User talk:(WT-en) Barry

Hello Barry!

Welcome to Wikivoyage. Please take a sec to look at our copyleft and policies and guidelines, but feel free to plunge forward and edit some pages. Scanning the Manual of style, especially the article templates, can give you a good idea of how we like articles formatted. If you need help, check out Project:Help, and if you need some info not on there, post a message in the travellers' pub.

Thank you for contributing to St Helens (England). An excellent first article. --(WT-en) Huttite 20:53, 11 Jan 2006 (EST)

You asked on my Talk page How can I help?

Hey, thanks for proofreading the St Helens (England) article. That's the first guide I've made.. and that's my hometown I chose to write it on, so I guess I know what I'm talking about! Thing is, being new, I didn't really know what I was doing, so if you could let me know how I can improve the page further than "usable" I'll see what I can do. My digital camera's bust at the moment or else I'd have been happy to add photos. I'm lost without it! Thanks (WT-en) BarrY 20:18, 11 Jan 2006 (EST)

My reply

Normally I try and give a welcome message to people when they make their first edit of an article, or create a new page. You were so quick off the mark and the St Helens (England) article was so good, I thought you were an old hand. I only left the article as usable because the listings were brief and did not have all the contact details, such as telephone numbers, only external links. I asked myself, could I use this article as my only source of information about St Helens? The answer was no because I would need to go look up the websites to make a reservation - or knock on the door and ask - if I was on the road and did not have on-line access. -- (WT-en) Huttite 20:53, 11 Jan 2006 (EST)

Hi Barry, as you live close to Manchester can you offer any advise/solutions about how to list plases like Oldham, Stockport etc. Please see Talk:Manchester. Thanks. (WV-en) WindHorse. 12 Jan 06

Maps / one last note on Paris

Hi Barry, I use Inkscape to make my maps, usually starting from a satellite photo. There's a description of the process here if you'd like to have a go at it.

One more thing: If your friend is still concerned about Parisians accepting him show him the Wikipedia article on Bertrand Delanoe. -- (WT-en) Mark 16:47, 12 Jan 2006 (EST)

Open directory

On my talk page you asked

Hi, sorry about this, but you added a link to Greater Manchester to an open directory. Sorry to be a pain in the neck but what's this? I couldn't find anything on it in the help files and I'm curious. I'm just willing to learn! Cheers (WT-en) BarrY 07:13, 12 Jan 2006 (EST)

My reply

See Project:Links to Open Directory. The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a website with the sublime mission of categorising all websites using human editors. Because Humans do it better. It was founded by the good people at Netscape and is called DMOZ after Mozilla, an early web-browser. If you have ever used Google and wanted to submit a URL it directs you to submit the URL to ODP, along with pretty much every other search engine on earth.

Search engines use ODP as a base for categorising websites. If your website is not in the Open Directory Project, search engines will have a hard time finding it. Which is why spammers want to put links on any wiki they find, because google loves wikis and ODP hates spammers and only gives them one link per website.

Wikivoyage links to ODP appear in the box called Other languages/sites in the left hand sidebar, below the Navigation, Search and Toolbox boxes. Wikivoyage links to ODP help people find the related websites to a place and help search engines correctly categorise and rank ODP pages. -- (WT-en) Huttite 04:59, 13 Jan 2006 (EST)