ #Related sites title appearing large. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:01, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Oops, I didn't notice, just went here and hit "Add topic" :P ϒpsilon (talk) 16:10, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Deleting listings we don't find recommendable

I have a question regarding the official interpretation of our policies and guidelines regarding listings.

User:Sapphire, in a very long-winded argument about the distrification of Warsaw (which is turning rather ugly, but you can read it at Talk:Warsaw if you really want a nasty bit of Wikivoyage) is using a variety of arguments, but I got a real double take when I read this:

simply remove the places that we wouldn't recommend (actually, it's a policy)

and this:

Subjectivity is the foundation of Wikivoyage guides and the beauty of this wiki is that if Person A adds a restaurant or a do listing and Person B comes along a few weeks later and used this guide and had the worst time ever at that place, he/she can delete it.

Is this how we're supposed to roll? If so, what I am seeing is a big loud invitation to endless edit warring. Please correct me if I am wrong, or if User:Sapphire is wrong, I would love for him to stand corrected, as I do not want to work on Wikivoyage where listings are constantly being deleted. PrinceGloria (talk) 18:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The two most relevant policies are probably Wikivoyage:Avoid negative reviews, which User:Sapphire noted, and the "not a yellow pages" part of Wikivoyage:Goals and non-goals#Non-goals. That said, listings are not generally deleted unless lists get long or a place is truly objectionable (in which case it is common to leave a note on the talk page indicating why the listing was removed). With regards to the Warsaw discussion, everyone involved would be better served by a more civil discussion - for example, describing someone's argument as "long-winded" seems unnecessarily provocative. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I would appreciate a note on my personal talk page, if you plan on quoting me elsewhere on Wikivoyage. And, I would like to clarify that I never once said that I would remove someone's listings in this discussion. -- Sapphire (talk) 19:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(ec) I think that Sapphire is fundamentally wrong here. Contentious places should be described as such, according to the Be fair policy. Another policy, Wikivoyage:Avoid negative reviews, is quite vague, because it leaves a lot of freedom to post negative descriptions of places that are "prominently located" or "widely advertised". The original discussion concerned the central part of Warsaw, where nearly every place is prominently located, so Wikivoyage:Avoid negative reviews does not even apply here. --Alexander (talk) 19:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

As a side note: I meant "argument" as in "quarrel" (and not as "arguing one's case"), and long-winded referred to all of our writing there, both mine and other users' involved. It is very emotionally loaded and full of unnecessary verbosity in general, my posts included. But I find it hard to distance myself therefrom at this moment and suddenly become composed and balanced. I am not picking on Sapphire.

I am not a native speaker and quite emotional at this moment, I guess I am not expressing myself as well as I would want to. Apologies to anybody who might have felt offended. PrinceGloria (talk) 20:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Chin up, I find that district and region discussion has to be amongst the most drawn-out, contentious and personal, given that it has to be carried out by people who know the area well enough and if not careful, a head-on dispute implies that either side doesn't have a clue. Yet a great division gives a lot more context and understanding of an area than any other place like TripAdvisor or Wikipedia could. I do wonder if this will worsen with more users, since there'll be more home ground and it will get emotionally loaded. -- torty3 (talk) 04:24, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I'd kill for a few more users though ;) It's a little bewildering that I, having never been to Miami, am the site's foremost expert on its travel geography? --Peter ^Talk 19:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Can everyone please stop linking to my user page? I also have no idea how my opposition to two proposed guides has gone this off topic. The only reason I was mentioning it was because I thought not everyone understood that we shouldn't be listing every possible listing. Please note that I never said anything about the be fair policy. I used a hypothetical situation about Person B deleting Person A's entry to demonstrate what this wiki is about. From what I've read here, I am afraid that my words are being misconstrued and that some words have been put into my mouth. -- Sapphire (talk) 20:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

What on Earth is your issue with other folks linking to your user page, Sapphire? It's not only harmless, but it's common practice on Wikivoyage talk pages and always has been. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Preference only. Normally, I wouldn't give a damn, but, as I noted, I think my comments are being misinterpreted and I would rather not have my user name called out so blatantly when I think there is a discrepancy between what I was saying and what is being presented as what I was saying. -- Sapphire (talk) 21:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Understood. :) -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Birth defects

Let's not overwhelm it with comments from us, but I wanted to provide a pointer to the sobering thread at meta:Talk:Wikimedia budget#Cost of Wikivoyage. --Peter ^Talk 19:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the polite, diplomatic and elegant vote of thanks you delivered there, Peter, on behalf of all of us here. Let's try and make sure we're worth all that loot and effort. --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 22:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Line numbers in diffs

When one views the difference between revisions, there is a line number displayed above each change. Is there any way that one can use this number to find the change in the article? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:58, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Undead WTS

So I've finally finished importing the last of the pages I meant to from wts-old. You can find them all via Wikivoyage:WTS archive. Three requests for all:

1. Are there any more pages that really need to be imported and added to this archive?
2. Would you like me to import your WTS user talk page (like I did for myself)?

The third request is more complex. I created dummy (WT-shared) accounts here so that we could keep contributions histories intact after importing the articles (like this one). That means we'll be able to UserMerge (WT-shared) contributions into new, real accounts. I only created accounts here for (WT-shared) accounts that made edits to imported pages. If you think I missed you, let me know, and I'll create one for you. After tasks 1 & 2 are complete, I will do the user merges upon request. —in a nutshell, I'll be able to merge your old WT-shared accounts to your new ones, if your name is on that list.

Anyway, please let me know now about 1 & 2, or if something I wrote is unclear. --Peter ^Talk 06:09, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Should edit counts on a merged account include all edits made on WT? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:46, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

What do you mean by edit counts? --Peter ^Talk 06:52, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

For example http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Pbsouthwood shows 3,769 edits starting 19 November 2012 on en:Wikivoyage, and http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Pbsouthwood&dir=prev&target=Pbsouthwood shows my earliest edit as 7 September 2012, whereas my editing on WT started several years earlier, and those edits should all be in the history somewhere if the full history is here. It is no big issue if they can't be counted for some technical reason, but maybe they should be counted and there is a bug somewhere. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:29, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I was about to explain that yes, CentralAuth isn't counting mergeduser stats (stats.wikimedia does), but then I see that you haven't had your old (WT-en) account merged into your new one! Do you want me to do that now? --Peter ^Talk 07:37, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Please go ahead, I thought it might have been done, but don't know how to tell the difference. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:43, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I would like you to import my talk pages from wt if you don't mind. Texugo (talk) 11:24, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Agriculture - where you can stick it?

In Wikivoyage:Where you can stick it there appear to be no entries for agricotourism. Is picking your own apples/strawberries/blueberries an activity ("do"), a marketplace ("buy") or food ("eat")?

It looks like we're missing these:

• Barn dance, square dancing - "Do"
• County fair - "Do"
• Farm - "Buy" if the farm primarily sells produce, antiquities or souvenirs to travellers; "do" for tours, horse or wagon rides, corn mazes, haunted houses, "sleep" for rural B&B-style accommodations, "eat" if food is served for immediate consumption on-site
• Farmers' market - "Buy"
• Horse riding or lessons - "Do"
• Maple cabin/sugar shack/érablière - "Eat"
• Orchard - "Buy" if produce already picked and packaged for takeaway, possibly "do" for pick-your-own or "eat" if food consumed on-site
• Outfitter - "Do" (hunting/fishing as activity), possibly "Sleep" if cabins and campsites are offered or "Buy" if selling equipment
• Petting zoo, hobby farm - "See"
• Wagon ride, Hay wagon, farm tour - "Do" section
• Vineyard, Wineries - "Drink" if wine served on-premise, otherwise "buy" (wine sold for takeaway) or "do" (winery tour)

with all of these at city-level for the nearest village which has an article.

Do these look reasonable? I'm trying to place a "pick your own blueberries" in Nantes (Lac-Mégantic) somewhere but there's no wcysi for this. K7L (talk) 17:25, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Those look reasonable to me, although I don't recognize the term "maple cabin", and I don't think a farm would ever be an "Eat" entry - if the farm has a restaurant or similar business on its property then it would be more common to create a listing for that business than for the farm itself. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:31, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Is this reasonable to add:

• Pioneer village - "Do" (historical theme park as living, open museum for walking tour)

The w:Pioneer village format is an "open" museum in which a large group of historic buildings has been relocated and restored to 1800s operation, complete with the various trades (agriculture, blacksmithery, manufacture of clothing and household items) being carried out as they were historically. Effectively a museum ("see") on the scale of a theme park ("do") and focussed on one region in one historical era, so it falls between two existing wycsi classifications. K7L (talk) 18:42, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I think I'd put it in "See" (without the Wikipedia link). It seems more of a thing to see than do, to me.

I'd put a petting zoo in "Do," because it's about petting the animals, not just seeing them. I'm not sure what a hobby farm is. What is it? Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:58, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

These can be difficult, because there can be so many reasons at once to visit one farm. Trader's Point Creamery is listed in do section of Indianapolis, which I guess makes sense, but I only ever went there for the restaurant, which is absolutely fabulous. It's hard to handle that without a double listing, (especially in such a long article). --19:12, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Petting zoos should be in See with the other zoos; pick-your-own-produce farms should be in Buy with the other farm markets. While I understand the activity-related aspects of each of these, it's more important to my mind to group like with like. LtPowers (talk) 19:26, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I guess the concept I'm looking for is a farm where one can see, visit or feed the animals.

It looks like agritourism just generates more "see also" topics which need to be put somewhere:

• Agricultural show
• Rodeo (event)
• State fair

I presume these are events and therefore "Do"? K7L (talk) 19:28, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Do. Rodeo is already on the wycsi list, actually. Texugo (talk) 19:49, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

The article on agricultural show pretty much says it's the same as a state or county fair, even though these are separate articles as travel topics. K7L (talk) 20:16, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: Ryan's comment, as someone with a good deal of expertise on the region in question, I can provide some enlightenment on the subject of maple cabins. They're a very popular seasonal ritual in Québec, and to a lesser extent in anglophone Eastern Canada and northern New England. At the very beginning of the spring thaw (Feb-Mar), people go up to the sugar shacks (cabanes à sucre) to draw the sap out of the maple trees and boil it into syrup, with lots of merrymaking during and after the harvest including games, a big communal dinner where regional fare can be had - taffy made by partially freezing maple syrup on snow (tir à neige) is obviously a favorite. At any rate, maple cabins very obviously fall under "Do". -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I've added the agrotourism entries, but have a couple of other questions:

• duty-free store

We currently have this as part of airports but not freestanding (at the border). Should the duty-free at the international bridge be Buy?

• event, fair, festival, rodeo

We currently have these as Do, but there are many of these that run briefly for a weekend or a week in each town. A subsection Do - Events may be justified if these are numerous locally. K7L (talk) 04:58, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

That is basically standard practice to put them in an Events subsection. Texugo (talk) 17:30, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Growing like topsy

I believe that we should strive to make our Manual of Style as clear and simple as possible in the advice it offers to editors.

I'm a bit worried that our Wikivoyage:Currency page will grow into a huge list and become rather unwieldy and difficult to understand.

There are more than 100 different countries that don't really have a commonly recognised or well known symbol or abbreviation that is consistently used in the destination country and I don't think we should list them all on this page.

I have made a proposal for simplifying our policy somewhat (but preserving the existing exceptions, since I know many editors are loathe to re-visit articles related to those countries that already have a consistent use of different currency formats implemented).

The simplification I'd propose is that Except for the countries that we have already specifically listed on the $ policy page, we should prefix currency amounts with the three letter ISO 4217 code for the currency in block capitals and no intervening space, like this example:

• AZN100 in Azerbaijan, not ман 100, 100 AZN nor 100 Azerbaijani New Manat

Comments are welcome at Wikivoyage talk:Currency#Growing like topsy --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 22:36, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Listing editor

Well just in time to make use of Ryan's excellent bot work on templates, I've done up a listing editor at User:Torty3/editor.js, and to test it out, add importScript('User:Torty3/editor.js'); to your common.js. Now, I'm not a Javascript expert by any means and looked over at the other projects for examples (all the coders seem to be at Wikidata :), so a quick review would be great. Had a look at the Visual Editor and I think it could be problematic because it doesn't really process templates all that well.

Known bugs: cannot process nested templates and pipes, which might be problematic for ru.voy, but I don't think they're quite prevalent here. City/park/airport/district article state templates will need to be slightly tweaked in order to add the [add listing] button. The editor could also be implemented as a beta gadget to make testing easier. Further features could include geolocation, but I'm still contemplating how that would work out. -- torty3 (talk) 10:28, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow! It's a great start! After a very quick few tests, here are a few comments/bugs:

• Newly added listings seem to be uneditable - I copied a few existing listings to a new page (graffiti wall), then tried to edit. The buttons did nothing.
• I think having more fields/less fields is unnecessary, as some of those hidden fields are very common. There seems to be plenty of room to have it simply open up everything by default, so why not?
• Place name should be editable
• Sleep listings need to have checkin/checkout fields instead of an hours field
• The edit buttons should be hidden when looking at a non-current version of the page, so as not to inadvertently edit an old version
• The "image" field is not currently part of the listing template, and is quite buggy: When the image field is filled in for one item, it appears in that field for all items in the section. If a second one is added, random other listings get deleted. I think this field should be simply removed from the editor, as the template doesn't do anything with it currently and we do not encourage having an image for every listing (and restaurant/shop/hotel listings are actively discouraged from having their own image).

Problems aside, this is a very exciting development, and I'm really looking forward to getting the kinks ironed out and getting it rolling! By the way, what kind of changes to the article templates would be needed? Texugo (talk) 11:26, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

1. Hmm, unexpected use case. It's based on editing sections, so it needs at least one heading to make an edit. Will try to fix.
2. Wasn't too sure about more/less fields, was just trying to balance the visual load.
3. Will fix the place names/sleep listings and edit buttons.
4. Just added in the image field because the dynamic maps are using them, see Soltau, though that's more of a de.voy preference still. Could probably hide it. I think the big deletion may have been due to the equal signs in the website url, which is pretty bad.
5. Article status templates - eg outline city, guide district, usable airport, will need a unique identifier like <div id="#root_location"></div> to load the [add listing] button, because countries/regions/travel topics shouldn't get the [add listing] buttons. Should the [add listing] buttons show up next to Understand/Get in/Get around? Because we could still add a tourism bureau listing for example. Also should there be no [add listing] buttons in main huge city articles?

It was easier than I thought to set up, but the niggly part will be getting it to work perfectly. By the way, the only code needed in common.js is

importScript('User:Torty3/editor.js');

then I can keep updating it separately. -- torty3 (talk) 12:09, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Great work! I think this is crucial for the project, and can't wait to see it implemented. When testing it, I got a similar bug as Texugo [11]. Globe-trotter (talk) 13:28, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Another thought: You might want to make the "type" field a drop-down selector so that only valid types can be chosen. Otherwise we may get people changing it to "hotel" or "museum" or "mexican food"... Texugo (talk) 14:36, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh yeah. Was being lazy by making it read-only :D Type will be automatically selected when adding listings, though a dropdown menu will of course be more flexible. A text input is for some other languages in mind, hence why I was leaning towards extensible code. Which is a little bit of the drawback with the templates compared to the tags. -- torty3 (talk) 15:30, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I was just thinking that a drop-down type selector would make it easier to correct existing cases where the wrong type has been used, but there is no reason for it to accept free text input, which just results in a red template link for any non-legitimate type entered. Texugo (talk) 15:49, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Fabulous! Here we go:

1. Per Wikivoyage:Accommodation listings checkin/checkout are rarely supposed to be filled out, so it's probably best to just leave them off the editor. I recommend the same for fax. I can't for the life of me find the discussions where we planned to leave these off the form based listings editor, but I swear we had them ;) Marketers always add useless info for these sections, and we also don't want to give editors the notion that it's worth their time to add fax numbers for nightclubs.
2. The editor doesn't pop up for the listings at Valle de Cocora#Do, presumably because they don't have all the standard fields in the wikitext. I did that to get listings to show up on the dynamic map, and this will also be an issue for other itineraries where the "listings" need to go on the map, but are in the middle of narrative, like The Wire Tour. The solution there might be to have a separate POI-tag for use in general prose, rather than a fix to the editor. It wouldn't be desirable for the form editor to add those fields when updating the ones already present.
3. I think it's best to add the [add listing] button only to traditional listings headings: see, do, buy, eat, drink, sleep, and connect. While they occasionally see use in other sections, like fax and checkin times, they're rare enough where we don't want to encourage their use on the level that an [add listing] button would suggest.
4. The editor gets confused by listings that lack an item in the name= field, e.g., restaurante anonymous in La Macarena#Eat. In that same section, for reasons much less clear, the form editor won't appear when clicking [edit]. My best guess is that there is an extra space in the name= field.

I'll find more stuff as I keep testing. --Peter ^Talk 18:10, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow, this is BRILLIANT! Editing listings is a blast now!

That said, I have an issue in Dresden, where there are both a Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express in the same section, and it won't let me edit the former, opening the window for the Express whenever I try the regular Holiday Inn (the Express is first on the list).

It would also be good to have at least the more popular currency signs (€, $, £) next to the "price" field, as copying them in is a bit of a chore and defies the streamlining/timesaving aspect of the editor a bit.

If you were thinking of expanding the editor further, an "add listing" button would be brilliant, and it would be good if we could simply drag-and-drop listings between sections, as well as automatically arrange them alphabetically inside a section.

Thanks a lot for that and have fun further developing the editor! PrinceGloria (talk) 03:34, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Another helpful idea: When a URL is added, have it check that it starts with http:// and if not, add it before saving. I just finished correcting about 1300-1500 wrongly inserted URLs, so obviously this is a problem that the listing editor could help avoid. Texugo (talk) 23:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Pywikipedia is migrating to git

Hello, Sorry for English but It's very important for bot operators so I hope someone translates this. Pywikipedia is migrating to Git so after July 26, SVN checkouts won't be updated If you're using Pywikipedia you have to switch to git, otherwise you will use out-dated framework and your bot might not work properly. There is a manual for doing that and a blog post explaining about this change in non-technical language. If you have question feel free to ask in mw:Manual talk:Pywikipediabot/Gerrit, mailing list, or in the IRC channel. Best Amir (via Global message delivery). 13:07, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Global search

Is there any way to search all Wikivoyages for a given article (I'm working on importing Wikivoyage interwikis over to Wikidata)? King jakob c 2 (talk) 20:27, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Google? Use "site:wikivoyage.org". But keep in mind many articles will have different names in different languages. LtPowers (talk) 21:05, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Wouldn't the conversion to Wikidata be done using 'bots and the data extracted from the existing interwikis? That's how this was handled on Wikipedia. Doing this by hand is ridiculous, slow and repetitive. K7L (talk) 04:11, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata is here!

Heya folks :)

I just wanted to let you know that the first part of Wikidata has now been enabled here. This means you no longer have to store interwiki links in the article's wiki text but can do so via Wikidata. This also means that it no longer has to be kept in sync across all the languages but is only stored and edited in one place. Please keep in mind that if you keep local interwiki links in the wiki text they will overwrite the ones on Wikidata. You can now start migrating the links or wait for one of the bots to come and do it for you. Access to other information on Wikidata like timezones, airport codes and so on is not enabled yet. This will follow in the future. Please do let me know if you encounter any issues or have questions. d:wd:Wikivoyage migration has a list of people who are additionally willing to help with any problems you might encounter. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 21:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Lydia. I don't fully understand how this works. Do we still need to include links to Wikipedia and Commons, or are those also in Wikidata? Also, is Wikidata automatically linked to every article, or do readers have to know to surf to that site in order to find interwiki links? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:21, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia and Commons links still need to be included for now, but the eventual goal is to not require this. Wikidata links will show up automatically on every article, when the article and the Wikidata item are linked (and bots are going around right now trying to link them). --Rschen7754 22:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes what Rschen said. For the reader nothing changes with this. For the editors it should be less work and less fighting with bots (and in the future access to all the other information that is in Wikidata). --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 22:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

For example, San Diego now has all interwikis coming from Wikidata. When the next language Wikivoyage comes out (Vietnamese according to the rumors) then we add the interwiki to Wikidata, and it is updated automatically on all other Wikivoyages. --Rschen7754 22:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Nice! Thanks to all you technical folks for making this possible. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:39, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome! It's so nice to be welcomed with open arms all over Wikivoyage. Please never lose that! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 22:42, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

What's the best way to fix errors?

Let me explain: Take Manhattan/Lower Manhattan for instance. It's properly linked to de:Manhattan/Financial District and a couple of other languages. But the Wikidata page is d:Q11253 (titled "Lower Manhattan"), which refers to the entire lower third of the island (below 14th Street) while the English and German articles cover only the tip of the island (below Chambers St and the Brooklyn Bridge).

So how should this be repaired? Should I delete the Wikivoyage article links from d:Q11253 ("Lower Manhattan") and add them to d:Q1050048 ("Financial District")? Or is there a better way to handle it?

-- LtPowers (talk) 14:32, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes please remove it from the first one and add it to the second one. (Order is important as a link can never be in two items on Wikidata at the same time.) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 19:04, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, another question: How are renames handled? If I rename Manhattan/Lower Manhattan to Manhattan/Financial District, would it be picked up automatically, or would I need to manually edit Wikidata to fix the linkage? LtPowers (talk) 19:44, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

It should be done automatically now. This is a very new feature though so please do test it and let me know if there are any issues with it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 20:15, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Make Facebook thumbnail avoid banner?

When linking to a webpage in Facebook, Facebook crawls the page and tries to find an image to use as a thumbnail.

In case of Wikivoyage, apparently Facebook often chooses the banner, which is almost always a bad choice:

• When the article has a custom banner, it almost always have other images, whose size would fit better (banner is unrecognizable at thumbnail size)
• When the article has a default banner, it would be better to use the Wikivoyage logo.

Apparently a web page can specify the image to use using some HTML code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5749028/how-do-i-prevent-an-image-from-showing-up-as-a-thumbnail-option

Not worth bugging the Wikimedia staff, but if anybody has time to try, a proof-of-concept would be a great start :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

That's never been a problem for me. In updating WV's Facebook page when new featured articles come out, Facebook almost always prompts me to select from a series of images to use as the thumbnail. Perhaps it's an issue with your browser? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Easier way to link to a sub-section?

Let's say a friend asks me for for luxurious restaurants in Roppongi. I would like to send a link, but I can only find links to sections (eg Eat) not sub-sections (eg Eat→Splurge). By investigating the HTML source code of the page, I can find out that the link http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Tokyo/Roppongi#Splurge but there is no easy way to do so from a normal user's point of view.

How about solving this problem but doing like Github wiki? When you put the mouse over a title, a small "link" icon will appear on the left, which is a deep link that can be copied (Copy Link Location).

It might be doable by templates/CSS without having to bother the Wikimedia staff... anyone willing to give it a try? Being easy to link to is very important in terms of adoption+SEO. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:40, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Not sure if I'm fully sure of your concerns, but in terms of internal linking, it's simple: Tokyo/Roppongi#Splurge. If you are pointing out that is difficult to find for everyday users, considering we have no links to third level headers in the banner, maybe so. But I don't think it's a major concern, as just like the TOC, the sections are compact enough that there shouldn't be a need to link to specific smaller sections, and Tokyo/Roppongi#Eat should be enough. James A ▪ talk 06:58, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

"there shouldn't be a need to link to specific smaller sections" Actually I happened to preceisely have this need, an hour ago. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:47, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Digression: I would even say that linking to the description of a particular hotel would be very useful. I don't know in other countries, but in Japan people rarely share the official URL of a restaurant, they link to a third-party review site that has compact info about the place. Most restaurants around the world don't have websites nor reviews in <choose your language>, so the habit of linking to the Wikivoyage entry could even see widespread adoption. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:47, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

10th anniversary?

Hi, an IP address has just informed me that it's the 10th anniversary of WV, wanting this mentioned in the Signpost. Is this true? Tony (talk) 15:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep! See #10 years of WT/WV above. Texugo (talk) 15:02, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, the editor in chief may agree to put this in an "In brief". I wish we'd known about it before. If there's a potted history, please link me to it. Tony (talk) 15:11, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

More accurately, it's the 10th anniversary of the founding of the community that currently edits Wikivoyage. The history is well covered at w:Wikivoyage and w:Wikitravel if you want to know the gory details. LtPowers (talk) 15:34, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Improving WV and increasing readership

• Many of our articles are missing pictures and pictures are key to a travel resource. There are many pictures on Wikipedia / Commons that could be easily added. I have done a few. Having a list of all articles missing pictures would make adding them easier. Does this exist or could a bot create one?
• If alexa.com is to be trusted 20% of our visitors were just at Wikipedia. It would be useful to make sure that we have a link from each of the corresponding Wikipedia articles to Wikivoyage in the external links section. I know many exist but not sure how consistent this is. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:28, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for helping! There is a page called Wikivoyage:Pages needing images, but it lists only some such pages and needs updating. It also is not linked from Category:Articles needing attention, and like an unsigned user who posted to Category talk:Articles needing attention, I have no idea how to insert a link into Category:Articles needing attention. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:56, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

There's also Category:Articles without Wikipedia links, but it is essentially - and seemingly inexplicably - essentially contentless. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:59, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I added a note over there -- since it's a manually generated list, not a category, it can't be added as a subcategory like the others. I also don't know if it's still being updated?

(Add links to categories by prefixing the link with a colon, e.g. [[:Category:Africa]] instead of [[Category:Africa]].) -- D. Guillaume (talk) 20:09, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

To my knowledge, no-one is updating it. Is there a way a bot could update it? Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:16, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes a bot that lists all articles without pictures would be perfect. Should be easy to do to. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:08, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

My recent exposure to Tripadvisor brought home how old-fashioned the WV model has become. Tripadvisor isn't optimal (cluttered, not always intuitive, and commercial to its core), but some of its structure and processes could be modified and adopted here without much trouble: I refer specifically to the much more effective invitations to readers to write reviews of hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions. We fail dreadfully on that count. It's all in the linking and the creation of sub-pages. My second observation is that we need a lot more images. I'm almost inclined to run competitions and award prizes as a way of boosting our photographic profile. Is there a WV thematic organisation yet??? Tony (talk) 03:00, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree allowing users to provide reviews would be a great way to draw them into contributing. Is discussed here with mockups Wikivoyage:Roadmap/Enable_listings_reviews. We need programmers to help.

Yes a competition for photos is a good idea. IMO every article should have at least one appropriate photo.

There is a Thorg for Wikivoyage here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage_e.V. It was started in 2006 in Germany. Stefan will be speaking with me at Wikimania. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:14, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Our problems with struggling readership begin and end, essentially, with SEO.

Leaving aside the brief blip in activity during the launch week, Wikivoyage has actually been trending sharply downward on Alexa since the launch (it bears mentioning that over the past two weeks there's been a sustained uptick in activity, but as far as I can tell it's too early to say whether that's anything more than a statistical anomaly). Meanwhile, in this same time period, Wikipedia has been diligently adding interwiki links on its pages to Wikivoyage. The original commenter's points on continued integration of Wikivoyage with other WMF sites is well taken; however, the trend over the past six months says to me that we can't rely on Wikipedia alone to drive visitors to our site.

Also, while I'll be the first to say that more images are a good thing, I highly doubt that how many images our articles have makes much of a difference in our Alexa rankings. Wikitravel, being essentially a dead site as far as active contributions are concerned, presumably has fewer images than we do. But, far from sinking like a stone, over the past six months Wikitravel's lead over Wikivoyage on Alexa has actually widened. This despite the fact that Wikipedia has been removing links to Wikitravel on its pages as steadily as it's been adding links to us. According to Alexa, fully 19.3% of Wikitravel's viewers were referred there by Google - and that figure takes into account only google.com, not google.de, google.co.uk, and the other international Googles, six more of which besides the main one are on the top 10 list of upstream sites for Wikitravel. Meanwhile, Wikivoyage only gleans 6.1% of its visitors from Google. This says to me that, again, our main problem is with SEO.

Wikivoyage has a Search Expedition. I'm not an active contributor, as I know next to nothing about the technical aspects of SEO, so I can't say for sure how active that expedition is. But if it isn't active, it really, really, really needs to be. In my opinion, we need to put on the back burner things like adding images to articles and cajoling Wikipedia to continue adding interwiki links to us, and go full throttle in solving our Google problem, whether that be by convincing them that we're not just a mirror of Wikitravel, or by twisting the WMF's arm to do what they need to do, or whatever the hold-up happens to be. All other concerns regarding boosting readership are, frankly, secondary. Failing a solution to our Google problem, we are going to end up the dead site, not Wikitravel.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:58, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Presentation for Wikimania

Stefan and I are working on a presentation for Wikimania Aug 10th in Hong Kong here [12]. We have 50 minutes to speak about Wikivoyage. Any comments / suggestions? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps after making your audience all enthusiastic for the project, suggest to edit their home town, add their favourite restaurant. Since on Wikipedia it's quite the other way around (personal involvement often being considered a bad thing), I imagine it might be useful to point out that we in fact like such suggestions. It's a good way to get started, I think. Good luck with the preparations! JuliasTravels (talk) 22:02, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

It's super that you're doing this! I think it would be great to present some of the improvements we've made, such as the changes to the front page, pagebanners, and increased numbers of high-quality images on pages, with "before and after" projections. Please also mention the monthly features and show them examples of Destination of the Month, Off the Beaten Path, and other featured articles. As a side point, many phrasebooks could use more help, and at an international conference in Hong Kong, I'm sure there will be speakers of many languages, so as part of your request, you could also suggest that some members of the audience might enjoy helping improve phrasebooks in languages they speak. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:06, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Might want to mention the ongoing Airport Expedition and the work on the Dynamic maps Expedition and listing editor. I'd also say anything you can do to get people interested in the other language versions would be great. Es:, pt:, and ro: are all really hurting for more collaborators, and other versions may be too. Texugo (talk) 22:13, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks great suggestions. Maybe will also discuss the manual of style. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:05, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

You asked for it and you will get it and you will regret it. I am pretty anal about presentations, plus just woken up by a random call in the middle of the night, so rather p!ssed. But FWIW, here I go:

1. Experience tells me that bullet-point slides are not a good way to capture the audience's attention. Even if you end up conveying so much more than the bullet points say, people will read the bullet points quickly and their attention span will lapse. Any kind of picture or graphic, be it a chart, screenshot, photo, graph, illustration is much more stimulating to the brain and will have the audience wanting to find out its relationship to the slide text.
2. I believe it would be good if the presentation would be useful for those who won't be able to attend the conference for them to download, and as such should be self-contained and self-explanatory in a way. I believe in 50 minutes you will want to say more than what you have on the slides more, so adding a few more words of explanation and details won't hurt.
3. I would consider starting with the bright side - what is Wikivoyage, how it is useful, fun, engaging and worthwhile. The gloomy, murky bits about the history could be left for a later bit - it is important to speak about it, but it would be better not to make the impression that Wikivoyage is only about being in conflict with IB
4. I am not really sure what messages you are trying to convey with all the charts. It would be good to add titles, comments and takeaways, especially for the offline reader
5. Slide 15 sounds like we are all doomed and will die. Besides, was anybody surveyed to say that Wikivoyage is "technically hard to edit" and has "too many rules"? If I am reading it correctly, those seem like personal opinions and should not be presented as facts, but rather hypotheses. There are many other reasons why people might not get to edit WV, and it would be good to list all the hypotheses along with some proof. One of my hypotheses is that there simply aren't enough people aware of and frequently visiting WV to convert into a substantial editor group. A comparison of the number of visitors / page views and editors of popular travel sites (WT, TripAdvisor, WV) would come in handy to test it.
6. If slide 15 is about something totally else, this proves my point about writing (and illustrating) slides in a way that the offline reader gets the message just as well.
7. At any rate - what's with all this stuff about women, Facebook and Pinterest???
8. Slides 18-20 need titles and comments as to what they present
9. Slide 22 (how to find new Contributors) should go after the discussion of how there aren't many now
10. Another way one can start contributing is by looking up the guides for the places they plan to travel to and improve them during their own plans and preparations (this is what I do), as well as after returning. This is when one devoted the most attention to a destination and sees it from the same POV other target readers would.
11. The fun thing about WV is that you can contribute meaningfully even when you have very little time, willingness and attention span. Adding a listing or photo, making a banner or copyediting a section can be very worthwhile. At Wikipedia, real satisfaction mostly comes from writing a long, well-referenced status and pushing it through FA, which often requires weeks of work. Wikivoyage is always "live" and never finished (like a Wikipedia FA article), so one doesn't need to feel bad when their contributions are scattered across what tickled their fancy at a given moment. Dropping to WV for a moment can be a good way to relax from the demanding and rather formalized other projects, like Wikipedia.
12. We absolutely need to mention the Dynamic Maps in a most prominent way, and the future possibilities, such as "Special:Nearby". To me this is so much more important and powerful to reviews, which will be a laughably underutilized feature until we get readership and usership on par with other travel sites. And this may only happen thanks to innovative features such as dynamic maps and real-time geolocalization.
13. If there is any expedition I would mention besides Dynamic Maps, I'd say it's Banners.

I guess that's it in terms of reasonable comments I could make at that time of day (night). Do not hesitate to let me know how I can help you with the presentation. Kindest, PrinceGloria (talk) 00:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC) PrinceGloria (talk) 00:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Slide 15 is for the Wikipedia crowd generally rather than specifically about Wikivoyage. There is huge talk in the movement as a whole about editor numbers and why they have stop growing. My point is that Wikivoyage does not have huge numbers of rules and is not hard to edit and yet it too stopped growing at about the same time as Wikipedia did.

The female / male ratio is another huge issue.

Do you have some links to more info on the dynamic maps?

Yes agree with leading with images. Many of them have no text. The key point in that WV has had an uptick in activity both in editor numbers and content creation since joining the WM movement. I will write in some notes to go with the slide for those note present. It will be recorded as well. Travel Doc James (talk ·contribs · email) 00:25, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage logo proposal

I wanted to just briefly let you know that submissions for the Wikivoyage logo proposal are now closed, and the images are open for community review for obvious copyright issues or other disqualifications. The current batch of logos are located here: m:Wikivoyage/Logo/2013/R1/Gallery. The time between now and 00:01 UTC, 26 July 2013 is set aside for the community to review those submissions for obvious copyright issues or other concerns that would prevent their being eligible for selection. Please place any comments at m:Talk:Wikivoyage/Logo/2013/R1/Gallery. I will announce here when the first round of voting begins (scheduled for 00:01 UTC, 26 July 2013). For more about the process, please see m:Wikivoyage/Logo 2013.

I also want to thank Rillke for making all this work, and all the Wikivoyagers who have submitted logo designs and helped to guide designers so far. :) --Mdennis (WMF) (talk)