User talk:EvanProdromou/Oct-Nov 2006

See also User talk:(WT-en) Evan/Archives

Please direct the following questions to the right spots:

• Technical requests like feature requests or bug reports should be posted using the tool at wts:Technical requests.

Evan,, What a great site for peolpe like me that LOVE to travel. My wife and I caught the travel bug 10 years ago and have taken at least two trips a year since. However, we recently discovered a travel club that allows us to travel every month if we choose because of the ridiculous deals they can offer by buying travel packages in bulk.(Kinda like the Wallmart of Travel). I would like to talk to you if possible about sharing this idea with you. You can also go to tropicalgetaways.worldventures.biz for more information. Please contact me when you have time at aplapiana@yahoo.com or by phone 702-480-7673. Thanks! Tony

Sex Tourism Dispute

Evan, would please take a look at the Sex Tourism talkpage in the main Wikipedia when you have chance. We are in a big dispute, and you look like you have some invaluable knowledge on the subject. I'm trying to show that there are forms of sex tourism that are not abusive, but the editor disputing me has more sources via the advocacy groups and political organization. As you may know there are not many external references that describe sex tourism beyond that, and I'm basically at the mercy of original research. Would you please see the discussion.
(WT-en) KyndFellow 03:28, 5 November 2006 (EST)

"You look like you have some invaluable knowledge on the subject."

I think he's calling you a pervert. :) -- 71.72.212.152 18:14, 15 November 2006 (EST)

eo

Would you please add the text I've added to to . It's the same short cut to every other language version's recent changes page that we use on every other version. -- (WT-en) Sapphire 00:11, 2 October 2006 (EDT)

hu

Hey Evan! I am happy to help in the Hungarian Wikivoyage Expedition [1], however as my schedule is changing quite frequently, I don't have time to be there all the time. If it is still OK, I'm in. -- (WT-en) bujatt 18:20, 3 October 2006 (EDT)

That's great! I'll get the site set up to go, can you contact the people on the team to tell them we're ready to start soon? --(WT-en) Evan 19:36, 3 October 2006 (EDT)

Yepp, I wrote to their talk pages, and emailed those two who have email receiving enabled. --(WT-en) bujatt 05:51, 5 October 2006 (EDT)

Two guys replied already as they are fascinated to join the expedition. What will be the next step? Let's communicate on [2] talk page. -- (WT-en) bujatt 07:27, 6 October 2006 (EDT)

Hey Evan! I have started editing the language file. I would like hu:User:(WT-hu) Strapontin to become a sysop so he could also contribute to it. How can I make it? --(WT-en) bujatt 14:17, 8 October 2006 (EDT)

You can't, yet. Typically for new expeditions the liaison (you) becomes an admin, and then a voting system for new admins is put in place. However, for this time, I've followed your request and made Strapontin an admin. For some longtime admins, I've turned over admin-making to the local wiki. --(WT-en) Evan 11:03, 12 October 2006 (EDT)

Thanks.

We have found quite a few bugs, some of these are technical. Could you please take a look at our buglist, I've translated it to English. - (WT-en) bujatt 06:02, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

Sure. New bug reports should go on wts:Technical requests, please. --(WT-en) Evan 12:49, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

Hi Evan! I'm an either editor from Hungarian Wikivoyage. Several days ago, I checked-in to be a sysop. You see, I got positive votes here. How can I get the rights? I think, I can get them from you! :) Please! Thx! (WT-hu) Dorgan 14:41, 18 November 2006 (EST)

Hi, Dorgan! Sounds great. I don't want to be a jerk, but... I don't speak Hungarian, and I'm not 100% sure I understand that nomination page. It looks fine to me, but I'm pretty sure you'd rather I didn't make people admins just because they told me they should be and pointed to a believable-looking page. To be on the safe side, I've asked Bujatt to confirm. Once that's done, I'll get it done immediately! --20:42, 18 November 2006 (EST)

You see, you've got an answer :). Thank you for the rights! (WV-hu) Dorgan 02:52, 19 November 2006 (EST)

RDF extension

I'm setting up a travel related wiki, and would like it very much to use the RDF/Breadcrumb navigation code to organize the content. What's the latest version of the RDF extension? The one in MW SVN is 0.4, but I've seen you refer to 0.5 somewhere in the talk pages here but couldn't download it from the URL provided. Also, what's is the skin modification that is needed to display the breadcrumbs? -- (WT-en) Alex

I'll see if I can track those down for you. --(WT-en) Evan 08:52, 4 October 2006 (EDT)

Re:[en] International Wikivoyager Get-together

Hi! Thank you for your message on my ja. user page. O.K. I will work it on this weekend.--(WT-en) Shoestring 08:17, 5 October 2006 (EDT)

Hi! I have uploaded the information today as follows:--(WT-en) Shoestring 07:22, 8 October 2006 (EDT)

Re: reverted addition to Phnom Penh page

Hi Evan. You just reverted out my reference to the Phnom Penh visitors guide on the Phnom Penh page. Did I breach wikivoyage etiquette by mentioning this guide, or did I include it in the wrong spot? If so, my sincerest apologies. (WT-en) hopha 14:45, 5 October 2006 (EDT)

Not at all, I was wrong not to add a note to the Talk: age. I got called away to the phone right afterwards, my fault entirely. We have some rules about linking to other guides, see Project:External links. --(WT-en) Evan 15:20, 5 October 2006 (EDT)

ES Admin

Maybe I'm just impatient, but I was nominated on Sept. 26 and I have enough support there. Are you the one who grants the admin status? I'd much appreciate it. (WT-en) Texugo 20:40, 9 October 2006 (EDT)

Happy Birthday!

• Happy Birthday! I like Ravi's cooking so I'm giving you one of his scrumdiddlyumptous cakes. -- (WT-en) Sapphire 18:55, 14 October 2006 (EDT)
  • I knew a little fishing would work. Thanks! --(WT-en) Evan 20:51, 14 October 2006 (EDT)

I second the cake-giving. Have a good one. -- (WT-en) Ryan 21:32, 14 October 2006 (EDT)

Joyeux 38! :) - (WT-en) Ricardo (Rmx) 22:48, 14 October 2006 (EDT)

Dang! Missed by a day. Hope you had a great birthday! — (WT-en) Ravikiran 13:22, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Opps. I just checked my mail for the first time in days and got the note from networking site.. Happy Birthday (if late)! -- (WT-en) Mark 16:25, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Another late HB from me too... -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 16:47, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Happy bday from me too. That explains why we haven't seen you on IRC lately. You must be recovering from the party still. :) --(WT-en) Dawnview 13:12, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

Markha Valley Trek

I'd think that a trek would be more of an itinerary than a region. --(WT-en) Evan 11:40, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

• There isn't an Itinerary template among the options available at the top of new pages, so I chose the one which seemed most appropriate - that for National Park. And, in some ways, this template is better than the Itinerary one as it offers a comprehensive choice of sleep options, plus sub-sections for adding info on climate, flora and fauna etc. Actually, none of the current templates provide sufficient information options for someone embarking on a long mountain trek. They all have to be adapted. Therefore, I think designing a new template specially for this purpose (possibly a combination of the National Park and Itinerary templates) would be a good idea. Thoughts? (WT-en) WindHorse 21:25, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

Pashley as admin!

Hi Evan

Just thought I'd drop you a quick message to say that (WT-en) Pashley needs to be admin-ed! He's been waiting a few days I believe. Sorry for bothering you if he already is, but I cant see his name on the list. --(WT-en) Tim 15:21, 18 October 2006 (EDT)

Done! Thanks for the reminder. --(WT-en) Evan 15:39, 18 October 2006 (EDT)

Problems with Italian Wikivoyage

Server is very slow! Editing pages is a hard task. We waste lot of time. Please rescue us from this ugly situation! Gobbler

Something goes wrong with the item Other sites into the Navigation bar

Zeke's Gallery

Howdy!

Adapting to 'local mores' - Just dropping you a line to apologize for missing your presentation, and to remind you to swing by so we can discuss Bruleurs further. My 'local mores' are more pedestrian and can be done using a phone or walking in the door. (tee-hee!) Zeke's Gallery 19:00 21 October 2006 (EDT)

Blinky test

Blink blink blink. --207.134.56.158 11:39, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

Of course I still don't see it in Konqueror, but it's in the right place now. Thanks! I don't quite know why that bugged me so much.  ;) -- (WT-en) Mark 11:47, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

It's OK. I have a lot of debugging to do in Konq. --(WT-en) Evan 12:14, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

No worries. I'm sure it will work eventually. There's a sort of convergence going on as the konq/html team make their browser work with all the hip new sites out there, so it might just start working on its own. -- (WT-en) Mark 12:27, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

Monthly averages / Typical Weather for all locations

Hey Evan, I've been working on a project WeatherBonk and have built a worldwide database of weather normals (typical weather you'd expect for each month, based on previous 30 year averages. Thought it might be an interesting collaboration with wikivoyage, so each location could have a section with the normals. The normals can be generated by coordinate or geocoded from a plain text location string. just a thought. cheers david at weatherbonk.com --68.126.183.252 15:52, 5 November 2006 (EST)

MediaWiki:Xtravelguide

I've just translated MediaWiki:Travelguidedescription to Portuguese on pt and I'm doing the OpenID stuff next. MediaWiki:Xtravelguide, however, is a bit more complicated because of Portuguese language. Between "$1" and "travel guide" we'd have to have an article, but there are 4 or 5 possible choices (do/da/dos/das) according to the cases (male/female and singular/plural) which I don't suppose MediaWiki can easily recognize. We could use the more or less neutral de, which would work well for most cities but sound weird for nearly all other places, so answering your question: no, sadly it's not quite feasible in Portuguese. -- (WT-en) Ricardo (Rmx) 19:52, 5 November 2006 (EST)

That's what I guessed. I think I can add a bit of trickiness to the software to detect it, but I think that's about the point that it's going to be more trouble than it's worth. Another thing we can do is change the part after "Wikivoyage", so that it looks like "Florianopolis - Wikivoyage, the Free travel guide". Anyways, not really important, but something I've been looking at. Thanks for doing the descriptions, though! --(WT-en) Evan 00:00, 6 November 2006 (EST)

User talk:Tsandell#Wikitext_helpers

I think that having a set of hu:MediaWiki:Edittools at the bottom of each form would be really helpful until the grand form based solution happens. Once that's up, it really will be dead easy for anyone to contribute - which is what we want.

I must say that I wasn't overly convinced about having the tags in at all at first (maybe I'm just a wiki purist - I just like putting in all the and ' etc etc everywhere!) but after having done a bit of MoSing on Delhi, I can really see the benefits in having something quick to edit that gives a 100% standardised output. I'm looking forward to these forms! -- (WT-en) Tim 18:48, 7 November 2006 (EST)

Advice for a new Wiki Project

Hi Evan,

I've been reading with great interest the timeline and project notes for the creation of this page. I have suggested to my client New California Network [3] that they lead the way in creating a wiki policy site for the state of California. As a collection of legislation, judicial proceedings, speeches, white pages, position papers, academic entries and summary articles of the many public policy issues that confront California, I believe that this wiki project could increase transparency, accountability, and access in the realm of policy proceedings.

I'm currently writing a grant proposasl for this venture and was hoping that you could share some of your expertise with me. I'm looking for figures concerning needed supplies, bandwidth, personnel, initial contributors, etc etc to get a wiki project started and succesful within one calendar year. Also, we would prefer to have a full time Project Manager from the initial stages. Are there many out there with expertise like you and Maj?

I am proposing that we join forces with a student non-profit think tank for content development. Also, we have several analysts on retainer that would be a an immediate source of content development.

BTW - I had a meeting with Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons and he suggested that I contact you guys because you'd been so succesful.

I'll check back here for a response or you could email me: kpope at newcalnet.org

Thanks! Kemble K. Pope

Listings URLs

I'm not sure if there's policy on this and thought I'd better ask. I just cleaned up some frontlinking on Orlando and noticed something for the second time. The URLs for a couple of the listings included stuff like src=Wikivoyage or something like that. I suspect there is ulterior motive involved where the lister is getting credit for a referral (though I'm not enuf of a techie to know). Question is, is there policy on this? I know there is policy stating we want the shortest links possible, but obviously the question of referral credits goes beyond that. (WT-en) OldPine 09:43, 11 November 2006 (EST)

Hotelmakerbot

Could you check out Project:Script nominations#Hotelmakerbot? Once any lingering questions are resolved, could you edituser User:(WT-en) Hotelmakerbot and categorize it as a bot? (No hurry about the useredit, I just want to get any questions resolved early).

My current status on this is that I've written about 70% of the bot and will be testing it on my own Sandbox Wikimedia (preloaded with some selected Wikivoyage pages) before unleashing it on Wikivoyage. When I do unleash it, I plan to permit it to only change one page on the first run and see how it works. So long as it works, I'll grant it permission to alter a few more pages per successful run.

BTW, 90% of the pages this bot is interested in editing don't currently exist. In a perfect world, I'd download Special:Allpages and use that to detect if a page exists before bothering the Wikivoyage server. But since robots.txt does not allow that, I plan on manually downloading Allpages. Do you have any opinion about whether it might be reasonable to automate that if I restrict the bot to something sensible like "no more than one download per run, no more than one download per week, each individual page within allpages counts as an "edit" in terms of pacing the robot to avoid server load" or somesuch? -- (WT-en) Colin 03:25, 13 November 2006 (EST)

Special:Allpages is pretty hairy; you may want to consider some other options. First, check out Special:Sitemap, which generates a list of all pages and images in Google Sitemaps format (with a useful last-modified timestamp), and Special:Urllist (for Yahoo), which just generates a one-url-per-line listing of all pages and images. Those might get you where you want to go. Another option is to use the new MediaWiki API (see [4]), just released as part of MW 1.8.x. Since it's under active development, there may be some incompatible changes in the future, but it looks promising from what I see.

Lastly, our infrastructure is doing pretty well, so I've dialed down the Crawl-Delay in robots.txt to zero seconds, meaning just go crazy on reads, man. I think the main reason to throttle writes to the system is to make it possible for the community to correct or stop a runaway bot before it has done too much damage. Don't worry too much about reading big query pages within reasonable limits (agreed, once or twice per run for a script is probably best, preferably running less frequently than once per hour); if it gets to be a problem, we can solve it then. --(WT-en) Evan 10:55, 13 November 2006 (EST)

Whoa. Sitemap is awesome... and solves a ton of problems having to do with "did I check that page yet?" or "should I check that page again". -- (WT-en) Colin 13:46, 13 November 2006 (EST)

Tag Params

So for the new sleep tags, there's no field currently defined to hold a tollfree number. Any preference what I should call it? It's not terribly important that it's not displayed currently, just that we have an agreed upon name for the field.

I've noticed a few other fields that need defining which are not related to my current project. Where should I bring them up? As a tech request, bug report, or Project:Listings? -- (WT-en) Colin 16:31, 15 November 2006 (EST)

• I've brought it up at Project:Listings.

• I still need an answer regarding toll-free numbers before I can update the rest of the sleep listings with the bot. -- (WT-en) Colin 00:28, 20 November 2006 (EST)

France: Gites de France

Thanks for the info, and for being even-handed in which links are allowed and which are not.

Would it be all right if I put back just the information about what to expect when booking a gite (no links whatsoever)? It's growing in popularity among Americans (Europeans have been doing it comfortably for years), so it might be helpful to them to have more info on just what they should expect to see (and not see) in the process.

-(WT-en) vrooje

deleting my texts

Hi I would just like to know why you removed so many of my contributions, the majority of which I see no reason for deleting (I am new here though).

Btw> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/definitely —The preceding comment was added by (WT-en) Se Globetrotter (talk • contribs)

I'm not sure! I rolled back your edits that included first-person pronouns (see Project:First person pronouns for why), and the software seems to have rolled back all your edits. I'll go back through and see if I can recover other stuff that was accidentally deleted. Sorry for that! The last thing I want to do is discourage someone from contributing. --(WT-en) Evan 17:12, 16 November 2006 (EST)

Panajachel

Jim, thanks for your diplomatic approach on Talk:Panajachel. It's much appreciated. --(WT-en) Evan 12:26, 16 November 2006 (EST)

What Evan said! Nice job! -- (WT-en) Colin 15:35, 16 November 2006 (EST)

Evan, Colin: Thanks for mentioning it. I am hopeful the Panajachel anonymous person(s) might perhaps turn into good Wikivoyage editors, if we can get them onside. (WT-en) JimDeLaHunt 23:05, 16 November 2006 (EST)

Article#Section redirects

I just saw your Allhotels in dhaka redirect edit - it would be useful if redirects like that actually worked (ie the #Section part) - just curious to know if they're going to work at a later date? (I asked once before - see 3rd "UTP" para) ~ 61.91.191.11 13:10, 17 November 2006 (EST)

Bump! ~ 203.144.143.4 21:51, 17 December 2006 (EST)

Hi. I don't think we have a tech request for this. If you add one, I'll take a look. --(WT-en) Evan 21:56, 17 December 2006 (EST)

Done - Tech:Article-Section redirects ~ 203.144.143.5 22:46, 17 December 2006 (EST)

IE ToC

So I see some tinkering has been done with the TOC on Review. I purposely downloaded the newest IE version and the left side menus are now over lapping with the actual guides or whatever content was normally in the center of the screen. Do you need a screenshot? I can get a screen shot, but I'll be very busy tomorrow and I may not have much time between now and Sunday to get one uploaded. -- Andrew

Don't rush; I've got a copy of IE7, and I can debug it on my testing server. Thanks for the info, it's a big help. --(WT-en) Evan 17:37, 17 November 2006 (EST)

Username

Hi, do you know if I can change my username? What should I do? Thanks (I'm on the french Wikivoyage, User:Mtu33260 )87.88.248.33 14:56, 19 November 2006 (EST)

Put your request on wts:Requests for username change, and use your old username to sign it (using OpenID). --(WT-en) Evan 18:02, 19 November 2006 (EST)

Geo Microformat

Hi, Evan,

It's great that you;re going to be using card, but please also consider using the Geo microformat for marking up co-ordinates. All it needs is:

<div class="geo">  <!-- or span, or some other container, such as <P> -->
 <abbr class="latitude" title="37.408183">N 37° 24.491</abbr> 
 <abbr class="longitude" title="-122.13855">W 122° 08.313</abbr>
</div>

Thank you. (WT-en) Andy Mabbett 10:51, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Sure; there's a geo attribution to Project:listings, and that's exactly what it's for. However, I have some qualms about doing this. Microformats are supposed to be for both human-readable and machine-readable content, but for the vast majority of humans, lat-long coordinates are almost meaningless. Navigating through a city using lat-long coordinates is much less common than using the street address. So, if we print out the actual coordinates for each listing on a page, we get a whole lot of visual noise that's incomprehensible to the average person. (Take a peek at Singapore/Sentosa and think a bit about how a bunch of lat-long pairs after each listing would look.)

Now, I have plans to start including embedded maps into the site, so one way to make something that's useful for humans and gives readable output for computers is, say,

 <a href="[...]/Special:Mapstraction/37.408183/-122.13855" class="geo"><abbr class="latitude" title="37.408183"></abbr><abbr class="longitude" title="-122.13855"></abbr>Map</a>
 

However, when I brought this up on #microformats, tantek gave me a serious talking-to about it. He said if you're going to hide the coordinates, don't use geo at all. What's your opinion? --(WT-en) Evan 11:49, 25 November 2006 (EST)

I don't share his somewhat extreme personal views on the subject, and I think it's a pity he's conflated those with the standard for microformats, which seem capable of working either way; but nonetheless that seems to be both the written and de facto standard. That said, I think, with the growth in the number of people using GPS and geo-tagging, more people are starting to use - and to want to access, if not see - co-ordinates. Conversely, I think it's OK to apply them as an abbreviation to, say, a postal code [5] or, in the UK, an Ordnance Survey grid reference (e.g near the foot of [6]), instead of in an empty 'abbr' or publishing them in full. Publishing the co-ordinates for the subject of a page; and publishing those for multiple items referred to within the page, are separate issues. Note how Wikipedia pages, e.g. Birmingham use them top right, to link to a powerful mapping service. I hope that Project:Microformats will be useful. (WT-en) Andy Mabbett 16:01, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Microformat page

I'm quite offended that you describe the original content of Wikivoyage:Microformats as "hype". (WT-en) Andy Mabbett 17:39, 25 November 2006 (EST)

I'm sorry; advocacy would have been a better term. Typically for project-namespace articles we describe what's actually happening or imminent, and speculation tends to go on talk pages. If you want to advocate for further use of microformats, maybe Project:Microformats would be a good place. Also, if you have specific technical requests, we have wts:Technical requests. --(WT-en) Evan 17:49, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Thank you. I'm not speculating, but explaining (with some proposing). I've restored some of the text; feel free to move it to the pages you describe if they're more suitable. (WT-en) Andy Mabbett 17:58, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Template:Failedstarnomination

Hi Evan

I created this tag to add to articles that were nominated for star status but failed. The idea is to help draw attention to the criticisms of the article so that they can be improved, and re nominated quickly. I believe something like this should go on the discussion page rather than the actual article.

In the tag, I've used a link to Wikivoyage:Star nominations/Slush pile#{{FULLPAGENAME}} , but this ends up linking to Slush pile#Talk:Yogyakarta, rather than Slush pile#Yogyakarta! Is there anything like {{FULLPAGENAME}} that becomes a link to the articles main page rather than its talk page? -- (WT-en) Tim 07:12, 26 November 2006 (EST)

I changed FULLPAGENAME to PAGENAME, so the namespace is ignored. So on Talk:Yogyakarta, FULLPAGENAME is "Talk:Yogyakarta" and PAGENAME is just "Yogyakarta". Note that this only works for articles in the main namespace; PAGENAME on "Wikivoyage talk:Docents" would be "Docents", not "Wikivoyage:Docents". I think in those cases you'd have to use ARTICLESPACE or TALKSPACE or something, but I don't know exactly how. See magic words help for MediaWiki. --(WT-en) Evan 12:58, 26 November 2006 (EST)

Barnstar

Whereas (WT-en) Andrew has deemed (WT-en) Evan indispensable and;

Whereas (WT-en) Evan does an amazing amount of work and for three years' worth of work he didn't get paid for and;

Whereas (WT-en) Evan gave me a ride back to my hotel in Everett and;

Whereas I, (WT-en) Andrew, was greatly impressed by the investigative work done by (WT-en) Mr. Prodromou to ensure copyrights were protected and;

Whereas (WT-en) Evan is a Cincinnatian by birth I hereby award (WT-en) Evan a barnstar!

Wow! Thanks! --(WT-en) Evan 15:10, 29 November 2006 (EST)

I apologize for the horrible grammar, but after nearly 22 hours being awake I'm not inclined to proofread. I really was quite impressed with the copyright thing. Is this your first barnstar on WT? -- (WT-en) Andrew H. (Sapphire) 15:33, 29 November 2006 (EST)