Wikivoyage:Cultural Expedition

The Cultural Expedition is a Wikivoyage Expedition to give travellers a basic understanding of the culture, customs, behaviour and etiquette of a particular country or region.

Rationale

Interacting with local people is one the highlights of a trip to a foreign country. On many occasions travellers are surprised and sometimes even shocked when they discover the habits, ways and practises of the people they are visiting. And just as well they might find the way a traveller behaves funny, odd or even appalling. Understanding these differences and acting accordingly helps to bridge the gap between the traveller and the local.

Goals

• Determine the place of cultural guides in Wikivoyage as a whole
• Examine the ways other articles relate to these guides and vice versa
• Define a cultural guide template to give them a consistent look and feel, and to make starting new guides easier
• List the cultural aspects that travellers will most likely encounter in a given territory.

Cultural guides in Wikivoyage

The same culture can be shared by different countries, but one country can also harbour a multitude of cultures. These boundaries do not necessarily follow the national or regional borders used in Wikivoyage articles. Culture primarily has to do with people and less with land. So, the nature of cultural topics is sufficiently different from the content found in "geographical" articles. Therefore a separate cultural guide can link to the appropriate "geographical" articles and vice versa. If need be, interlinking cultural guides of different levels can be written. For example, the guide covering Indonesia might have links to lower level guides covering the Toraja culture on Sulawesi or the Dani culture in Western New Guinea.

Cultural guides are not meant to give a thorough, in-depth academic study of all the aspects of a given culture. Nor are they meant to describe cultures from a moralistic point of view: this is not the place to claim a certain culture to be inferior or superior to another or that particular aspects of it are right or wrong. Their function is to prepare the traveller for actions and reactions of local people as well as give them a basic insight of the do's and don'ts in the place they are going to visit.

Cultural guide names

An article for a cultural guide should have a title like "Territory cultural guide" or "People cultural guide". Examples: Arabian cultural guide, Indonesian cultural guide, Jewish cultural guide.

Structure of Cultural Guides

Each Wikivoyage cultural guide should have the following parts:

1. An overview of the culture, giving a brief history, its scope and any other general information valuable to travellers.
2. A topic list with explanations. Topics cover subjects such as "general politeness", "dress code", "eating and drinking", "religion", "male-female relations", etc.

The format of the guide should follow the Cultural guide template.