Talk:Karachi/Archive 2013

Map

I have a copyrighted map of Karachi with boundaries of districts/towns mentioned. I don't know how to create a map so if anybody willing to create one, please send me an e-mail and I'll send you the image file in reply. --Saqib (talk) 10:58, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

Done. --Saqib (talk) 09:34, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

New page banner

Panoramic view of popular Karachi beach. Thoughts? --Saqib (talk) 14:47, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

As someone who's never been to Karachi, this doesn't scream "Karachi" to me, but I definitely like it better than the current banner. And maybe having a banner that is unexpected is a good thing, though I'd love to see one that perhaps shows a characteristic urban view. Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:10, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The current banner is not great, but this amounts to an almost generic beach picture, and the black-and-white quality and sillouetted people makes it look very drab. Texugo (talk) 12:23, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Well the first thing that came to mind of Pakistani people when they talk about Karachi is beach of Karachi, and I must add here that in the background is Karachi Port and Manora island, but anyway I will keep looking out for the new page banners but unfortunately we don't have much images in Commons right now. --Saqib (talk) 12:41, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Kiamari boating harbour

This is a better photo, but I don't find it a terribly interesting image. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:13, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Me neither found it interesting. I'll keep looking for a better one. --Saqib (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

OK, as a creator of the banner currently in use, I'm of course a bit biased in favor of keeping it. Yes, it looks perhaps a little silly but isn't Quaid-e-Azam's mausoleum one of the most important sights in Karachi? Well, if we are going to change it and change it to one of the above my vote would go to the beach banner for two reasons. Firstly a banner should preferably be something that people associate with the city (and didn't you say it was what many Pakistanis think about when they think about Karachi?) and then there's the camel that you notice after looking at the banner for a second and a half (reminds me of the "kangaroos on the beach" banner I made for Australia). I must say I do not really like the boat banner.

As many the pictures on Commons are less than 1800px wide and many of them aren't very lively... if you Saqib would happen to have a good picture of something typical for Karachi you could maybe consider cutting out a banner from it? Like a picture of some lively market (but not one of those taken from a high place where you mostly see the brown tent roofs of the stalls), a street scene with some visible landmark or a better pic of the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum or some other popular sight? ϒpsilon (talk) 16:42, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Restaurants from the Sindh article

These restaurants were listed in the Sindh article. Since the Eat section is already pretty long and full of details, I thought it better to put these here for the time being. Texugo (talk) 18:16, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

---

• Floating Ship. Sea View, Karachi 
• Revolving Restaurant. Sh Faisal Karachi 
• Sky grill located inside Avari towers, club rd, Karachi
• The Village, Sea View Karachi
• The Second floor. Zamzama, Karachi 

Consulates

I was the one who added all the consulates when I newly joined WV last year, but since then I realised most of our city articles only contains few diplomatic missions. Most of consulates in Karachi are actually honorary consulates, so should they be removed or kept? --Saqib (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Kept. The watchword, as always, is the traveller comes first. If the information is clearly helpful to the traveller, it stays. Ikan Kekek (talk) 14:26, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't know whether honorary consulates provide consular service to its citizens. --Saqib (talk) 14:37, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

If they don't really do anything, there might not be a point in listing them. I am not really up on just how much honorary consulates do. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:21, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

History

I've recently expanded the history sub-section and mostly of the content I copy pasted from WP. Anybody interested to trim down and shorten the section please? --Saqib (talk) 14:47, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Just for clarity, was the copy-pasted content from WP indented as temporary text? The reason I ask is that in order to avoid policy confusion, perhaps such a section might be copied to a temporary page under your account until it is ready for integration with the main WV article. Andrewssi2 (talk) 13:57, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for joining in. Umm not temporary, and per here, we're allowed to take content from WP. Right? All the material under History sub-section is actually worth to mention but bit trimming down is required in order to shorten the section. --Saqib (talk) 14:06, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Your link said that: "If you post text from Wikipedia on Wikivoyage, you are required to post a specific template on the talk page of the guide on Wikivoyage". Has this been done? Andrewssi2 (talk) 15:11, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Done. --Saqib (talk) 15:21, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Merge separate district articles?

There's not enough good content for Karachi's central district and Malir district so I'm thinking of merging central district with western district and Malir district with eastern district. Please comment. --Saqib (talk) 15:42, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Karachi is a huge city but unfortunately, there's really nothing of good interest to tourist except South Karachi district. Even though, many of colonial public buildings listed in South district needs to trimmed down along with some attraction listings from East Karachi and West Karachi. I think we can make Karachi article much more better even without districtifying it. --Saqib (talk) 20:45, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

If your intention is to:

a) keep the current map with 5 districts

b) instead of having 5 separate Karachi district articles each with their own sleep, eat, see, etc sections to then bring them into this Karachi article (with, of course) the relevant 5 sub-sections of each sleep, eat, see, etc sections here in this Karachi article, then

I would support this.

Although, as one of Asia's mega-cities with a hugely expanding population a priori reasoning might indicate that Karachi is an obvious candidate for districtification, the sad fact is that currently we don't have enough active editors expanding well-written content in most of the district articles. Being frank, many areas outside the South Karachi district are always going to be of very limited interest to most visitors anyway.

If this situation should drastically and suddenly improve, if we keep the current map and geographical divisions, it should be a comparatively easy task to de-merge into separate district articles again...

PS: It might be a good idea to add a request for comments at Wikivoyage:Requests_for_comment#Articles -- Alice^✉ 04:49, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

From looking at the page history of the two districts you mention, it doesn't look like the districts are that barren. It may be a good idea to give merging a go, then see how long the main article gets, but I believe the current district split is working quite well. As for Malir, if it is a rural district, maybe it should be merged out of Karachi into another article. I also am having second-thoughts about the districtification of Dhaka and will most likely merge them all into 3 or 4 major districts. James A ▪ talk 05:13, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

There're several colonial public buildings in Karachi, which are being used as government offices and entry is restricted to visitors. Is it wise to delete those listings? --Saqib (talk) 12:10, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

If entry is restricted to visitors and tourists, then it probably isn't the best idea to include them on this wiki. TCN7JM 08:32, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Unless the exteriors or settings are of interest... -- Alice^✉ 09:30, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Alice, almost all buildings were built during the colonial period so have architectural and historic interest. --Saqib (talk) 09:41, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

If that is the case, only the needed info should be given. The page looks fine as it is now because only the address (or approximate address) is given as well as a brief description where known. TCN7JM 10:14, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps my decision of un-districtifying was wrong so I'll keep the article as it is. --Saqib (talk) 17:18, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Should we name the third district as "Central and West Karachi" or "Central and Western Karachi" ? --Saqib (talk) 22:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Pakistani Rupee

Please contribute your suggestions at wv:Currency as to how the Pakistani Rupee should be dealt with in our articles. --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 09:53, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Where Frank? wv:Currency doesn't exist. --Saqib (talk) 10:28, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

That's because User:Globe-trotter vindictively stalks my edits and reverts and deletes without explanation or prior discussion (presumably in a childish attempt to make me quit editing). Just after I edited here, he deleted the shortcut (which had been sanctioned in the Wikivoyage namespace by prior discussion).

Not helpful since, although many editors don't bother with the tedious chore of explanatory edit summaries, these shortcuts can be very useful and User:Globe-trotter has yet to advance any cogent rationale for their deletion other than "I don't like them". The shortcut (before User:Globe-trotter abused his administrator tools) was to Wikivoyage:Currency - a bit more difficult to either remember or type, eh? --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 10:53, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Frank you can see here, we never used WV namespace to create the shortcuts. Currency is already redirecting to Money article so I've create $ as a shortcut for Wikivoyage:Currency. --Saqib (talk) 17:15, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

I've checked and it was actually Inas and not Peter Southwood who was vehemently opposed to shortcuts being created in main namespace and he advanced good reasons for this opposition: http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage_talk%3AInternal_links&diff=2147650&oldid=2147640) --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 19:22, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

I've noticed that it seems to be very much 50/50 whether casual (and some long term editors) use Rp. 50 or Rp 50 Rs. 50 or Rs 50.

Coupled with the need to use HTML for either symbolisation to avoid orphaned units, I wonder if there is a case for changing to our usual wv:$ convention and using PKR50? --118.93nzp (talk) 21:32, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Where Rp. or Rp used? I can't see. --Saqib (talk) 21:36, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorry! My mistake which I have now corrected... --118.93nzp (talk) 21:43, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments about the districts

What you said about Karachi is actually something I noticed is true for most cities and towns in the world, compared to the city center suburbs are not that exciting. I don't think it is a big problem to have short district articles of Western and Eastern Karachi (the latter definitely has enough information to be a separate article), but if you do want to merge them, the Karachi article itself is the right place. ϒpsilon (talk) 17:37, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Great new map

Thanks for all your hard work in creating the wonderful new map, Saqib!

Because the street names and legend on your new map are really clear, I'll reduce the width from a hard coded width of 900px to a relative syntax described width of 2.5 times the width of the readers' setting for thumbnails.
Since the current default width is 220px for readers that are either not logged in or have not chosen to change that default in their user preferences, that will translate to a width of 550px. For someone who has set their preference to 300px, they will see a width of 750px on their big screens. For someone who has set their default to 120px, they will see a width of 300px via their (presumably slow or expensive) connection on their (presumably smaller) screen. --118.93nzp (talk) 18:49, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Saqib, nice new map!

118.93nzp, please help me to find a place where we reached a consensus for using relative image widths. I might be mistaken (I'm still learning ;)), but it seems a controversial topic, specially when used for maps. Thanks for the effort. Danapit (talk) 20:05, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Saqib, if you have any doubts about the new map being slightly confusing, what about trying to leave a little gap between the top part and the detail in the bottom? I think it will be clearer that way. You are getting really good with the maps. Danapit (talk) 20:28, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Dana. You're right. Actually, I've decided to split into 2 maps. --Saqib (talk) 20:38, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

@Danapit:You may have a different understanding of how consensus used to work for many years before the problems developed with IB and folks went into battleground mode. As well as consensus, plunging forward was enshrined as a guiding principle of this project.

Essentially, I take that combination of guiding principles to mean that everyone is entitled to attempt to improve this travel guide by their edits unless the attempt is specifically forbidden by policy. (If the policy is likely to change in the immediate future, it's obviously a sensible thing to avoid edits that, while they are technically compliant now, won't be after a likely consensus is enshrined in a newly written or edited policy page.)

In practice, that means that I don't need your permission or wait for any any consensus to form to allow me to put an umlaut on a Swiss street name or the acute accent in Café únless and until there is a policy page that forbids such radical and dangerous innovations.

It does seem increasingly obvious that some contributors haven't really grasped that the HTML generated by MediaWiki markup is interpreted differently by different browsers and displayed differently according to the size of screen, resolution, etc. It's rather different from a printed brochure where such things as exact picture widths can be micro managed. I'm a bit baffled as to exactly why some contributors here think they know better than the combined wisdom of hundreds of Wikipedians who explain why "upright factored" dimensions are preferable for most images (special cases such as embassy flags, etc, excepted): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PIC#Pixel_counts_vs._upright_factors --118.93nzp (talk) 08:12, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Removal of entire "Talk" section

I was saddened to see the entire "Talk" section removed since I thought it gave some helpful insights to foreign travellers and was also relatively well written.

As an off-topic aside, I must also say that the last few months have considerably weakened the lead section. Brevity is a virtue in the introduction to an article. --118.93nzp (talk) 22:00, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

I removed it per here. There was nothing notable in the section and everything is mentioned in the parent article's talk section. --Saqib (talk) 22:09, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

"Only used in Country and Region articles, and very rarely in city articles"

Our Karachi article seems to emphasise what a huge and cosmopolitan city Karachi is (bigger than more than 50 sovereign countries on its own!) and how different it is in many ways from the rest of Pakistan.

As a foreign traveller, I might not bother to read the Pakistan article after reading this huge article, and it might have been useful to know that: "Karachi is Pakistan's melting pot — a confluence of people from various parts of Pakistan as well from India, Burmese, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Urdu and English are both official languages of Pakistan and, therefore, Karachi. Urdu is spoken everywhere in the city and almost 98% of the population in Karachi understands the Urdu language while English is the lingua franca (British control began in the 1840's and did not end until 1947). Most locals learn English in school and know at least basic English. English is widely used in the corporate world, in banking and trading and at most places, you will be able to get by with English, as most people you will encounter can communicate in broken English at the very least." - whereas I doubt the latter is true in rural parts of Pakistan - is it? --118.93nzp (talk) 00:11, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

"Karachi is Pakistan's melting pot — a confluence of people from various parts of Pakistan as well from India, Burmese, Bangladesh and Afghanistan." is already mentioned in the article. Its a fact Urdu and English language are spoken everywhere in the city as national and official languages are spoken in any big city in the world. --Saqib (talk) 09:04, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Karachi guide book

Swept in from the pub

Cover-page by Nick

I would like to inform you guys that I, with the collaboration of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation decided to publish a travel guide book on Karachi based on our WV article. The main factors behind this initiative are, to promote both the Wikivoyage and Wikimedia movement throughout Pakistan, and to help promote tourism in Karachi which is badly affected because of recent bad security situation in the city. The current status of Karachi article is at guide but its not yet perfect to be published as a guide book and it still requires a lot of work to be done. PTDC have agreed to do copyedit and give final touch to the book before it gets printed but it would be great to hear what do you guys think of the changes and improvements needs to be made in the article? Fyi, travel guide giant LP hasn't published any new edition of travel guide on Karachi or Pakistan since 2008, so we can say our Karachi guide will be the the only complete, up-to-date, reliable and the most comprehensive guide ever written on one of the world's biggest city. Point to be mention here, the copies of Karachi guide books will be distributed free of cost to both local and foreign tourists in the city by the PTDC itself. --Saqib (talk) 13:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Congratulations!! Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:55, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

This is fantastic news! Just what Wikivoyage needs! Congratulations Saqib! :) --Nick ^talk 15:36, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Terrific!

I would suggest, though, that PTDC consider either opening a corporate account to do that copy editing or that they open accounts for each of their staff members that are going to be copyediting prefixed by PTDC (eg: User:PTDCjohn, User:PTDCjane, etc).

(It would be a bit of a PR disaster if these edits were to be either unthinkingly reverted as anons or, even worse, they were accused of tag teaming.) --118.93nzp (talk) 17:24, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Actually they're not the one who'll do the copyedit, they'll instead hire a professional copy-editor to give the article a final touch once it is ready from our side. --Saqib (talk) 18:42, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

To Saqib: It would be nice if that "professional copy-editor" edited our article to give it a final polish, rather than just used our article as the foundation to create a derivative work, don't you think? --118.93nzp (talk) 21:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

You're right but I don't know who will be that editor and whether if he will be interesting to edit the articles himself on-wiki. I will try to convince him to edit the article on-wiki but incase he won't, I'll make the changes on-wiki on his behalf. What say? --Saqib (talk) 21:59, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate all the effort you've put into this, Saqib and I hope it all works out. Obviously the former would be better than the latter, in giving you less work and perhaps also giving the professional easier access to keeping our article(s) up-to-date in the future... --118.93nzp (talk) 22:08, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I would advise them to pay very close attention to the Wikimedia trademark policy, and be very careful how they use the "Wikivoyage" trademark. LtPowers (talk) 20:57, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

A member of Wikimedia Pakistan is already in contact with the foundation over trademark issues. --Saqib (talk) 21:06, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Saqib, it's a fantastic initiative to let people know about Wikivoyage when they're actually traveling through a book project like this. I see that it will also contain information about Mohenjo-daro. It would perhaps be useful to also (partially or entirely) include the Pakistan article in the book? ϒpsilon (talk) 21:20, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

The reason why I've decided to include "Mohenjo-daro" in the Karachi guide book because Mohenjo-daro is a very popular side trip from Karachi and fortunately we've the article at guide status. Pakistan article is in bad shape right now so I don't think its good idea to have it in the book. Maybe one day, we can able to publish Pakistan travel guide book. Btw, I've estimated that Karachi guide book will contain some 200 pages. --Saqib (talk) 21:34, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I guessed that Mohenjo-daro was a popular side trip. The Pakistan article could certainly be in a better shape than it is now, but I think there are still some parts of it that could enhance a Karachi guide like Holidays in the Understand section (if they affect the opening hours of sights, restaurants etc.) and the Eat and Drink sections which present Pakistani cuisine (they need to be tidied up a bit, I know). Perhaps something else too. ϒpsilon (talk) 21:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Your suggestion well noted and its a good idea to incorporate some stuff from the Pakistan article to our Karachi guide book. I hope I will be able to start working on Pakistan's wonderful destinations (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir) articles asap to get them at guide status. --Saqib (talk) 22:07, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

(indent) Congratulations! This is a great way to get the word out about WV! Nice it's free! ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:29, 2 December 2013 (UTC)