User talk:(WT-en) Huttite/Pathfinder Expedition

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Background

I got the idea for a (WT-en) Pathfinder Expedition while I was working my way through the lists of special pages, in particular:

• orphaned pages, which are pages that no other page refers to, and
• dead-end pages, which are pages that don't refer to any other page.

There are often quick gains to be made with these special pages because an article may just need a wikilink or two to bring it into the fold, as it is often already mentioned on another page, but just not linked, or can be easily linked to another page.

I began noticing that the total number of pages only went down when I did work on the orphaned and dead-end pages. So I began wondering why nobody else was giving these pages any attention. After I had spent some time away from here, I realised that nobody else understood why these pages need attention.

Firstly, orphaned and dead-end pages are the growth area of the wiki. They are the stepping stones into the space where the wiki can grow. The problem often is that these pages do not either have the support of other pages yet, or do not provide support to other pages. The way to provide support is to provide wiki links to and from these pages. However, in order to give that support, one needs to find a path to or from these pages. In some cases that path is simply a wiki-link on another page; in other cases there are whole regions and sub-regions missing from the geographical hierachy that need to be created first.

From this sprang the name Pathfinder and with it the realisation that an expedition was probably needed.

Note: On the historical side of things, during World War 2, the Pathfinders were aircraft tasked with the mission to find an air-raid target and drop target designator flares and incendaries on it in advance of the heavy bomber squadrons. Often the Pathfinders were equipped with accurate ground radar and other navigation aids that the other aircraft didn't have. However, once that path was found to the target, the bombers in the general area could see the Pathfinders target markers and so zero in and bomb accurately.

I see the analogy as an appropriate one, as once an article is linked into the wiki with sufficient information about where it is, people will want to list on the page as they will know where it is and realise it is the place for them to list.

I have also begun thinking of these pages as being lost children (orphaned pages) that need to be (re)united with their parents and infertile parents (dead-end pages) that need to be encouraged to procreate or adopt a child. I'm not sure that the Social Work Expedition is as intuitive as Pathfinder Expedition. However, the parent-child terminology comes from thinking of each destination page as being a child of it's parent regional page. The sorts of pages I see that the expedition would address include:

• Lost Children - Pages that fit within but do not currently link into the geographical hierarchy.
• Lone Children - Pages that only their parent page refers to, they have no friend, although they might claim a few friends (links) themselves.
• Shy Children - Pages that only refer to their parent page. Other pages might be friends (link) with them, but they don't admit they have any friends.
• Kidnapped Children - Pages that would be lost children if a page outside the main namespace wasn't referring to them. These are pages that have been kidnapped by (appear as links on) talk pages, user pages, help pages or even Wikivoyage pages and do not have any parents or friends in the main namespace.
• Gravid Parents and Hyperactive Children - These are pages that are just bursting at the seams with content. This includes huge cities that need districts or regional articles that need destinations. The listings on these pages needs to be moved out into smaller, shorter child articles.

Why not encourage cooperation?

I support this expedition proposal. I've always thought we needed more of this kind of interconnectivity and I think your tree analogy is quite fitting. Just one comment-- I don't understand the purpose of stating that routebox navigation boxes are a non-goal. I think there is a lot more to be gained from encouraging cooperation between these two expeditions. I might even go so far as to suggest that this be posited as the parent expedition of Routebox Navigation expedition, since routeboxes fulfill one aspect of the larger goals stated here. As discussed before, routeboxes are good for increasing connectedness by covering certain kinds of routes, and this expedition would strive to complete the job even more thoroughly. (WT-en) Texugo 08:45, 2 February 2009 (EST)

Agreed, this was one of my rationales about taking all the time to dig up obscure cities with near empty guides throughout Scandinavia, along the European routes - so that people could easier find them, and populate them. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 08:49, 2 February 2009 (EST)

Perhaps I have expressed it wrongly. I do not see the expedition as creating any new special navigation tools along the lines of Routeboxes or encroaching on the work of other expeditions. I wanted to put a boundary around what the Expedition would and wouldn't do. That and the fact I was writing it rather late at night perhaps means what I had drafted does not quite say what I wanted to - now I read it in the cold light of day. Yes I do want the Pathfinder Expedition to support other expeditions like Routeboxes, especially like Routeboxes. Let me try and rework it. - (WT-en) Huttite 02:37, 3 February 2009 (EST)

OK. Reworked. Is that better? - (WT-en) Huttite 04:30, 3 February 2009 (EST)

relation to Get In

> Populating the content of the Get in section of each article that has this section in a way that is natural and logical for the traveller.

Just to clarify, what does this have to do with making nodes of the region hierarchy tree well-interconnected? --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 21:17, 14 February 2009 (EST)

overall support

I generally like the idea of having an expedition to improve content around wikivoyage in a single specific aspect, and looking forward to follow with a similar expedition or two when this experiment will prove successful. Best of luck! --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 21:19, 14 February 2009 (EST)