Talk:Cenotes of the Yucatán

Sources in Spanish

La Ruta de los Cenotes is basically an ecotourist development project sponsored by people in the state governments of the Yucatan. Nobody has translated anything about the project into English yet. So if you are interested in what you've read so far, and you want to find more of the cenotes listed, you'll have to rely on Spanish links for now. (WT-en) HLM 10:02, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

• La ruta de los cenotes, un mágico encuentro

To do

List the cenotes along the route, how to find them, where to find guides for them, etc. (WT-en) HLM 09:37, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Article name

Wikivoyage policy is to use the "most common English name" for destination articles, and all of our itinerary titles are brief descriptions of the trip in English. If this route were already well-known by this Spanish name, I could see making an exception, but it's not, and "Route of the Yucatan Cenotes" (or something similar) would be a clearer title for someone browsing the Project:List of itineraries page. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 10:20, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Dude. Sorry to disappoint you. This thing don't have an English name. If you want the "Route of the Yucatan Cenotes" then I'd like to be there to watch you ask one of the locals where it is. (WT-en) HLM 10:34, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Then the article should explain what it's called in Spanish. The title of the article should be meaningful to people who speak English, because that's the audience for this version of Wikivoyage. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 11:52, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

I think HLM is right - a google search for "Route of the Yucatan Cenotes" comes up with zero hits, and "Route of the Cenotes" comes up with 3 hits. There's an exception to every rule, I guess. I would strongly suggest, HLM, that you come up with a good description on the itinerary page and the article page, so non-Spanish speakers actually understand what this route is about (it took me awhile to figure out that cenotes = sinkholes. -- (WT-en) Fastestdogever 11:08, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

That's not a meaningful test, because those aren't names; they're descriptions. You're not going to find many hits for "One week in Eastern Tasmania" either, but that's the name of one of our itineraries, because that's a description in English of it. That's how we label itineraries, and I don't see any reason to start obfuscating them by putting them in other languages. Searching for "La Ruta de los Cenotes" comes up with only 41 distinct hits. And if you restrict the Google search to pages in English, you get only 1 hit. Maybe someday it'll be so well known that this phrase will be meaningful to English speakers, but right now it's just an ordinary description in Spanish. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 11:49, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

You're right - I take back what I said. I was under the impression that "La Ruta de los Cenotes" was something similar to Route 66, when really it's more like a list of "Sinkholes in of the Yucatan". -- (WT-en) Fastestdogever 11:59, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

A better analogy might be the Ice Age Trail in my native Wisconsin, which connects a broad set of otherwise unlinked roads and trails where one can see related geological features. La Ruta de los Cenotes is an official effort (mostly promoted by tourist authorities and developers, of course) to create interest. Todd, since you are from western Michigan, maybe the Great Lakes Circle Tour is a good analogy, since it seems to be very well signed. (WT-en) HLM 12:43, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Maybe I'd find these precedents more compelling if you weren't creating those stubs as you went along. -(WT-en) Todd VerBeek 14:12, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

I was surprised they weren't here already, so I created stubs. Wikivoyage is still very underdeveloped as a travel guide. Very basic things are still lacking an article. I always create a stub when there should be an article. (WT-en) HLM 15:09, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Yeah, Wikivoyage is only a few years old, and a travel guide doesn't attract the same level of participation as a general-purpose encyclopedia (for example). When you create new articles, please include outlines for them; we really prefer to avoid stubs around here. Just click the appropriate article type on the new-article page. And before you create an article, please consider that in some cases the reason we don't have an article for something is because it doesn't meet Wikivoyage's guidelines for a valid article. I haven't had time to check on that Wisconsin footpath you mentioned (and the stub doesn't give enough information to tell), but if it were the sort of thing that someone might traverse in a day, then it wouldn't be worth creating a separate article for, because we could cover it in the article for the region it's in. And just because someone designated an official driving tour somewhere, that doesn't mean we have to create an article for it. Consider first whether we have something to add that the official brochure doesn't have. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 14:29, 30 April 2007 (EDT)

There's a free picture of a cenote over in the English Wikipedia. This is my first day contributing here, so I am not sure if I should copy it from over there, or link to the file there in some way. What do you suggest? I'm doing research right now in preparation for a trip to the Yucatan, and I plan to spend several days along this route. I'll take pictures, but a lot of this stuff is just too amazing for pictures, that's all I can say! (This will be my third trip to the Yucatan.) (WT-en) HLM 11:20, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

Take a look at Project:Copyleft and Project:Image policy; these explain our policies on handling images. They do have to be uploaded to our system, and to do this, the image has to be either public domain, or licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license for us to use it. Most Wikipedia images don't qualify. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 11:49, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

For those who haven't been to Mexico, creating rutas for tourists seems to be an obsession of Mexican state governments. So actually, there are many such routes, all with names like Ruta de los ____. For example, there is the [Ruta de los Conventos] for those who want to visit convents, the Ruta Puuc for those interested in the Puuc indigenous culture, the Ruta Maya, the Ruta Azteca, etc. Or how about the Ruta Dominica de la Mixteca, which is promoted by the government of Oaxaca. These are in effect official itineraries, and perhaps they are named in Spanish because following tourist itineraries is of interest to Spanish speaking tourists (who often come from Spain, Argentina, etc). They can all become future articles here on wikivoyage. Anyhow, my point is these are official lists that are created by somebody in Mexican government for promotional purposes, and the phenomenon seems to be a cultural feature of how Spanish speaking people like to travel. (WT-en) HLM 12:34, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

I believe they're named in Spanish because the government speaks Spanish. If the government ever decides to market them in earnest to los Yanquis, I'll bet my parents' condo in Jalisco that they translate the names into English. Our cardinal rule here is that the traveller comes first. For example, if the government draws region boundaries that don't make sense from a travel perspective, we don't use them. Or if the government says that the name of the country is "The People's Imperial Democratic Republic of Freedonia" but it's better known to travelers as "West Freedonia", we call it "West Freedonia". So if the government describes a group of travel destinations in a language that readers of the English-language Wikivoyage won't understand, why should we use that description? It simply makes no sense as the title of an itinerary in this guide. Stop editing for a minute and look around at, say, Project:List of itineraries and Project:What is an article? for a sense of how this community does things. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 14:12, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

The vast majority of Americans stay in big hotels in Cancun and maybe see one Mayan site or cenote through a tour bus company that takes them there in an air conditioned bus. So it wouldn't do the Mexican government much good to market that way. But if you want to find sites on your own and get a little deeper into Mexico, it helps to observe local names in Spanish and official local signs. Through wikilinking, it's easy to use official Mexican names and yet associate them with the right articles and places, and thus help anglophones who are traveling independently in the region to understand the signs they see and find the sites they are looking for. The great thing about using the Mexican names (some of the big guidebooks use these names too) is that they collectively refer to a whole set of attractions, to an itinerary. (WT-en) HLM 14:38, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

What's wrong with Mexican names is that they are in Spanish, and therefore are not good titles for Wikivoyage-English itinerary articles. The rest of the arguments you're making are beside that rather simple point. I've renamed the article to Cenotes of the Yucatán, which still requires understanding the meaning of "cenote", but at least is intelligible to our audience. The article still explains what name to look for when the traveler gets down there. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 13:35, 30 April 2007 (EDT)