User talk:128.250.5.246

Hello 128.250.5.246 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. -- (WT-en) felix 04:38, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

Driving in Australia

Your recent contributions to the Driving in Australia article are appreciated and it is clear that you have made a serious attempt to make improvements and develop the article. However the structural changes you have made appear to have changed the focus of the article from one of driving in Australia to that of long distance driving and rural/outback driving conditions. The original structure of the article outlines the general driving situation in Australia, then it goes on to elaborate on the driving conditions. Most visitors arrive on the coast at a major airport. Think of it as a sequence of needs, first a potential driver needs to know the general situation, hopefully they consider this before they leave home, then they need to know something of the legal and licensing requirements so they understand if they are eligible to drive there, then they need to know the details of things like road conditions, distances, advisories and cautions.

Although many visitors may just think of the allure and challenges of the Australian 'outback' and the open road most of these trips start with more pragmatic considerations. Do you have a valid licence, how to gain access to a vehicle, how to drive in the cities, and further how to tackle the specific needs of long distance and remote area travel. I think I understand why you have re-ordered things as you did but I am not at all convinced that those changes are a good idea. It is also not a good idea to change the section header names as they are derived from a thematic and formulaic style dictated by the article formatting policies and guidelines as described in the Wikivoyage manual of style. An article section header such as ==Understand== is a standard article header.

The normal way to approach major content or structural change is to discuss the needs, requirements and proposed changes on the articles discussion page. This is especially so in the case of an established and reasonably well resolved article such as those with a "Guide" or "Star" rating. This means they have been subjected to some fairly rigorous scrutiny by established editors to ensure that the article is compliant with the policies and guidelines applicable and is suitably useful in content and article structure.

Any content that you have contributed in your recent edits is not 'lost', as it is all retained in the edit histories. I encourage you to register as a user, so other editors know they are just dealing with one individual rather than multiple users of an IP address and explore the MoS and the guideline and policy articles linked there. I appreciate you may feel a little annoyed that your edits have been reverted but please do understand that new editors are very welcome here, especially when they are clearly making an effort to improve an article.

It might also assist if you made smaller edits so that other editors can more readily identify what you are doing. This also avoids the problems that can arise when a block revert such as I have just done takes some uncontroversial improvements with it as well. Perhaps start with some changes to the prose in the article if you can identify some areas for improvement, but do not make any major structural changes until you are more familiar with the policies and guidelines and please do not rename any section or sub-section headers or use exclamation marks in them. I hope you will continue to contribute here, most certainly please do not be put off by the recent revert to your contributions and welcome to Wikivoyage. -- (WT-en) felix 04:38, 14 August 2011 (EDT)