User:Tbennert/welcome

To help further the goals laid out in the Tourist Bureau Expedition this page will help direct tourism professionals to related Wikivoyage policies and explain any questions.

How can my bureau help?

Any help on Wikivoyage is greatly appreciated! Does your location page have information in each section? Is it current? Can you add a small description to a restaurant listing? Look over Ways to help Wikivoyage for more good ideas about what kind of help we’re looking for.

Additionally, we’re always looking for help with adding tourist maps and images to Wikivoyage. Read more about our copyright policy and image policy before diving into this task. We hate having to remove images that don't meet our policies.

Incentives

Wikivoyage is written by and for travellers. These travellers want to know more about your unique location than just the tourist hot spots. Having an accurate and up to date page helps visitors enjoy their time in your town. Travellers on the road or planning a trip may decide to stay a night because of an interesting listing on your page.

Every month we feature some of our best guides on the front page of Wikivoyage. To become one of the best guides takes time. Continue improving the page bit by bit then head over to Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates when you are ready. If you are ready to begin improvements, get familiar with Wikivoyage:Article status. Articles featured on the front page must be guide or star status.

Wikivoyage's content is provided under a free license. This means you can use some or all of the article for nearly any purpose, provided that you release it under the same license and retain attribution.

Working with the community

Wikivoyage welcomes the input of professionals. Travel and tourist information professionals — such as guides, travel writers, and travel agents — are welcome for the detailed and in depth knowledge of destinations and subjects that they bring. We welcome professionals on all subjects — history, geography, language, culture, economics and any others - for their specialised knowledge.

We also believe travel is an individual experience. Every person, regardless of profession or background, has valuable information to contribute to the project. This travel guide is built by and for travellers, and we think that is the best way to reach our goals.

A few points of etiquette to keep in mind:

Please identify yourself by creating a user account. Then give a brief introduction of yourself on your user page.
Wikivoyage is built in collaboration with thousands of contributors from around the world. Anyone may edit or change your contributions. We find great benefit in drawing on the collective experience of travellers — they do legwork and provide feedback that one person cannot do alone.
When you make changes to an article, please be ready to defend your position on the talk pages. The talk page is used for discussion regarding the article whether it be collaboration or a difference of opinion. Many changes are uncontroversial and they will not meet objection. When you do enter a discussion, others will be swayed by your reasoning and never by your occupation.
Please don't tout for products, services, or destinations. Overexcited or exclamatory statements put off other editors and readers. Straightforward, objective descriptions of a destination that are fair, are more likely to survive future edits, and are also more likely to stimulate the interest of Wikivoyage readers.

How do we edit Wikivoyage?

The best way to begin editing is to plunge forward. Try to follow our manual of style but don’t worry about the little mistakes. We’ll help you out and we can fix any mistakes.

On the technical side of editing, you will likely notice some characters included in the text. Read about wiki markup to learn more. You can also insert the wiki markup by using the buttons that appear at the top of the edit box.

Wikivoyage:Help can guide you to several useful pages. Some good pages for travel professionals to read are:

Creating a new guide

Article templates

What to put in, what to leave out

A Wikivoyage destination-level page is normally a description of one city (or one borough or district of a large metropolis). It should have information on how to get to the area and a reasonably complete list of things to see and do while there. The page should provide a few viable options for places to eat and places to sleep. It should also explain what makes this destination unique; a brief description of the history, cultural identity and geography of the area serve as a good introduction. The destination should link to Wikivoyage pages for nearby towns which may be suitable day trips. Having one or two pictures is good. Read Wikivoyage:How to add an image for the technical aspects. All images must be compatible with our [copyleft].

Destination pages vary in their level of completion. Information can be missing, incomplete or outdated. Because of your knowledge of an individual destination, you can help Wikivoyage better inform travellers by checking articles for destinations in your region and filling in key gaps:

Are there things to see and do which have been missed? A live theatre, a historic site, a museum, an amusement park, a local farmers' market, a key landmark which visitors come from far and wide to see? If a key listing is missing, plunge forward and add it.

Are there listings which are incomplete, missing factual information or padded with promotional language? Remove the fluff, add the facts: names, address/location, contact information, phone numbers in international format, pricing, hours of operation. For a restaurant, what type of cuisine? For a hotel, what facilities (pool, restaurant, Internet, conference or banquet rooms, breakfast or room service) are offered? A listing with just a name and a link to the venue's website is utterly useless to a traveller who tucked a printed copy of your city's article into carry-on luggage.

Are there listings which are outdated? Businesses which have closed their doors? Popular venues under new names and new ownership? Remove the information or update and include a note about the change in the edit summary.

Are there a few good options for food and lodging in each category or price range? If not, fill in the gaps.

Are there nearby towns which are popular as day trips among visitors to your city? If these places have a Wikivoyage article, mention them and link to that article in "Go next".

At the same time, please avoid adding:

Copypasta. Text copied from your existing promotional materials and pasted to Wikivoyage is problematic for a number of reasons. One is copyright; we need to be able to freely modify and redistribute text (with attribution) at will and therefore require content be under a free license. One cannot easily verify that text or images copied from outside sources is indeed free. Another issue is that the tone of an advertisement is utterly wrong in a guide which needs to be fair and informative, not promotional in content or wording.

The local CVB's (or local hôtelier's) opinion of the venue or destination. Destinations may claim to be "a vacation paradise" and hotels claim "our friendly staff will make your relaxing stay an enjoyable one". These self-serving assessments provide no information of value to the traveller and will be removed. Read Don't tout for further guidance.

Long lists of every business in the area, or listings which are not specifically of use to travellers. Wikivoyage is not a yellow page directory. We don't need the name of every school, every church and every lumberyard in town.

Indiscriminate collections of external links. One link to the city hall or official tourist information site for a town in the article's lead, and one link to the official site for a venue from that venue's listing is reasonable — if these aren't used as a substitute for putting the information into the Wikivoyage guide. Links to resellers, booking agents and other travel guides are to be avoided.

Excessive detail for a single venue. Wikivoyage is a travel guide, not an encyclopaedia. A sentence to a paragraph is reasonable to describe one activity or attraction. If you need an entire page to explain why one building is listed on a national historic register, complete with a bibliography of reliable secondary sources, that level of detail may better suit Wikipedia. An article here covers a small city, a large rural area or a district of a large metropolis. See Wikivoyage:What is an article?.

Misplaced content. The "connect" section is for helping travellers remain in contact while on the road - post offices, wi-fi hotspots, local mobile and SIM cards outlets belong here. It is not somewhere to list "contact X Hôtel at +1-123-123-4567" or "contact the local CVB". Likewise, lists of local landmarks and attractions belong in "See", not in individual hotel descriptions. "Go next" is for linking to other Wikivoyage articles for nearby destinations, not for listing in-town venues which belong in "see" or "do" locally. Reference article sections for details on all sections of a page.

Remember, in all cases the traveller comes first. Add only the information which is useful to the traveller.