User talk:(WT-en) Bill Ellett

Welcome

Hello, Bill Ellett! Welcome to Wikivoyage.

To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Project:Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub.

Thanks for your edits to Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site! -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 20:36, 16 July 2010 (EDT)

A thanks from me too for your work on the UNESCO list. You are doing really great work—I hope you stick around ;) --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 00:13, 24 July 2010 (EDT)

Thanks for the updated to United States National Parks‎. I was actually the original author of the article many years ago, and didn't realize how much things had changed, so many thanks for bringing it up-to-date. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 00:57, 30 July 2010 (EDT)

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm finding a good many sites which are not from US Nat. Parks Service which I am trying to add systematically, following the guidelines from the discussion page as well as what is already listed. For example, no national forests. Plus just the changes that happen over time. Everything on the page is federal. After I finish these updates, I'm going to suggest a couple of changes, not sure what yet, either adding subdivisions under the states or breaking out some sites to different pages. We have parks, regions, and iteneraries mixed together. For example, Appalachian Trail is not a "park" in the traditional sense, though it is extremely important to capture in our pages. I'll move to the nat. parks discussion page when I figure out what I'm suggesting, next week. (WT-en) Bill in STL 11:49, 30 July 2010 (EDT)

And a thanks from me too -- great to see others working on the UNESCO list as well! (WT-en) Jpatokal 20:48, 1 August 2010 (EDT)

Searching

Hi, Bill. Saw your note on Peter's talk page; hope you don't mind if I take a stab at replying. Honestly, the search function on most wikis is pretty limited; in many cases, you're actually better off going to Google and doing a search using "site:wikivoyage.org" (to limit the results to pages on this wiki). That said, most of our navigation here on the site is done via links, moreso than by searching. We take great care to make sure all destinations are linked to the next-higher level in our geographic hierarchy, which means you can find just about any place by starting at the top and working your way down. It may take a little longer, but it's kinda how the site has evolved.

Hope that helps!

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 13:33, 26 July 2010 (EDT)

Feedback

Hi Bill - saw your note on my talk page and I'll take another look at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and respond fully as soon as I get a chance, probably tomorrow evening - unfortunately I'm on the road for business right now and don't have time for much beyond an occasional quick perusal of Special:Recentchanges. If you'd like quicker feedback you can try posting a request for feedback in the Pub - sometimes that elicits dozens of useful suggestions, and other times everyone is busy and there aren't any responses; it's kind of a crapshoot.

Beyond that particular article, thanks for all you've done. It would be great if every new user was like you - taking the time to read the various policy pages and discuss issues on talk pages is very much appreciated, and the edits you've made have in general been terrific. There has been occasional discussion over the past couple of years about re-vamping our policy pages, so if you have suggestions about how to better organize things or make things clearer please keep notes, and perhaps we combine everyone's suggestions into a Project:Collaboration of the month with the goal of improving the site's documentation. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 00:43, 3 August 2010 (EDT)

I made a couple of minor copyedits to Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and added some comments at Talk:Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. I changed "free" to "Free" in the listing tags since that ends up being a single-word sentence in the article text, included the region in the opening sentence per standard Wikivoyage practice, and changed a few special characters to HTML entities to ensure they render properly in all browsers. Overall the article looks great - nice work! -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:23, 3 August 2010 (EDT)

Geo Template

Despite more than five years of contributing to this site, I had no idea that the Geo template created a map link. Thanks for teaching me something new! Now we just need to figure out how to get it to display more prominently... -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 14:53, 6 August 2010 (EDT)

Geez, me neither. No wonder no one ever contacts docents; anything in that toolbox area just gets lost. I agree that adding a link to the toolbox is not a very prominent way to display the map. (WT-en) LtPowers 16:06, 6 August 2010 (EDT)

List of phrasebooks

I just finished adding the color codes to the phrasebooks, but I'm sure there was plenty of room for "typo"-style error. If you have a chance to take a look over it, to make sure that the colors match the actual status (particularly for the long Asia section), I predict that the article would benefit! --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 01:31, 17 August 2010 (EDT)

St. Louis

Man, I'm really hoping to make it out there. It's been looking lately like I won't be able to get any real time off for myself until the slow-in-D.C. month of December, and that month may get used up by a trip to either Colombia (cheap flights!) or Sierra Leone (friend's villa). (It's a weird year, when Sierra Leone seems more likely than St. Louis...) I'm hoping to at least get out to New Orleans while I'm watching Tremé, but hopefully I'll get to do that full Mississippi River pilgrimage, which I'm still kicking myself for not having done when I lived in Chicago. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 21:55, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

Re: Images: Did I do it right?

It looks fine, Bill, but why did you upload such a tiny thumbnail? (WT-en) LtPowers 08:40, 19 August 2010 (EDT)

Oops, I got caught by the caching bug. You'd already uploaded the larger version by the time I replied to you, but I was still seeing the tiny version. (WT-en) LtPowers 21:08, 20 August 2010 (EDT)

Thanks

Thanks for the ridiculous amount of cleanup you're doing! Also, I've seen many of the discussions you've started about templates and other issues and apologize for not personally responding to most of them - like many people, I'm often on this site merely to pop in, check recent changes, and then pop back out to whatever I was doing, which doesn't always provide the time to give a reasoned response. Feel free to *bump* any more urgent questions back on to the recent changes list by making a minor edit with the comment "*bump*" as it is a helpful way to let others know what issues are currently the most pressing. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:02, 24 August 2010 (EDT)

VfDs

Bill, I have just discovered that if you go to Category:VfD you get an automatic listing of all pages with the VfD tag. So when it is non-contentious there is perhaps no reason to add a page proposed for deletion to the Votes for Deletion page? (WT-en) Shep 03:28, 29 August 2010 (EDT)

Absolutely not; we don't routinely check the VfD category (which I only recently created anyway). (WT-en) LtPowers 21:59, 29 August 2010 (EDT)

Regions

I noticed that you updated the templates for Saint Martins Island and Mykonos to guideregion. However, those destinations are not regions and they are also listed as other destinations in their respective country articles (eventhough Mykonos is also (incorrectly) listed as a region in Cyclades article). I do not know how important this is, but it might be worth giving a thought if we should not restrict using the region template to "real" regions (ie regions with articles listing a number of cities/other destinations but without detailed listings in see/sleep etc), --(WT-en) ClausHansen 02:28, 3 September 2010 (EDT)

Those articles use (or should use) the city article template, and when assessing their status (usable, guide, star) we are using the guidelines for city articles. As I see it, that points in the direction of also marking them with the city templates, --(WT-en) ClausHansen 03:24, 3 September 2010 (EDT)

Gallery subarticle to Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay/Pinnacle

Hi Bill. I have removed the stub label you put in the gallery for Pinnacle dive site, as it is not a stub. See the discussions on the talk page for Pinnacle for reasons why a gallery was used. There isnt really a suitable status label for it as galleries are seldom used on WT for reasons argued on one of the policy pages, I forget which, but you will probably find it easily enough with a search. If the lack of a status label bothers you for any reason, it probably should be guide topic or thereabout, as it is part of a Star rated article. Feel free to discuss on the article's talk page if you like. Cheers, (WT-en) Peter (Southwood) ^Talk 10:51, 3 September 2010 (EDT)

Fixing template redirects

Hi, Bill. Just so you know, there's really no point to edits like this one. Template redirects are cheap and don't really affect server performance -- at least, no more than making the edit does. (WT-en) LtPowers 22:00, 14 September 2010 (EDT)

Barnstar

I don't envy you for taking on some really grungy tasks, but all of the cleanups you've been making are much appreciated. Barnstars are about the only semi-formal way we've got of saying "thanks" around here, so enjoy some virtual pixels for all of your hard work! -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 18:50, 24 September 2010 (EDT)

Thanks! I'm having fun figuring out how to look for oddities and make them match the rules. -- (WT-en) Bill in STL 21:48, 24 September 2010 (EDT)

Disambiguation pages

Hi Bill. All your clean-up work is great and your effort is certainly very much appreciated, but could you please add the disambiguation pages you created to Project:Links to disambiguating pages so they are not orphaned, i.e. not linked from elsewhere on the site. It's also neat to have all disambiguation pages indexed conveniently somewhere (I guess you librarians are pretty strict on this :-). I've added a bunch yesterday and today (up to Brandenburg (disambiguation)) but I'm afraid of missing the odd one and you seem to be keep working on this. – (WT-en) Vidimian 06:28, 27 September 2010 (EDT)

I had added 316 missing pages to the Project:Links to disambiguating pages in the last couple of weeks and removed 50 which had been deleted, renamed, or otherwise no longer disambiguating. For my new ones, I was planning to wait until I had several to add at once, but will try to add daily. I have a list of 365 more potentially-new disambiguating pages to verify and add over the next few weeks between Bremen and Zurich (some names turn into merge or delete candidates or otherwise don't qualify, so it'll probably turn into about 200 pages actually added). Thanks. --(WT-en) Bill in STL 11:40, 27 September 2010 (EDT)

Ah, OK. I haven't check the revision history of that page and thought you might be unaware of its existence. No need to rush, then. – (WT-en) Vidimian 12:47, 27 September 2010 (EDT)