User:Jdlrobson/Someday

Disclaimer: best tested on Chrome!

As a personal project (nothing to do with WMF) I've been exploring an offline experience for Wikivoyage and I'm pleased to share it with you after taking it for a test drive on my recent trip. I hope some of the ideas I have been playing with are of interest to the community and might be considered for inclusion in the project at some future date. You can edit via the app (I've been doing so) if you login via OAuth.

I'm interesting in any feedback you have on any of these features (feel free to indent comments into the text block about the feature)

This is the link: someday travel guide

The app is a culmination of ideas based on how I like to travel. I mean no offence in my changes to presentation or the liberties I've taken with the data on Wikivoyage. I honestly hope my ideas are interesting and thought provoking! Anyone can use it so feel free to jump in, log in and have a play!

Goals

1. Easier to digest information
2. More images to aid imagination/excitement
3. Offline experience

Context based tabs

It is my belief that different information is needed at different times during travel. I split sections into tabs:

1. dream (working out where to go and why)
2. Arrive (information needed in transit from place A to place B hotel
3. Explore (investigating on the ground)

The added benefit of using tabs is that pages load quicker as there is less to render.

Cards

On most of my trips I like to move around seeing as much as possible. To make lists easier to scan I pulled these out of the content in such a way that I think aids exploration. I added distance in kilometers to get a sense of how far places were from each other.

Likewise it's useful to know what kind of sights are there - I cross reference sights with Wikipedia to show images and stub content from Wikipedia so I don't have to do a Wikipedia search to get a sense of what a sight is (I was doing that an awful lot before).

Autogenerated go next

On pages without go next places a section is autogenerated. A curate list link allows you to fill that in using the api created data.

Weather

The weather tables on Wikivoyage are useful, but overwhelming when stored in tables and sometimes require conversion so I standardised on celcius (it would be trivial to allow switching units but I haven't got that far yet)

Trips (user generated shareable itineraries)

In the web app the green watchstar on articles now allows you to construct trips rather than add pages to watchlist.

Here's the trip I just took: https://nomad.wmflabs.org/en.wikivoyage/Special:Collections/by/Jdlrobson/17

Click on the map and you'll see it on a map: https://nomad.wmflabs.org/en.wikivoyage/Special:Collections/by/Jdlrobson/17#/collection-map/Jdlrobson/17/

If your browser is new enough you'll also see an offline button which allows you to download all the pages in the trip for use offline. I've been using this and can confirm this worked quite nicely (minus some images) while travelling without data in Vietnam.

All trips are accessible to the public: https://nomad.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Collections so it's interesting to find and reach out to people that could help edit articles and learn about new places we might be able to visit.

Notes

On previous trips I've tried to edit articles while on the road and it's proved difficult. Here for example: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User_talk:Jdlrobson#Cubaocho

I've been wanting a way to quickly record places I visit for inclusion in the travel guide later. I think the notes option solves this problem. Basically every page has a note button which allows you to store draft content in your user name space.

The end result gets publically stored at a page such as https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/notes/Ho_Chi_Minh_City which is easily accessible via the UI on the labs app. I can then, when I have time (returned from my trip) have a go at incorporating the information I've found into the guide. In this particular example I was not sure how best to add my suggestion to the article which favours listing places and addresses given that my suggestion was more itinerary based - but luckily I've stored this and can think about this long after leaving the actual city!

Offline

I've been experimenting with an offline experience. Any page you view on Firefox or Chrome should automatically store for offline usage on your device. I think there may be some kinks in there still but for the most part it worked for me on my trip.

Should work for anons and https://nomad.wmflabs.org/en.wikivoyage/Special:Collections/by/~your%20device/-1

Issues with Wikivoyage content

• The app mostly relies on screenscraping. It would be awesome if similar to how vcards are generated there were ways to specify what kind of data (e.g. weather / a go next destination) has been added in a consistent manner across the site.
• Images - there is a severe lack of images on Wikivoyage and this is a huge shame as images are extremely important for the planning part of a trip.