Wikivoyage:Welcome, tourism professionals
To help further the goals laid out in the Tourist Bureau Expedition this page will help direct tourism professionals to related Wikivoyage policies and explain any questions.
How can my bureau help?
Any help on Wikivoyage is greatly appreciated and a good place to start about what kind of help we’re looking for is Ways to help Wikivoyage. Additionally, we’re always looking for help with adding tourist maps and images to Wikivoyage; however, we need all materials uploaded or shared with Wikivoyage to be compliant with our copyright policy and image policy.
Incentives
Every month we feature some of our best guides on the front page of Wikivoyage, viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. That could be your destination! However, this requires you taking the time to carefully construct a complete guide in line with our policies and our tone, but considering the costs of reaching a global audience the size of Wikivoyage's through advertisement, it could easily prove more economical, more effective and more fun!
Furthermore, as destinations guides grow into well developed articles, they tend to begin attracting a larger number of contributors who update, upgrade and improve the content constantly. As Wikivoyage's content is provided under a free license, you can take the new information, reviews, etc. back into your internal information ecology, provided that you release it under a similar license (no copyright).
Working with the community
Wikivoyage welcomes the input of professionals on all subjects — history, geography, language, culture, economics and any others. Travel and tourist information professionals — such as guides, travel writers, and travel agents — are welcome for the detailed and in depth knowledge of destinations and subjects that they can bring.
However, we also believe that travel is an individual experience, and that everyone has valuable information to contribute to the project. This travel guide is built by and for travellers, and we think that is the best way to get to our goals.
We ask academics and professionals to follow a few guidelines.
- Please identify yourself by creating a user account and giving a little description on your user page.
- Please remember that Wikivoyage is built in collaboration with tens of thousands of contributors from around the world. There is a great benefit to drawing on the collective experience of those travellers — they do legwork and provide feedback that one person cannot do alone.
- If you have to make changes to an article, please be ready to defend your position on the talk pages. The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy and a bad way to work together.
- Please don't tout for products, services, or destinations. Overexcited or exclamatory statements put off other editors and readers. Straightforward, objective descriptions of a destination that are fair are more likely to survive future edits, and are also more likely to stimulate the interest of Wikivoyage readers.
How do we edit Wikivoyage?
The first thing option is to plunge forward and do your best to follow our manual of style. Don’t worry about the little mistakes, because we’ll help you out and fix any mistakes. To make your Wikivoyage editing experience more enjoyable with fewer hassles, please read over several of the policies listed below. We know, from personal experience, that using wiki markup is confusing, but reading our wiki markup article will help you.
Creating a new guide
Guidelines for listings
Wikivoyage uses listings in a predefined template format {{listing}} for individual venues and points of interest. There's space for contact info, hours, prices, a brief description and (lat, long) co-ordinates to place a {{marker}} on a locator map. It’s recommended that staff members of CVBs use these listings for ease of use. Most individual venue should be placed in one individual city district article (for large cities) or in the city article (for small towns) as the region articles are primarily a general description or overview.
Also, please read over the following policies:
What to put in, what to leave out
A Wikivoyage destination-level page is normally a description of one city (or one borough or district of a large metropolis). It should have information on how to get to the area and a reasonably complete list of things to see and do while there. It should also explain what makes this destination unique; a brief description of the history, cultural identity and geography of the area and maybe a photo or two (if available under a free licence) may serve as a good introduction. It should link to other Wikivoyage articles for nearby towns which may be suitable day trips and provide a few viable options for places to eat or sleep.
For some destinations, Wikivoyage already has at least a usable guide to the area; for others, a mere outline. In some cases, information will be missing, incomplete or outdated. Because of your knowledge of an individual destination, you can help Wikivoyage better inform travellers by checking articles for destinations in your region and filling in key gaps:
- Are there things to see and do which have been missed? A live theatre, a historic site, a museum, an amusement park, a local farmers' market, a key landmark which visitors come from far and wide to see? If a key listing is missing, plunge forward and add it.
- Are there listings which are incomplete, missing factual information or padded with promotional language? Remove the fluff, add the facts: names, address/location, contact information, phone numbers in international format, pricing, hours of operation. For a restaurant, what type of cuisine? For a hotel, what facilities (pool, restaurant, Internet, conference or banquet rooms, breakfast or room service) are offered? A listing with just a name and a link to the venue's website is utterly useless to a traveller who uses Wikivoyage offline (mobile phone roaming might be very expensive or unavailable).
- Are there listings which are outdated? Businesses which have closed their doors? Popular venues under new names and new ownership? Flag the outdated info, indicate why it is incorrect and remove it.
- Are there a few good options for food and lodging in each category or price range? If not, fill in the gaps.
- Are there nearby towns which are popular as day trips among visitors to your city? If these places have a Wikivoyage article, mention them and link to that article in "Go next".
At the same time, please avoid adding:
- Copypasta. Text copied from your existing promotional materials and pasted to Wikivoyage is problematic for a number of reasons. One is copyright; we need to be able to freely modify and redistribute text (with attribution) at will and therefore require content be under a free license. One cannot easily verify that text or images copied from outside sources is indeed free. Another issue is that the tone of an advertisement is utterly wrong in a guide which needs to be fair and informative, not promotional in content or wording.
- The local CVB's (or local hôtelier's) opinion of the venue or destination. Utterly useless; every destination claims to be "a vacation paradise" and the staff of every hotel claims "our friendly staff will make your relaxing stay an enjoyable one" but these self-serving assessments provide no information of value to the traveller and will be removed. Don't tout.
- Long lists of every business in the area, or listings which are not specifically of use to travellers. Wikivoyage is not a yellow page directory. We don't need the name of every school, every church and every lumberyard in town.
- Indiscriminate collections of external links. One link to the city hall or official tourist information site for a town in the article's lead, and one link to the official site for a venue from that venue's listing is reasonable – if these aren't used as a substitute for putting the information into the Wikivoyage guide. Links to resellers, booking agents and other travel guides are to be avoided.
- Excessive detail for a single venue. Wikivoyage is a travel guide, not an encyclopaedia. A sentence to a paragraph is reasonable to describe one activity or attraction. If you need an entire page to explain why one building is listed on a national historic register, complete with a bibliography of reliable secondary sources, that level of detail may better suit Wikipedia. An article here covers a small city, a large rural area or a district of a large metropolis. See Wikivoyage:What is an article?
- Misplaced content. The "Connect" section is for helping travellers remain in contact while on the road – post offices, libraries with copy/fax or Internet access, Wi-Fi hotspots, SIM cards and mobile phones belong here. It is not somewhere to list "contact X Hôtel at +1-123-123-4567" or "contact the local CVB". Likewise, lists of local landmarks and attractions belong in "See", not in individual hotel descriptions. "Go next" is for linking to other Wikivoyage articles for nearby destinations, not for listing in-town venues which belong in "see" or "do" locally.
Remember, in all cases the traveller comes first. Add only the information which is useful to the traveller.