Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2013 (additional)

The following are archived discussions from the Travellers' pub. They should not be modified.

Extra archive page for 2013

It was proving unreliable to sweep content to the 2013 archive page. This was because the page was so big and additions required the saving of the entire page each and every time. After all 2013 conversations have been swept, this van be merged back with the main archive page Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:29, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

District Template and Section Question

Does the structure of this article does conform to Sections and Template guidelines; Specifically the See subsections:

Landmarks
Museums
Churches and cathedrals
Institutions of learning
Monuments

If it does, I'll use it for some other district articles.

Also, why does the TOC not appear in this article?
--TheMightyHercules (talk) 23:48, 27 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess sections are OK if the destination really has many things to see. TOC is visible as a single line within the banner at the top. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:03, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sections are definitely OK when there's a lot to see. How many and which ones you want depends on the kind of sights there are in the district. Check out some of our star district articles, like San_Francisco/Chinatown-North_Beach#See, Paris/1st_arrondissement#See or Chicago/Bronzeville#See. I actually think institutions of learning should only be listed under see when their buildings have architectural or other "passive attraction" value. Otherwise, they should probably go in a separate "Learn" section after "Do". JuliasTravels (talk) 17:21, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a tiny sidenote, I believe that "learn" fits more in the city-level articles than district-level ones. People generally choose to settle in a city for a longer time to learn, not in a particular district, as oftentimes travelling from one district of a city to another for instruction is not impossible. PrinceGloria (talk) 19:54, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We don't generally list things that require one to "settle" to do. Most Learn listings should be for things like a one-day cooking class or a week-long language course. No reason those should be featured on the main city page. Texugo (talk) 19:57, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, for now those sections are filled with advice on long-term learning, universities and such, so I thought this is how they are meant to be used. The short-term learning options would be much more limited in choice, I presume, and I do not believe this is tied to a particular location within a city - you usually need to commit a few hours in a row, if not a full day, or a few hours over consecutive days or weeks to learn anything. This means that this advice should not be grouped with tourist attractions, which generally work around the principle of "while you're there, why don't you also see this/do this/eat there". Participating in a learning experience requires a different level of planning and it in turn would rarely be tied to a particular district one would discover, but rather a city one plans to spend a longer time in. PrinceGloria (talk) 22:01, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is no stronger an argument for putting them on the main article than it would be for putting hotels there. Things are featured/summarized on the main page because of their importance to the overall experience of the city, not because of the overall city experience's importance to them individually. Texugo (talk) 22:18, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Going back a little bit, I don't completely agree with what Texugo said upthread. While travellers might not have much need to know how to enroll in long-term classes in a city they're visiting for only a brief period, I find that providing brief bits of general information about area colleges and universities is a good way to give readers a better idea of the overall identity or "feel" of a city. This is especially true, I think, for district articles of Huge Cities—even more so when the district in question contains a large university that's a major component of its distinct identity, e.g. Buffalo/Elmwood Village. This information probably should not be in the form of listings, however. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:50, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was not so much giving a personal opinion as a reflection of the traditional advice on the subject. While I agree with you that in some cases, a brief mention of local universities might have cultural relevance, I think those are the exceptions to the general rule - describing the community colleges of the typical small-to-medium size town is largely irrelevant and unneeded. In any case, they should not be See listings unless there is something actually worthwhile to see on campus, and should not be Learn listings unless they actually do offer something short-term that is available and might be interesting for a traveller. A brief prose description in the Understand section (or, more likely, a mention in relation to college nightlife areas) is fine, if it is truly relevant to the identity of the city. Random info about Cumbersome County Community College or Bumpkin River Technical School should be broadly discouraged. Texugo (talk) 00:13, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree completely with Texugo. Unfortunately, we've let articles go (and even feature/star them) with excessive information in their Learn sections, which causes the error to proliferate. We should probably be making that a point of emphasis in nomination discussions going forward. LtPowers (talk) 01:05, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Even if we don't put it in the "Learn" section, I maintain that this information can and should be included somewhere. Again, it may not serve the traveller to know how to enroll in semester-long university classes in a city s/he won't be located in for nearly that long, but it certainly does serve the traveller to better acquaint him/herself with the identity of the place s/he chose to visit. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:17, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Andre's point, and I'd also say that in the case of college towns like Clinton (New York), it would be ridiculous not to give a link to the local college's website, because even if the college had no architectural significance and didn't host cultural events that might interest people not studying or employed by the college, it's pretty much the only game in town. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:30, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

[indent reset] I agree with most of what's been said above. I firmly believe the info on the town's character as an university town should go into "understand" rather than a separate section, plus a mention of a "seeable" / "visitable" establishment of an educational institution should go into either "see" or "do", depending on the character of the institution.
I find it an unusual case when there is anything to "learn" that is not simply a "do" and merits a separate section, and I would still maintain most of it will be better dealth with on the city level of larger cities, much as it will be better to list embassies, hospitals or airports on the city level than confine them to district and deprive the city level of that information. Which does not mean that individual district articles should not contain mentions of such in their "understand" or "orientation" sections if the placement of the city-unique services/institutions within those districts affects their characters or orientation within them. PrinceGloria (talk) 05:45, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In really huge cities, I think that while examples of institutions of learning are worth briefly mentioning, actual entries for them normally belong in district articles. For example, there are a lot of concerts and lectures at the New School University, and those should be listed with a link to the New School's Events Calendar in the Manhattan/West Village article (I'm not sure if they are), not the Manhattan article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:06, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This look an awful lot like a "Do" to me. We don't have separate category for "Sports", so why would we need a separate category for "doing" things in educational institutions. Those are all "do". If there is a lot of things to "do" in a districts, we're doing pretty well with third-level headings. PrinceGloria (talk) 09:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You may well be right. I guess the only issue I have is whether it's worth whatever extra work it would make to eliminate all the "Learn" subtitles and move most of the entries to "Do," plus some to "See." Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:51, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Let's just refrain from putting any more "Learn" sections to newly-created and expanded articles, and we can deal with the extant one as we go, on a case-by-case basis. There's a lot of cleanup to do and quite a few of us are actually doing this as we speak, as long as we agree to do this that way (and not add to the problem by creating new "Learn" sections) it will be dealt with in due course. PrinceGloria (talk) 10:15, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't checked, but there may be some article templates showing an optional "Learn" subtitle that would need to be deleted if there is a consensus behind that. Also, Where you can stick it may need to be checked. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:27, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am very happy to stop using 'Learn' sections. I find that people often want to list universities which isn't actually relevant traveler information. (Unless the university is worth visiting, such as Heidelberg, but then it should be listed under 'see') I think specific courses (cooking, language learning etc) are still good things to have however. Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:30, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is true that the purpose of the Learn section is often misunderstood not only as a place to list universities, colleges and even public schools, but also as a section to list random trivia the reader might want to know or even resources for "learning more" about the destination. Not quite sure how I feel about all the work it would take to deprecate it though. Texugo (talk) 11:58, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Even where a course of study is a few weeks (like Chicoutimi-Jonquière, the Collège du Jonquière is well-known to Ottawa swivel servants for a three-week intensive French as a second language programme with no students from the local area) the brief mention of the school in "understand" with the rest of the industrial history of the town (pulp/paper, aluminium) is enough. A "learn" section would add little.

Yes, a school could legitimately end up dominating an article if a huge university is in an otherwise small town. An article on "State College PA" would be incomplete without turning Paterno's statue 180 degrees "so that he can look away and turn a blind eye to the Sandusky affair" if that school and team are the town's most notable landmarks. Nonetheless, info like "Normal IL was named for a 'normal school' or state teacher's college" belongs in "Understand" and the campus itself (if architecturally notable or home to museums or concert halls) likely is "See" (with any specific activities there "Do"). We don't need "Learn" as another section as the school is described as seen by travellers, not temporary four-year resident students. K7L (talk) 14:50, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's not only universities though. One question is whether we want to stick an open university lecture series, a cooking school, a wine and cheese pairing class, a local crafts workshop, and 5 Spanish conversation schools together in a single subsection of Do. Texugo (talk) 15:00, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm of the opinion that there isn't much practical distinction between 'learn' and 'do'. I'm thinking 'Learn' should become deprecated in that it remains valid for existing articles and for new articles where there exist a lot of learning opportunities (as in your list). However it should not actually be required for new articles, or for old articles that people wish to refresh without it. Would such an approach be too vague for WV? Andrewssi2 (talk) 15:27, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, if the article template is to be changed in such a manner, I would really rather not just do it halfway. And actually, I think the Do section is already often overburdened with subsections (Parks, Theater, Music, Sports, Festivals, Events, Beaches, Hiking trails, organized tours, boating excursions, train rides, etc., etc.). I think taking a course in something is a different enough type of activity that we can leave it alone. Just because it is technically doing something doesn't mean it has to go in Do. After all, drinking, clubbing, doing laundry, and using the internet are also "activities" but we don't need to put everything in Do. Texugo (talk) 16:18, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Trains and boats are "get around" if used as transportation, the one exception being the sightseeing circle tour with no means to disembark at other than the original departure point. The "food, fuel, lodging" categories are more infrastructure than entertainment (gotta "Eat" and "Sleep" somewhere) and "laundry" seems to be more often a footnote within a listing in some other category (campsites in particular) than a stand-alone laundrette. "Wi-fi" is heading the same way as it's turning up too extensively in coffee shops, hotel/motels and public libraries; the stand-alone "Internet café" is dying. I'd hesitate to use the continued existence of "Connect" to justify "Learn" as a section (instead of a subsection) as "Connect"'s days may be numbered now that wi-fi is seemingly everywhere in most beaten-path destinations. If anything, "Events" are more worthy of a section than a subsection (as every little town has at least one annual tourist festival) while "Learn" should be demoted to a subsection of "Do" or dropped outright. If "ride a horse" is Do, "learn to ride a horse" should also be "Do" as they're almost the same activity. Wikivoyage:Where you can stick it#Learn and the article templates do need to change in order to deprecate this as a section for new articles, even if nothing is immediately done about the existing mess. Too much learning is outside our scope (ie: multi-year diploma and degree programmes) and what's left is merely one activity among many at a destination. K7L (talk) 21:38, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help pages clean up

I've been trying to clean up the formatting on the Irish pages for a while now. The biggest problem I have is following the manual of style pages. I find them hard to remember, scan and long-winded. Therefore I've tried to come up with my own version of the time and date format page that I think is easier to use.

Some things I've tried to improve:

Large bold examples. This is to make it easier to scan the page quickly. You should be able to tell how to do most formatting from the examples alone, without having to read the text.
Correct examples only. I've only ever used correct examples. If you see an example on the page, you know you can use it. This also helps keep the page shorter.
Short. I've tried to keep the page and notes as short as possible. It shouldn't need a "This page in a nutshell" box at the top. I also got rid of the introductory paragraph at the top which doesn't actually say anything.
Consistent formatting. I've tried to make the page as consistent as possible. For instance, all the examples are always shown on the left, instead of a random position in a sentence. This should help people quickly scan the examples to find the one they are looking for.

The new version is at Wikivoyage:Time and date formats/New version.

46.7.249.24 20:47, 2 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I don't like the large font. I haven't considered the rest - the font size is too overpowering. If you are willing to try normal size I would take another look. Otherwise I would not see it replacing the existing page - although you could keep it for use by yourself and others who like it as an alternative. Good on you for trying an improvement though. Nurg (talk) 00:01, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I do prefer this page, in terms of its conciseness and cleanliness, especially with the consistent formatting to see examples on the left and further explanation on the right. The bad examples are always confusing. What do others think? -- torty3 (talk) 00:09, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would helpful to have some form of cheatsheet if people find it useful. Would creating such a page at Wikivoyage:Cheatsheet/Time and date formats and Wikivoyage:Cheatsheet/Listings be ok? -- torty3 (talk) 23:39, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a reasonable idea to me. My only two concerns would be: 1) keeping the number of these "cheatsheets" small so it doesn't create extra work to keep them in sync with the policy pages and 2) that these "cheatsheets" should be lists of examples taken from the main policy page or some other concise version of info already on the policy page, and not be used to create alternatives to established policy. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:51, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alice's proposal

Alice has e-mailed me to say she is not currently have a technical possibility to post this message without compromising her password (keyloggers in Internet cafes, etc), but asks that I do so on her behalf:

"I (and others) have noticed the good work you've been doing with our Irish articles in adding lots of useful information, kicking them into our special listings format and making the formatting consistent and readable - so a special thanks for that!

I also agree with your basic premise that we should try and make our MoS pages easier to understand and remember. In this regard, unless it compromises comprehension, I think it's best to

1) have as few exceptions as possible

2) start with the most general cases first

3) try to follow world-wide standards where they exist

4) in listings, abbreviate to the shortest possible form unless it compromises comprehension

5) Be consistent in temporal formatting. Most human brains find it easier if there are consistent rules. I think that we should list the larger periods of time first and then the steadily smaller durations. eg:

when combining days or months with time, put the years, seasons and months first, then days of the week and finally the times eg: May-Sep M-F 10:00-14:00 rather than 10:00-14:00 M-F May-Sep.
when listing alternative date ranges (for example, seasonal opening hours) separate the alternatives with a semi-colon eg: Hall of Mirrors 3 May-8 Sep M-Sa 08:30-18:00; 9 Sep-2 May Th-Sa 10:30-16:00. Horror Maze 2013 Summer M-Sa 08:30-18:00; Oct-Feb F-Sa 10:30-13:00; 2014 Summer M-Sa 08:30-19:15;
for all seven days, use Daily. Do not use "every day" or "Su-Sa". eg: Jun-Sep daily 08:30-11:00, 12:30-18:00

I like the way that you have dropped the unnecessary (and confusing for newbies non-breaking HTML) space between the amount and the unit.

Consequently, I would much prefer if we changed the phrase at Wikivoyage:Measurements#Avoid_orphaned_units of Except for measurements of temperature and voltage, we have a mild preference for separating the number from its associated unit by a single space, but: to:

We have a mild preference for not separating the number from its associated unit, but:

I also think that, in listings especially, we can shorten the current abbreviation for hour/hours of hr to h so that we would see "N'Boli Airport is 42km (1.5h) drive since in some places you'll have to drive at less than 30km/h on the potholed roads".

Thanks for giving some thought to issues of style and formatting and for greatly improving our Irish articles! Alice".

--118.93.67.66 04:08, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A proposal to change Wikivoyage:Measurements would be better raised at Wikivoyage_talk:Measurements. Nurg (talk) 22:04, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I absolutely agree, Nurg. However, there have been occasions in the past when, after consensus has been reached on the specialised and appropriate policy discussion page, somebody then popped up and reverted the change on the grounds that they had not noticed the earlier discussion. --118.93nzp (talk) 22:13, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just like to point out that I was not only the messenger boy in posting the quote above - I also find nothing objectionable about "Alice's proposal".

I particularly liked the part about "have as few exceptions as possible" in our MoS and its application to tdf. Her proposal to "list the larger periods of time first and then the steadily smaller durations" would be particularly helpful now that our wonderful new listings editor often puts the digits of opening times immediately after the digits of a telephone number, and would save having to make customised edits such as this one where

The Lausanne Tourism Office (at the main station, and in Ouchy at Place de la Navigation 9 just across from the M2 station), ☏ +41 21 613-7373. Daily 09:00-19:00. The staff at the tourism board offices or over the phone can almost always place you in a hotel in your price range even at the very last minute. In addition they have a fantastic free map of the city and a huge assortment of useful printed materials in English as well as French, German, and Italian.

is obviously marginally less confusing to those readers using non colour screens (such as the paper white screens found on e-readers) than our current recommendation of

The Lausanne Tourism Office (at the main station, and in Ouchy at Place de la Navigation 9 just across from the M2 station), ☏ +41 21 613-7373. 09:00-19:00 daily. The staff at the tourism board offices or over the phone can almost always place you in a hotel in your price range even at the very last minute. In addition they have a fantastic free map of the city and a huge assortment of useful printed materials in English as well as French, German, and Italian. --118.93nzp (talk) 22:10, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why can't Alice just use an IP if she is worried about keyloggers? I'm a bit reluctant to evaluate a proposal given by a person who isn't prepared to step up and discuss it. I think we should place this on hold until Alice is available to discuss the merits, explain and (if necessary) defend her proposal. --Inas (talk) 03:14, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm scratching my head with respect to the reference about the listing editor. The listing template as it is, is mostly the same as it has been for years, nothing to do with anything new. -- torty3 (talk) 03:34, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Introducting Beta Features

(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)

We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.

Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Here are the first features you can test this week:

Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen
VisualEditor Formulæ (for wikis with VisualEditor) — edit algebra or equations on your pages
Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday)

Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.

After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.

Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.

Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Distributed via Global message delivery (wrong page? Correct it here), 19:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I checked this out before, and must say, I like the Media Viewer feature. It would work a charm with our static maps, which are often too small to see when in an article thumbnail. Once they start looking for sitewide tests, I recommend we put our hand up. James A ▪ talk 01:06, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template:PrintDistricts

This template appears to have been changed unilaterally last month (although I may have missed a discussion). Whilst I am in favour of losing (or at least diminishing) the role of printing in this warning, I'd want to change the new wording to something a little more pithy: perhaps "XXX is a huge city with several district articles which contain information about specific sights, restaurants, and accommodation."

It may also be worth thinking about the SEO impact of changing this common template - the previous wording was exactly the same as its WT counterpart. --Nick ^talk 02:24, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Your wording is good, Nick and it's also good to always have SEO at the back of our minds until WV is sunk. --118.93.67.66 11:47, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm hoping you meant 'WT' :P And the wording looks fine. James A ▪ talk 11:49, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aw shucks, my evil plan is revealed by my own Freudian slip. Off to sell my IB shares... Ibobi 04:15, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Getting that printout

It would be great if there was a simple way of getting a pdf (or printout) of a huge city article together with all its districts. Would it be possible to add a "Download all Districts as PDF" option to the Print/Export section on the left? AlasdairW (talk) 22:49, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Want to try CirrusSearch, MediaWiki's new search engine?

Hello everyone!

We'd like to invite your wiki to be early adopters of our new search feature, CirrusSearch.

CirrusSearch has a lot of advantages over the current search engine LuceneSearch, including:

Cirrus can expand templates. so the text of a template that's in an article will be found when searching.
Cirrus updates its search index more often. That means changes to articles will be reflected in search results much faster.
Cirrus supports different languages better than LuceneSearch. Our other early adopters (e.g. Bengali Wikipedia) have so far been happy with the new search.

If you agree to be early adopters, CirrusSearch will be run alongside the current search, so you can use both old and new search to test CirrusSearch. Eventually, CirrusSearch will be deployed to all wikis and replace the current search. By trying it out earlier, you can help us make it better for everyone, and make sure that it meets your needs. If you'd prefer to wait until we begin deploying it everywhere else, then that's okay too.

If you have any questions, please leave a message on my talk page on mediawiki.org here.

Best regards,

--Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 22:21, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think this sounds great. I have always been less than happy with our current search function. Texugo (talk) 13:10, 8 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess our main concern with templates is {{listing}} - where the template doesn't add text beyond that supplied in the parameters, but we do need to have its contents (before or after subsitution, don't care...) appear in any search result. K7L (talk) 04:03, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am always eager to try new things :-) Please let us know when this is test-deployed here, thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:05, 28 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think Dan Garry is probably a bit disappointed that, more than 3 weeks after his original question as to whether we wanted to be early adopters, we still haven't got our act together enough to give him a clear answer.

What's our consensus, please? --118.93nzp (talk) 07:17, 28 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Your thoughts please...

on an issue with a future FTT that has been nagging at me ever since it was nominated.

I'm posting a pointer here because I figure "Bargaining" is likely not a very high-traffic article.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:35, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another Main Page

Just a quick 'heads up' that another discussion is currently taking place about the future of the site's Main Page that you can read here. Please leave any comments, thoughts or ideas there. --Nick ^talk 00:05, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No "Thank" button for the first edit of an article

Hi, everyone. I wanted to thank a user for starting and putting the first post in a Talk article, and I found that there was no "Thank" button for that, so I posted to the user's user talk page. Is this a known issue? Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:27, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

For me, it works Mick and I've just send you a "thank" for a page you created. Btw, please try this. --Saqib (talk) 13:03, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what accounted for the problem, then. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:12, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:Rschen7754/The future of Wikivoyage

It's only half-finished, but I think it provides enough relevant stuff. --Rs chen 7754 23:31, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't read the whole thing, but it seems interesting to be, as a contributor who recently joined from Wikipedia. I find myself wanting to learn more about this community, and what Wikivoyage's strategic plan is for the next few years. Thanks for sharing! Edge3 (talk) 05:32, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean the future of Wikivoyage in general, or the future of English Wikivoyage? --Alexander (talk) 06:13, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm targeting this to the English Wikivoyage. Other language Wikivoyages have done a much better job at adapting to Wikimedia than this project has. But points on my essay may be relevant to them too. --Rs chen 7754 06:27, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is not true. For example, Russian Wikivoyage never tried to "adapt to Wikimedia". We are not obliged to do this, and it is solely the opinion of Wikipedians that Wikivoyage should look like Wikipedia. In fact, 90% of people from Wikipedia have no idea what a travel guide is (they never traveled and/or never used travel guides). Therefore, following the opinion of Wikipedians is, in general, a very bad idea.

Please, do not take it personally, but your essay, even in its draft version, already shows that the development of travel content is by far not the main task of this project, as you see it. This is a very fundamental thing, and I hope sincerely that this attitude will not inflict other language versions of Wikivoyage. --Alexander (talk) 11:15, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Where did I say that I wanted Wikivoyage to look like Wikipedia? And can you please back up your other statements? Finally, the statement "Therefore, following the opinion of Wikipedians is, in general, a very bad idea." is just a stereotype. --Rs chen 7754 11:22, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this is how I read your text. You link to Wikipedia policy on Consensus, and you repeatedly mention Wikimedia policies/practices, which originated from English Wikipedia anyway. And there is a very strange claim/allegation that Wikitravel was working against Wikimedia (I am not aware of anyone saying or doing this, except for, perhaps, IB, but they made no serious contribution to WT before the fork).

Moreover, you claim that existing policies will trigger the creation of similar content, and WV will never be different from WT. However, things like page banners and dynamic maps that are fully compatible with existing policies disprove this argument. The only thing that I have seen in your text so far is the idea to make Wikivoyage more friendly for Wikipedians, which is basically OK but of relatively low importance compared to traveler-related features, such as maps, PDF export, integration with OSMand, download of individual articles on mobile devices, etc... and the search for new editors among people with real travel experience. They are not people from Wikipedia. They are people from the TA and TT forums, the authors of individual travel blogs. This is the direction we will follow. --Alexander (talk) 17:25, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you know much about Wikimedia then. The English Wikipedia tends to be the odd one out of the bunch, as many other Wikimedia sites have purposefully chosen to go off in different directions. And here we go with the treating Wikipedians as second-class citizens again, and the stereotyping. "This is the direction we will follow" is incredibly arrogant. --Rs chen 7754 19:32, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

When I say "we", I mean Russian Wikivoyage, because we have a very solid consensus on that and a very similar opinion about Russian Wikipedia, which is, well, even more peculiar than any other Wikimedia project I am familiar with. If you think my words are arrogant or obnoxious, it is your choice, but I hope most people here understand that the majority of Wikipedians are not experienced travelers. It does not mean they are bad or "second-class citizens", as you say. It simply means that Wikivoyage should draw editors from elsewhere. --Alexander (talk) 19:55, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Page banners and dynamic maps are just window dressing; the content is still the same, especially to a text search engine like Google. And my point is that I've seen way too much of biting newcomers lately, even on the part of admins... and more often than not, they are Wikipedians. We are here to create the best travel guide in the world, and we need everybody we can get to do it. Geography, history, nightlife experts, transportation experts, photographers, copyeditors, template coders, travel experts, vandal fighters etc. all have a function here. We cannot be picky about who we let in and who we do not. --Rs chen 7754 20:02, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This illustrates my point. If you ever tried to use Wikivoyage articles, you understand that an article with the coordinates and up-to-date map is many times better than an old WT-style article with a simple list of POIs. Not for Google, but for actual readers and travelers. The Google rank is a completely different issue, but the influx of copyeditors and nightlife experts is also of little help here.

Another problem is that you can't draw everyone, you have to make a choice. And if you end up with a crowd of "copyeditors", this will not make a travel wiki any better. --Alexander (talk) 20:18, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I do agree with your sentiment about getting as many people as involved as possible, Rschen7754 - I think it's really important to our long-term survival. I hope you don't mind (cough) this! I agree broadly with your other points as well - the essay is a really good starting point for the issues that we are facing and are going to face. I'd hope that when our 1st WMF birthday swings round in January we can do a full-scale 'state of the wiki' review. --Nick ^talk 20:34, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disable "Ref" tags?

We don't use refs on this site, and new users coming from sites like Wikipedia, where refs are required, understandably use the Wiki-language functionality to insert them, creating a mess, with this message shown in big, red letters at the bottom of the page: "Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found." Is there any important reason why the ability to create ref tags can't be disabled on this site? I'm sorry if this question was asked and answered before; I have a vague memory of previously having this discussion, but as more and more Wikipedians come here, this is going to become a more and more serious problem, so it would be great to find an easier way of dealing with it. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:14, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think this would have to be done by technical staff. --Rs chen 7754 22:19, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How would it be proposed? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:22, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We would need consensus first, and then we would go to bugzilla. --Rs chen 7754 22:38, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't be too hard to get consensus, since we never use them. I have tried multiple times to remove the ref (and gallery) buttons from the edit bar above the edit window too, but haven't been able to figure that out. Any help with that would be appreciated too. Texugo (talk) 23:04, 15 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We never use them and explicitly deleted Template:Ref and Template:Note. I'm ready to declare consensus now if we think it's enough to convince the tech gurus. LtPowers (talk) 02:08, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's not what consensus is, the discussion's been open for only 4 hours. --Rs chen 7754 02:14, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It would probably help to explicitly establish that what we need is not new consensus on whether to use refs - which is already firmly established and which no one is suggesting be reopened for debate - but specifically a consensus to technically disable them so that they are no longer recognized and do not produce bright red error message. Texugo (talk) 02:35, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh come on, Rschen. The consensus exists; we just need evidence to point to prove it. Though Texugo may be right on the specificity of what we need consensus on. LtPowers (talk) 02:36, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How do you know that consensus exists in the community - are you claiming to speak for the community? How do you know that all the other active users will agree with this? You don't know until you have given everyone a chance to speak their mind. --Rs chen 7754 02:43, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Prior discussion over the last X number of years has made it abundantly clear that there's no desire or consensus to add references to Wikivoyage. I don't need a bunch of people to chime in to know what their responses will be. LtPowers (talk) 01:10, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support Here's to establishing a consensus that we can refer to. I continue to support the ban on refs and I support disabling the ability to create them or have them be recognized. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 07:03, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Since we don't use them, remove it. Nurg (talk) 09:53, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, I support this too. --Rs chen 7754 09:56, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

When did we start using bullet points in discussions? Doesn't this whole conversation stem from the fact that we're not Wikipedia? Anyway, Ikan's idea is great, and I totally agree with it. Nick1372 (talk) 16:13, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

While we do not typically use refs, sometimes they maybe useful. For example this article Traveller's_diarrhea. I thus do not support getting ride of them entirely. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:27, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- ...and this is why we have these discussions to make sure there is consensus. --Rs chen 7754 10:38, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm confused, James. I don't see any ref tags being used in Traveller's diarrhea. Am I missing something? Nick1372 (talk) 14:33, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, me too. There are no refs on that page, were you thinking of something else? I am fairly confident that there is not a single instance on any page where we have decided it was OK to use <ref>. Texugo (talk) 17:54, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are not but IMO there could be / should be. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

For what purpose? What is special about that page that it would need to cite sources? Texugo (talk) 10:17, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I also don't see why that article would need referencing. A list of reputable travel medical books could possibly be okay, but I don't see why statements within the article would need sourced. (Also, appologees for the bullet. I realize we don't use them here, as well as the "support vote" for consensus discussions. I just felt that rather than continue to discuss whether or not we needed records of support we could bypass that discussion by getting the support/consensus so that we can close the discussion, since I also believe this is rather uncontroversial. Obviously, I could be wrong, so concerns such as Doc James' must be addressed) ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:22, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Using information on other language pages

Can we do anything to help editors and travellers use pages in other languages? I can get a translation by opening the page with Chrome (but I usually use other browsers), but a link to a translated page would be better. I recently discovered that Balloch in Scotland has a bigger page in German than English. It also would be useful to have some idea of the size or rating of pages in another language - if a destination has a star guide in another language then it may be worth a look. It would also be great to see a map with the articles in all languages shown - maybe on meta by country. Is there a guide to importing content from another language? I realise that most of these will not be possible, they are just some ideas to prompt thoughts. AlasdairW (talk) 23:27, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you're asking for what I think you're asking for—links to pages in other languages—we already have that. They're located in the sidebar under "Languages" and in that big blue button at the bottom of mobile pages (We get this from Wikidata). Also, if you go to the Wikidata page for a location, you get a list of all the Wikivoyage pages in different languages and all the Wikipedia pages in different languages on the subject. As for adding an indicator of star-articles, that is a great idea and entirely possible. Wikipedia does it with feature articles and good articles, why can't we? I don't know the specifics, but you could find out somewhere. A map with all the articles in all the languages wouldn't be plausible. I'm sure you could do it, but it would be too much work for too little reward. We don't have a guide for "importing" information from other languages because it's just not something we do. It's the Wikimedia-wide custom that humans do translating, not bots. Any automated translations are not reliable. If you know multiple languages and see an interesting tidbit on the German version (that you know is true) that would be a nice addition to the English version, then by all means and add it. Hope this clears things up. Nick1372 (talk) 01:35, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I used an automatically translated page to help me copy the sleep listing from the German to English pages of Balloch (I know some German but reading the original article would have been slow). Automated translations are not good enough to use to directly put on pages, but can give an editor enough info on a listing, together with any primary links, to add it to the article in their own language. There is some guidance on copying from Wikipedia, and a template for attribution - if I translate stuff from another language, are there any special attribution considerations? AlasdairW (talk) 08:26, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it's your decision to trust an automatically translated page to be reliable. I wouldn't, but that's my opinion. I don't think you need any attribution when translating from another Wikivoyage, and a non-English Wikipedia should be the same as attributing to the English. I believe they all use the CC-by-SA copyright, so there shouldn't be any problems. Nick1372 (talk) 00:56, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No problems, yes, but Wikivoyage policy is that there should be credit given. So regardless of what version of Wikipedia is quoted, at the very least, mention where you borrowed the text from in an edit summary. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:10, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed... at the core of CC-BY-SA is "by"... the license requires attribution of the original author(s). K7L (talk) 19:16, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Call for comments on draft trademark policy

Hi all,

The Wikimedia legal team invites you to participate in the development of the new Wikimedia trademark policy.

The current trademark policy was introduced in 2009 to protect the Wikimedia marks. We are now updating this policy to better balance permissive use of the marks with the legal requirements for preserving them for the community. The new draft trademark policy is ready for your review here, and we encourage you to discuss it here.

We would appreciate if someone would translate this message into your language so more members of your community can contribute to the conversation.

Thanks,
Yana & Geoff

What is the status of the "Wikivoyage" mark? Is it to be registered as a Wikivoyage Foundation or Wikimedia Foundation trademark? I see "Wiki Voyage Offline" is already being packaged and sold as a rehash of our (supposedly-free) database dump at two bucks a pop. Perhaps they should pick another name so as not to appear affiliated to WMF or the thematic organisation? K7L (talk) 21:42, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sub-optimal actions by administrators

I realise that you are currently a much smaller project than the English language Wikipedia, but what is the equivalent page to EN WP's Administrators' Noticeboard, please. --118.93.239.53 00:58, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

118.93nzp, Wikivoyage talk:Administrators. --Saqib (talk) 01:05, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, that is not correct. We don't have an exact equivalent of that page; it depends on what you want to do. For general questions about how administrators do their job, Saqib's recommendation is fine. For specific concerns, they should be raised on the administrator's talk page. LtPowers (talk) 20:51, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

LtPowers, but if he have concerns about me, I wouldn't allow him to fill my user talk page. Sorry. --Saqib (talk) 20:57, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

At the moment we only have the pub as a centralised discussion space, for administrators and others. We have a running discussion on splitting it over on the talk page, where I'm proposing we have four pages a revamped Requests for comment, a vip becomes a more generic issues needing urgent attention, we have a suggestions/proposals page for new ideas, and leave the pub for other site discussion. --Inas (talk) 21:35, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Issues with "books"

I made a book by using the Book tool to gather and organise all the content for Indonesia: Bali & Lombok. And then downloaded it as an epub for my Nook; and very happy I am with it.

It seems like an obvious thing to share with others. The wikiPEDIA page on Books describes how to save to my user page and perhaps to the community. Unfortunately I don't have the page section described.

Apparently the only way I can now make further books is to delete the one I made. This seems rather strange. Cormac Bracken (talk) 14:13, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like you can create multiple books by moving them to different subpages of your user page, User:Davidbstanley/Books/Croatia and User:Davidbstanley/Books/Montenegro being one existing example set. I can't find any books in your contributions but, as far as I know, they're just an ordinary wiki page which contains a table of contents in some predefined format and a template; the Books extension grabs current versions of the listed articles and bundles them whenever a user requests the book. K7L (talk) 18:34, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well that's it, I don't have the means to save to my own userspace or anywhere else, so I haven't officially contributed anything yet. But on rereading the main Books page, I see that my account must be 4 days and 10 edits old, to save even to my own userspace. Now that's just silly. Cormac Bracken (talk) 11:12, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe you could ask one of the bureaucrats User:LtPowers or User:Wrh2 to change your rights for that? --Danapit (talk) 11:34, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to User:Texugo for adding me to the group Autopatrolled. Ideally I think any new user should have the right to save books to their own userspace, since it's a "user" function rather than a contributor function and doesn't seem to carry any vandalism risks. I suppose that's an issue for the wider MediaWiki software though. Cormac Bracken (talk) 12:18, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I raised this at Mediawiki support desk. Hopefully that's the right place! Cormac Bracken (talk) 12:18, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Did setting you to autopatroller fix the problem? It may have been premature to do so, but I wanted to see if it fixed the problem. Texugo (talk) 12:21, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, it's also a site request for Bugzilla again, though raising it at Mediawiki would solve it at the root. See Bugzilla: 46944 for the English Wikipedia request. I support the same. -- torty3 (talk) 12:29, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PDF rendering

Related question: does anyone know how to tame the extension for PDF export? I don't understand how to control it. For example, map markers are not shown in the PDF version, which is a huge disadvantage. --Alexander (talk) 19:30, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The .pdf might only be displaying whatever appears in the "print version" (so anything with class="noprint" is hidden), not sure. Wikivoyage talk:Listings#We have lost listings numbers in print version may be related? K7L (talk) 04:48, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes and no about noprint. The listing numbers displayed very oddly in the PDF version, and it cannot include CSS. Mapframe and listing numbers do show up in the web-printable version. The extension for PDF export, mw:Collection, is quite outdated or unsuited for customisation, and other projects like Wikisource are also looking for solutions according to User:AdamBMorgan. WMF are apparently looking into replacing the mw:PDF rendering pipeline to work on the fancy Parsoid stuff. -- torty3 (talk) 05:22, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply! So you also say we should sit and wait? I had the same impression. That's kind of unfortunate, because PDF export is a very useful thing, which is important for a travel guide. But at least the web print version works well for us now. --Alexander (talk) 06:56, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

epub rendering

Same question, basically. The epub export looks promising, but it is also missing map markers and having quite a few strange features. Is there any tool for fine-tuning? --Alexander (talk) 12:47, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Get in, from where, how?

About the "Get in" sections. I read an article here about a smaller city in a non-English speaking country, just saying "Most people arrive by car, use the road number 7". Well most visitors are from the same country, but I assume our readers are English speaking and would travel from another country and arrive by air. Should there always be information for people coming by air, telling which airport is suitable, how to travel by train or bus from the airport etc? What's the policy for content in the "Get in" section? --BIL (talk) 01:02, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The policy for a small city is at Wikivoyage:Small city article template#Get in. Nurg (talk) 01:11, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Need someone to make a template

In the long discussions at Proposal: Revise policy on dealing with repeated unwanted edits we have talked about making a template for warnings to a user. We need someone who is an experienced template-maker to help us with that. Any volunteers? thanks. Nurg (talk) 19:22, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Still needs a lot of work, but something along these lines: User:Traveler100/sandbox-warning. --Traveler100 (talk) 21:56, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Bay in Mauritius

Just wondering if someone with some knowledge of the area could look at the two articles, Blue Bay and Blue-Bay. Their titles are very similar but they appear to be about different subjects. Is this the case or should they be merged? If they are separate things then there should probably be some link to navigate between them. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:47, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Links to section headings

I just came across an interesting gadget at Mediawiki, and it reminded me of something User:Nicolas1981 mentioned quite a few months ago. Try it out at Preferences > Gadgets > HeadAnchor. I think we need to set some guidance on gadgets and scripts as well, some will really improve the site such as an optional Sharebox feature to Facebook and Twitter, although obviously limits will be good. -- torty3 (talk) 00:24, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the tip! HeadAnchor works great, the only complaint I have is that the image does not look as cute as the one that Github uses, but once this is fixed I think it should be turned on by default. To boost our Google rank, it is vital that we make it easier for readers to share a particular section or sub-section. I would say anybody knows how to share an URL... is there any scientific study showing how much FB/Twitter/etc share buttons improve sharing rates? Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:02, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Future of Wikivoyage reflected in its listings

~~The future of English Wikivoyage looks bleak: endless discussions about consensus, endless incarnations of W.Frank...~~ But here is one very practical question that I recently raised in the Summit. Fussi has come up with an idea to move all listings to Wikidata, so that different language versions could share this information. Although unfeasible in the nearest future, this idea puts forward another problem: how to find same listings in different languages? How to connect our listings to articles in Wikipedia and categories on Commons? In my opinion, these issues are central to the "integration with Wikimedia", which is extensively discussed in the topic above. Any ideas and opinions are highly appreciated, but please, read my post on Meta first. --Alexander (talk) 17:37, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to hear about continued integration with the rest of Wikimedia, but do we really need to start in on the old line about "the future of English Wikivoyage looks bleak"? We took great umbrage recently to another user making doom-and-gloom prophecies regarding Wikivoyage's future, and I'm having more and more difficulty (starting with comments you've made in the past and continuing though to this one) drawing distinctions between his approach and yours. Alexander, you had every right to make yourself inactive rather than pitching in and helping us resolve the personality conflicts and culture clashes that accompanied our move to the WMF. And, if you choose to become active on en: again in the future, that's your right as well - and I for one, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, would welcome you back with open arms. And I am sure we would love to hear any constructive solutions you may have for the problems you cite. But, absent anything like that, sniping from the sidelines solves nothing and is really poor form.

I say these without any prejudice toward the wonderful contributions you've made at en: in the past, nor toward the respect that I still have for you, Alexander, and I hope these words are taken in the constructive spirit in which they're intended.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:24, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I no longer try to convey my feelings here. It is simply my perception of the discussions taking place on en: over the last 1.5 months. But forget it. I asked a practical question and expect a response to it. The rest is unimportant. --Alexander (talk) 19:59, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alexander, I don't think your concerns about the direction en: is going are fundamentally different from the rest of us. However, I see the "endless discussions about consensus" as a very good thing - these are issues that cut to the heart of who the en:voy community is, and I frankly would be dismayed if there were not a lot of discussion about them. What has kept me from leaving the community along with Peter, Jan and you is that I have faith that these problems will eventually be solved, and that we will be able to once again focus our undivided attention on being the best travel guide around. Until then, I think that it would be good to have a bit more patience.

Also, I want to reiterate the great amount of respect I have for you and your work, Alexander. I hope that you have not read anything to the contrary in my comments directed to you on this thread.

I know that the main point you wanted to address in your original post had to do with moving listings to Wikidata so they'd be accessible from all language versions. Going forward, on this thread I'll restrict my comments to that topic. I have very little familiarity with the inner workings of Wikidata, but broadly speaking, I cannot imagine that I would be opposed to anything that would help along the process of integrating en:voy into the WMF community.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:28, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am interested in the idea of using Wikidata to share listings with other languages, but I see some potential difficulties:

- - - Different languages cover countries with different levels of granularity. So a castle in a smallville may be listed in the smallville article in one language, but in bigville (15 miles away) in another. I doubt that any huge cities are divided the same in multiple languages.
    - Some sights are only really of interest to those that speak a particular language. Museums about literature tend to be of limited interest if you are not fluent in the language and familiar with works concerned.
    - It is only the basic details that could come across automatically, any actual review would have to be translated.
    - The difficulty of tracking changes made as a result of Wikidata changes. Listings being changed need to show up on watchlists (not as a listing of all data properties changed).
    - We must do this in a way that does not put up a brick wall of complexity to occasional editors.
    - It will be a massive job to get each listing appearing only once in the database - recognising that "Edinburgh Castle", "Château d'Édimbourg", " el Castillo" and "Castello di Edimburgo" are the same place.

What might be useful is a tool that presented an editor with suggestions of listings to add when an article was being edited. AlasdairW (talk) 00:19, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As I mentioned on the Rfc thread, I also see some problems with this, in addition to the above.

Clarifying AlasdairW's second point above, I think only the phone/website/email fields will be usable across the board without translation. Pretty much every other field frequently has bits of prose or other elements that need translating.
If we have them appear automatically, we lose the ability to prune/curate lists locally. If we don't, how do we know when there are things that can be added?

Texugo (talk) 02:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking with my Wikidata hat on, this is definitely worth exploring, but I don't think the software is quite ready yet. --Rs chen 7754 02:38, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I both like this idea and have the same concerns Texugo has, but shouldn't we be discussing this in meta:Wikivoyage/Summit#ru, rather than here, so that more of the Wikivoyagers from websites in other languages see the points being made? Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:57, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think almost everyone is in favor of the general concept, but there are concerns (as noted above) about the implementation details. See wikidata:Wikidata:Requests for comment/VCards for Wikivoyage. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:38, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ikan, I have written the same thing on Meta one week ago. The only response is from torty3. It is clear enough that most people are not watching Meta pages and/or not interested in the topic. --Alexander (talk) 05:29, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was actually asking a different question. Should we do anything to connect listings in different languages? Suppose we can transfer the listings to Wikidata, or suppose we want to improve cross-linking with Wikipedia by adding Wikipedia links to listings and Wikivoyage links to relevant pages on Wikipedia. This has to be done by hand, because each of the listings is a completely independent entity. It certainly makes sense to do something that will simplify automatic processing of the listings. The question is what to do. --Alexander (talk) 05:10, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea who is going to go to the manual effort to update all of those listings, given that we have thousands of destinations with dozens of {{listing}} tags/templates in each. We already have huge numbers of listings which were never converted properly to templates (the mess at Perth (Ontario) at the moment, for instance), which haven't been checked in years to see if the venue still exists (click on the web links - many are 404, cybersquatted, spam or point to some other business) or which have other issues such as incorrectly-formatted or outdated telephone numbers. For the most part, nothing's being done to remove listings for defunct venues. Bots have been tried as a means to convert badly-formatted listings to templates, but that's hit and miss. Unless some sort of script can connect listings initially (such as by spotting duplicated telephone numbers and hoping they're the same venue), it's not going to get done. There are just too many listings to do them all by hand. K7L (talk) 06:13, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, we should definitely do something, or simply watch chaos growing. I think that your response gives me several ideas of what to do, so thank you! Other thoughts and opinions are still welcome! --Alexander (talk) 17:53, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Um, can't these be connected without moving the whole article to Wikidata? I seem to recall that Wikipedia has a template or widget of some sort that they place in articles in place of the interwiki links, that provide access to interwiki links. Couldn't we do the same? Purple backpack89 18:32, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage is doing the same. Reading information from Wikidata is no problem. The question is how to transfer it there. --Alexander (talk) 19:07, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The questions are how to transfer it there *and* how to maintain it once it's there. The latter appears to be our weak point as it is (businesses which close are still in the guide) and is going to be hugely more complex once the data is split across multiple wikis. How is a new user going to edit a listing which is partially here, partially on Wikidata and entirely out of date? K7L (talk) 19:18, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If Listing editor could read entries from Wikidata, editing would be very similar to the existing interface. But this again diverts the conversation to a different topic. Given the weak interest of the community, I don't think that the transfer of listings to Wikidata would be possible at all. Therefore, I am just contemplating what we can do to better organize the listings and to link them to other Wikimedia projects. This may have different implications, such as Wikidata, links to Wikipedia (if they are ever introduced), or a purely technical tool that will help finding new images on Commons by reading relevant categories. --Alexander (talk) 20:02, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What about we think of starting simple, with something that resembles pure data. Something like the flights and destinations from an airport, for example. Most of our airports have what direct flights there are, and what airlines fly there. Much the same info is at WP. If this information is kept centrally, we can draw on it as required. We can move on from there? --Inas (talk) 21:38, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this might be an option, although it does not quite fit into my understanding of a travel guide that should either contain an up-to-date timetable or only a brief description of travel options. The list of airlines and destinations is something that I never understood. Moreover, one should reach an agreement with English Wikipedia (and perhaps other Wikipedia's) because starting this. I would fully support this activity, but I certainly don't know how to start. --Alexander (talk) 22:55, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia already tries to maintain a list of destinations and flights per airport, so it isn't as if we're creating something that doesn't already exist. Of course, not every article we have would list these. It if overwhelms and article with hundreds, then we don't want it, and short prose is better. However knowing the flights and airline that fly to Port Macquarie is a requirement of a travel guide to that city. --Inas (talk) 23:30, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am convinced that Wikivoyage would benefit greatly from having listings on Wikidata. To answer a few concerns:

Moving data is not a big challenge, we have already gained experience by moving coordinates and banners, listings will just be a the same with more data types.
Modifying data will be as easy as now if we modify the listing editor.
Where granularity differs (eg. castle present in fr/bigville and en/smallville), data about the catsle is duplicated... no big deal, it was already duplicated before Wikidata, we can live with it.
"Some sights are only really of interest to those that speak a particular language": I doubt anyone can find more than 10 such listings in the whole Wikivoyage... please let me know about all such listings, to get a better idea.
"Reviews would have to be translated": Yes. The data that benefits most from Wikidata is URL/phone/price/etc.
"difficulty of tracking changes made as a result of Wikidata changes": We are in the same situation as Wikipedia, so I am sure Wikidata will solve this problem.
"[some listings] haven't been checked in years": Wikidata will help with this, thanks to collaboration between languages. Also, Wikidata makes it easy to create bots that detect 404 errors, for instance.
"can't these be connected without moving the whole article to Wikidata?" Yes, but as an interwiki veteran I know that Wikidata is much more manageable than ad-hoc interwiki connections.

Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:07, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Although I am generally supportive, would it be possible to see an example of how this would look in action? Thanks. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:19, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not against this idea either, but I still don't understand how it would work.

Since only the phone, url, and email fields will not require translation, who will be doing all the work to fill in the other fields and ensure that the items are connected to the right things in other language versions?
How will it be displayed in our articles? It can't be displayed automatically without turning any pruning/curating efforts into a complicated cross-lingual collaboration. And if it's not displayed automatically, how do we find things that could potentially be added to an article? As a corollary, listing items could not be assigned a one-to-one correspondence with their parent article either, without forcing all participating language versions to agree on regional/district breakdowns to make it work.
Your #4 point seems to assume things would get displayed automatically. Aside from the example of literature museums given above, the example I've given elsewhere was this: Japanese travel guides will tend to be heavy on hotels where Japanese is spoken, resorts that cater specifically to Japanese tourists, Japanese restaurants, etc. Other versions may be heavier on halal or kosher restaurants. Other languages may have other things they lean toward. The selection of listings on the English version doesn't necessarily need all that and needs to retain its ability to be pruned/curated separately.
I think the solution for viewing the recent changes will have to come before we actually implement any of this. Otherwise we'd just be blinding ourselves now and waiting for the solution to come.

Texugo (talk) 10:47, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, I think you do not understand. The selection of listings is not a problem at all. You as a Wikivoyage editor decide what to include. Ideally, one would write {{listing|wdid=Q123456789|description=A nice place in the middle of nowhere}}, and get all necessary information (name, address, opening hours) from the Q123456789 card of Wikidata. The listing editor could be very similar to what we have now, but it would transfer information directly to Wikidata, so that all language versions enjoy use the most recent information. That would be an ideal situation that we will most likely never reach because of multiple challenges:

Interface of Wikidata is not ready yet
Most of the listings (hotels, restaurants) may not pass Wikidata criteria for notability
Translation issues require a lot of thinking. The format of addresses, phone numbers, and prices on Wikidata should be very strict, so that each language version could automatically translate it and convert it into a custom format.
Listings should be synchronized between different language versions and between other Wikimedia projects as well. Empire State Building has its own entry in Wikidata, but there is no way to make sure that the listing in Wikivoyage is about the same thing as the article in Wikipedia/item in Wikidata.
Patrolling of recent changes becomes rather complicated; new technical solutions are most likely required

So far, I have not seen more than 5-10 people across all language versions who would be seriously interested in doing this. Therefore, it is very clear that the proposal should be put on hold for an indefinite period of time.

An interim solution could be the following. Add an optional parameter (we call it "wdid") that will contain Wikidata number and provide an explicit connection between Wikivoyage listings and existing data items. This parameter will facilitate linking to Wikipedia and Commons, which will be very helpful for bots and perhaps for real users as well.

More generally, there is a closely related proposal about moving information on cultural heritage monuments to Wikidata. Its time scale is also undetermined, but at least it would be a natural first step to improve technical aspects and gain necessary experience. --Alexander (talk) 11:45, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So this will be mostly for "See" and "Do" listings. I think this will be great when it's technically worked out. Will there be a way to set things up so that when "See" and "Do" listings are added in en.Wikivoyage, the listings are automatically put into Wikidata? Or that if a listing that already exists is started, the Wikidata info is automatically filled in by default? It seems to me that those are kinds of things that would be good for the software folks to work on. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding translating things automatically, I don't believe it is feasible to have those fields strict enough to allow for auto-translation. Phone number, email, and URL fields probably don't need translating at all, but I don't think it possible to automatically translate address fields to/from other scripts, and the price/hours field have a widely varying format frequently with snippets of prose to clarify what is being talked about. No strict formatting is going to allow for handling random qualifier phrases like "Main dishes for two around $40, half portions available at 70% of listed prices" or "Shops Mo-Fr 10AM-9PM, Sa-Su 2PM-8PM; Food court Mo-Su 11AM-8PM; closing hours one hour earlier in winter, Dec. 15-Mar. 1". Even if we only used WD items for See and Do listings, I believe there are many such qualifier phases in those fields. Texugo (talk) 12:12, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If it is not something that we can try out today (even in beta) then actually I am really unclear about what the ask is here? Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:51, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have not made any particular proposal. The goal of this topic was to "test the ground", see if people are interested, and if they have any good ideas on how to proceed. I have not seen much activity beyond rephrasing the problems of language-specific information and patrolling recent changes, so we are not about to move information to Wikidata tomorrow, but some parts of this conversation were useful anyway. Thanks to everyone! --Alexander (talk) 13:48, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ikan, this is a fundamental misunderstanding. The information should be transferred to Wikidata once and later retrieved from there. Otherwise, you simply keep a copy of your listings at Wikidata, which is not really useful. I also tried to make it clear that presently we have no tools to retrieve this type of information from Wikidata. These tools will (slowly) appear, but they will be of no particular use unless Wikivoyage makes a big effort on sorting things, identifying same listings in different language versions, and identifying listings that already have their Wikidata items (Wikipedia articles). This last point is something that everyone can start doing immediately, but I am not sure I was able to explain this properly. --Alexander (talk) 13:48, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't sound like that entails any change in behavior. Consulting Wikipedia for basic info on sights is nothing new, but it's usually more reliable to consult the sites' own web pages. Am I missing something again? Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:48, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yes... It is not about getting new information. It is about cross-project links. Suppose English Wikivoyage has an entry for Moscow Kremlin, and Russian Wikivoyage has it as well, but there is no one-to-one correspondence. If you add the Wikidata number to both languages, you immediately know it is the same listing. Now, Wikipedia does not like to store practical information, such as opening hours and ticket prices, so it is natural to supply the Wikipedia article for Moscow Kremlin with a link to Wikivoyage. You can do it all manually, or you can ask a bot to do it for you, but this bot has to know which Wikipedia article is connected to Wikivoyage listing for Moscow Kremlin. --Alexander (talk) 19:32, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be interested in a Wikidata entry for sharing listing between English and German versions of the same articles (and by extension other languages as well). I notice on the Kremin link there is an empty section for WV. Does this mean you have already started with the integration tools? Andrewssi2 (talk) 13:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Each Wikidata item has an empty slot for Wikivoyage articles. It does not mean anything.

As I said, we (the Russian-Ukranian team) do not plan to start anything on our own and will rather focus our efforts on cultural heritage stuff, which is a bit easier, better organized, and fulfills the notability criteria better. But even the cultural heritage is a long-term project. --Alexander (talk) 13:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

.voyage

Apparently there's a top-level domain .voyage opening in the new year; is this of any use to us? K7L (talk) 19:56, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm.. Interesting! I would think this should be brought ASAP to the attention of whoever is in the relevant department at the WMF, though I haven't a clue who that would be. Texugo (talk) 19:59, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

wikivoyage.com and wikivoyage.net already redirect to wikivoyage.org, so adding "wikivoyage.voyage" as well is just common sense. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:08, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And wiki.voyage! Jjtkk (talk) 17:32, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the tip! Wiki.voyage would be a very catchy URL indeed :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:42, 28 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Did a bit of inquiring, and got this answer: --Rs chen 7754 10:00, 28 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@K7L: @Texugo: --Rs chen 7754 18:56, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, yeah I saw this earlier but forgot to reply. Have you emailed YWelinder about it? Texugo (talk) 19:45, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't, since I thought that someone more familiar with this sort of thing should do it, but if nobody else wants to, I can do it... --Rs chen 7754 19:52, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure there is anyone more familiar with this kind of thing here. Would you mind? Texugo (talk) 20:00, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Now done. --Rs chen 7754 20:03, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There's been a .travel TLD for some years now. Do we have, need or want any domains there? I'd say guide.travel would be worthwhile. Pashley (talk) 20:07, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I had pre-registered "wiki.voyage" a long time ago and once the TLD will be available for registration, I'll hand over it to WMF so no worries of domain squatting. Pashley, "guide.travel" is not available. --Saqib (talk) 20:41, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

wiki.travel might not go over so well... --Rs chen 7754 21:04, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The .travel domain has some very arbitrary restrictions — basically, one must prove status as a licensed travel agent or a vendor in one of twenty other specific travel-specific fields (airline/railway, hotel/B&B, hire car firm...) to register there, at ten times the normal price for .com/.net/.org or a local country code — so its adoption was rather limited. By 2007, Tralliance (which operates .travel) was speculated to be at risk of bankruptcy; only 30000 names were registered at the time the company was taken private in 2008. The domain still exists, but most vendors strongly prefer to keep their existing .com registrations as established, respected addresses. If wiki.travel.com has been done and just plain wiki.travel was skipped, maybe there's a reason? :) K7L (talk) 22:29, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

New Creative Commons license

Version 4.0 is out. I do not think this affects anything here anytime soon. I see no obvious need to change & we couldn't until WMF legal department has a look anyway. and we'd want some synchronisation with other WMF projects and ... But it seemed worth pointing out. Pashley (talk) 01:45, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info! After reading the changes quickly, I think that while switching would rather be a good thing, it is not a priority either. How about we just wait for WMF to take the initiative? It will presumably cost them less if they switch all projects at the same time. Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:13, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that we can go around changing stuff though, without the uploaders' permission. A lot of the media is on Commons, so I'd wait to see how they react first. --Rs chen 7754 02:24, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We could change without uploaders' permission since clause 4b of the current license allows redistribution under any later version of the same license. Of course we shouldn't, though. One big change is that the new version deals with international licensing differently. Determining whether that suits WMF projects is going to need co-ordination across both projects and languages, plus input from legal. Pashley (talk) 07:22, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tipper

Dear all,

How interested would you be in an Android app that allows you to easily add a listing to Wikivoyage?

It would look like the current listing editor.

Features that might be interesting:

Button to get the coordinates by GPS if desired
Show a list of nearby articles, user chooses the relevant article
Take a picture (hopefully an intent from the Wikimedia Commons Android app can be used)
If no Internet connection, store data and send it when a connection is available

In the experimental phase, data would be added to a user page from which I/anyone would copy/paste to the right place. Google App Engine or Heroku or similar could be used to avoid revealing IP addresses. If the tool gets popular, adding to the articles' talk page (or even to the article itself under some very strict conditions to define later) might be considered.

Any better name than "Tipper"? (as in: the one who sends tips about places) Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:21, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Wikimedia sites now support mw:OAuth so that might get rid of the IP address issue (though it was deployed pretty recently, so nobody uses it yet). I assume you'd be developing it? --Rs chen 7754 07:50, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My last Wikivoyage-related Android app (Wikivoyage offline) has been quite a flop (only 2000 installs), so I prefer to share the idea and get some feedback first. As usual, it would be Open Source, so everyone's help is welcome (by the way, creating such an app would be a great way to learn about Android development, anyone interested?). Thanks for the OAuth tip! I think we should not require users to have a Wikimedia account, but unsigned users are implicitely OK with their IP being revealed. Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:00, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Editing only the lead section

In my WP Preferences, under Gadgets - Appearance, there is "Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page". This is not in my WV Prefs. Is there an easier way of editing only the lead other than clicking "edit" for another section and, in the resulting URL, replacing the trailing &section=n with &section=0 before re-loading the page? And could we get that gadget for WV? Nurg (talk) 08:48, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We can get it. @PiRSquared17: if you're around, what's the file names again? I keep forgetting :( --Rs chen 7754 08:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I took care of it. --Rs chen 7754 10:03, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. It doesn't seem to work if the page has a banner. Or if it does, how? If it doesn't, can it made to? Would it require a change to the banner implementation, maybe? Nurg (talk) 20:16, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My guess is that the banner obscures it entirely. We could add a link in the banner, but then it would be visible for everyone... --Rs chen 7754 06:15, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

w:en:User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver

If there's any interest, since we have no archiving bot, here's a script that makes archiving easier. I made these edits and now I can archive sections on my talk page with one click.

The catch is that a small amount of code has to be added to each page set up for archiving this way. It also will not handle the sweeping of the pub to other pages (though theoretically someone could code that feature in). --Rs chen 7754 09:52, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mini-expedition to sanitize listings

I am launching a mini-expedition whose goal is to fix broken POI listings.

Is anyone aware of any similar effort, or any existing tools, so that work is not duplicated?

Here are the kind of problems I have detected so far, do you know any others?

Latitude (longitude) has format 34°31'33.95N instead of for instance 31.46937
Invalid URLs
Unreachable URLs
Invalid email address
Invalid phone/tollfree/fax numbers
Unknown parameters such as "vkontakte"

Subtle cases:

Hours/checkin/checkout: Do we want the following to conform exactly to the time/date format?
Price: Do we want a single price (number+currency), or total free format, or something in the middle (sentence where at least the first number+currency is machine-readable)?

Flexibility is good, but for mashups/collaborations (for instance OpenStreetMap layers) it is even better if machines are still able to understand the essential part of the data.

Your input/ideas are very welcome! Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:29, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The two rounds of Wikivoyage:Script nominations#Wrh2Bot should have mostly removed unrecognized parameters, although it would be good to have a maintenance bot that cleans up any that sneak back in. Were you planning on this being a manual expedition or an automated one, and if the latter, were you planning to write a bot or looking for someone else to do so? -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:47, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking about a manual expedition, but that could be reconsidered if the number of errors is too high. I was not aware that your bot cleaned unwanted attributes, great! By the way, my script is starting to spit out invalid attributes at User:Nicolas1981/Syntax_checks#Invalid_URLs Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:41, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here is my current script: https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/wikivoyage2osm/blob/master/wikivoyage2osm.sh Anyone feel free to contribute more validations :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:36, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some of these supposed "unknown parameters" may be fields which are valid in other WV languages, such as a second telephone number (or mobile telephone number), a link to Wikipedia or (if it's ever implemented) Wikidata, or a link to sites like Facebook/Twitter. Even if en.WV doesn't use this information at the current time, we may want to leave it alone as a mashup or third-party app might be able to find a use for it (for instance, WikiSherpa is a map + WP + WV, so the WP link could be useful to them). If the field name is something which does exist here and the name's just different (adresse and téléphone, for instance) that's something that would be valid to fix. We do have quite a few listings where information is in the description instead of in a more specific field - hours and pricing from listings that were originally plaintext and converted by a 'bot is inevitably prone to this. We also have many listings with improperly formatted telephone numbers - places like Cebu (city) sometimes have as many as four to call the same place. I have to wonder if the local Cebu phone company has no 'hunt' or 'equivalence' feature to handle a landline phone with more than one line? Freephone numbers are sometimes being included in 'phone' instead of 'toll-free', even if there's already a local number in the field. Missing country code is fairly common, and presumably we want +44 20 not +44 (0) 20 if an international call doesn't get the local trunk prefix. There is a huge number of errors, but I question whether they can be fixed automatically in any but a very limited number of cases. K7L (talk) 18:27, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rendering phone numbers as "tel:" URLs on all platforms

I often talk with the Kiwix developer, and he told me he sees no reason why we don't render phone numbers as "tel:" links.

I think he has a point, such links would be useful for people who support this protocol (Android, Skype, ...), even though it is not everybody.

What do you think about it? Thanks!

By the way, a fresh Wikivoyage ZIM has been released yesterday Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:31, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support the idea. Hyperlinking phone numbers are user-friendly and can greatly improve the experience of our mobile web site visitors. --Saqib (talk) 14:41, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is already happening for anything using the listing templates provided that the number starts with a + -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:08, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh right, just realised its working. --Saqib (talk) 18:17, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We have 3234 listings which don't have the correct format - they have two (or more) numbers jammed into the one field, the number has a main switchboard and then an extension (which tel: doesn't handle well, if at all), they contain w:phonewords like +1-800-HOLIDAY or +1-800-RENT-A-CAR, or (in 2914 instances) the country/area codes are missing. In some cases, these are listings originally submitted without tags or templates and haphazardly converted by robot scripts. A valid number in the correct format will get a tel: link now, but there are entire maintenance categories for pages where some numbers are badly formatted. K7L (talk) 18:10, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I had not realized that yet, sorry for the noise! I will try to think of a way to make it easier to fix problematic numbers without having to check all numbers within an article. Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:07, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OxygenGuide (offline Wikivoyage): Updated, now with sections menu

Download OxygenGuide and unzip it on your laptop or phone, and you will have the whole Wikivoyage available, even when you have no Internet!

Generated using the freshest data dump (Saturday). Now includes a menu to easily jump to any section. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:41, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And what about those on a Mac? --Saqib (talk) 13:43, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Saqib: On a Mac as well, you can download OxygenGuide, unzip it, and browse it offline :-) Please let me know if anything does not work as expected, thanks for your feedback! Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:07, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Any ability to search yet? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:26, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help needed to fix double redirects

Swept in from the pub

I detected a few dozen double redirects, anybody has 20 minutes to fix them? Thanks! They are at https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User:Nicolas1981/Syntax_checks#Double_redirects Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:40, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There used to be a bot that did this, but the operator retired from Wikimedia. :/ --Rs chen 7754 02:44, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I edited your list - FIXED -- only 1 Bigi Pan I believe pointed to itself so I made it redirect to Suriname as it is an island there... Matroc (talk) 05:35, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again Matroc :-) It takes 20 minutes every month so it is not super high priority, but if anyone knows the bot that does this on Wikipedia, could you tell me? I could try to run the same on Wikivoyage. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:50, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The bot that I've seen fixing double redirects on WP was w:User:AmphBot, although there could possibly be more. Nick1372 (talk) 16:24, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently Amphbot's operator has left Wikipedia in 2012, and no source code can be found. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:35, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:RileyBot was approved here, but stopped running after the owner retired from Wikimedia. --Rs chen 7754 04:18, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No source code found for RileyBot either... Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently this is a function in mw:Pywikipedia (redirect.py). --Rs chen 7754 07:19, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There's actually a page at Special:DoubleRedirects. Special:BrokenRedirects isn't being cleaned as well. -- torty3 (talk) 11:30, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Copied from WT

An issue has come up where Polatsk has been created with text copied from WT. Most but not all of the authorship is by the same user who imported it here. (see Talk:Polatsk) What do we do in this case? Do we want to keep it, and if so, what is the best way to attribute it? Obviously we don't want to make it too easy and encourage more of this copying, given our recent effort to reduce the number of attribution links to there rather than increase it. Or would it be possible for this user to insert only the original unaltered contributions he made there into our new article here and not worry about attributing the other site? Texugo (talk) 13:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Would the issue be solved by simply getting users to put the text into WV first, and then afterwards copy to WT? Andrewssi2 (talk) 14:26, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well the ideal would be that they contribute here first, period, but your suggestion is not very actionable and does not address the inevitable cases where the info has already been added there first. Texugo (talk) 14:36, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is actionable in that we can given direction to such contributors via their talk page.

No suggestion for the inevitable cases of WT first posts. Andrewssi2 (talk) 14:44, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Given past legal history (Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel#Can I copy content between Wikivoyage and Wikitravel?) we've discouraged copying that requires attribution, so I would suggest we would need to delete anything that isn't the author's own original work. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:56, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, everyone should avoid plain crtl+c ctrl+v:ing stuff from Travel. If one has added some first hand information to Travel it shouldn't be that hard to write the same information here using different words. As a side note, it is of course up to each one him/herself whether to support that other site or not, but personally I do not contribute there any longer since almost a year and a half and I suppose that's true for most other Voyagers too. ϒpsilon (talk) 16:38, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Legally, the author of the text owns the copyright and can do as they darned well please — but rewording text is a good idea as duplicate content is being penalised by search engines. After substantial changes to a page, using http://www.copyscape.com/compare.php to find leftover WT text still in the article that can be reworded or removed helps avoid the duplicate content penalty. K7L (talk) 16:47, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just to clarify my above comment, if someone is copying their own, original work then no further attribution is required - they are the original author and attribution would be the same whether they write something just for Wikivoyage, write something just for WT, or copy their own work to both sites. However, if the content being copied is not solely the author's own work, while it is legally permissible to copy text if attribution is provided, per Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikitravel#Can I copy content between Wikivoyage and Wikitravel? I think that is something to discourage unless it has first been discussed. As to SEO issues, while it would be great if all content was distinct from what is found elsewhere, if someone wants to contribute to both sites I'm not sure it's entirely reasonable to require them to write different versions for each site. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:15, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One can put the attribution in the history. This is what we do when we move text around WP. No attribution at the bottom is needed. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edit war in Vietnam

I see the above conversation about how to attract actual travelers to edit on WV. In that vein I would direct you to the Hoi An talk page where one of your regulars keeps reverting a piece of information I added. Someone please tell me why I should bother to make another edit here. --Neotarf (talk) 13:31, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not trying to chase you away, and part of my thinking is that since you aren't an absolutely new user, you are therefore more likely to be willing to discuss things than just up and leave. And the key point is, should My Son be listed in the "Go next" section or the "See" section of the article. It can't be listed in both. That's the only real sticking point, though I also brought up the issue of whether the articles should be merged. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:45, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please be patient. The policy position you are running up against here, is that each attraction is only listed once. That generally works well, but like all things, it's grey around the edges. --Inas (talk) 22:28, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What is the purpose of "Go Next"? It seems to be a random list of cities. Isn't there already a "getting away" section?
Travelers have an extremely limited amount of time. If they come here and find they are suddenly embroiled in some big bru-ha-ha, or are told to be patient, or given some insider jargon, they are going to cut their losses and quietly go somewhere else. They will probably not tell you why. I will. You already know I don't actually use this site, there are other much better dead-tree and on-line sources. But this site is new and has enormous potential.
On my talk page I was pointed to teh traveller comes first, but now I find there is a whole laundry list of hidden arcane reasons that that cannot happen. --Neotarf (talk) 03:13, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I addressed the uses of the "Go next" section when you asked about it in Talk:Hoi An, but since more people will probably be reading here, from Wikivoyage:Huge city article template:

Information about nearby destinations that would serve as a good "next stop." Provide a brief description of other nearby destination suggestions, adjacent cities and towns or day-trip ideas. Don't duplicate the information in "Get in."

There is no other "getting away" section. I think you're probably confusing this site with another site that still uses a "Get out" section.

Listen, maybe I shouldn't have reverted your edit twice, and I'm sorry I annoyed you, but we don't like to duplicate information in two different sections of an article, and I'm not sure I see your point about serving the traveler. I could see where it might serve the traveler to put in the "See" section in prose "Aside from these sights in town, many people also use Hoi An as a base to visit My Son and several other places (see "Go next"), but making a full "See" entry there and then also having a link in "Go next" to a more detailed guide - is that really something that best serves the traveler? I really am not getting why it helps travelers to cover the same attractions in more than one place. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:23, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The policy of avoiding multiple listings is to help the traveller. I really think you're making a mountain out of molehill here. If people are going to walk because we have a defined way of doings things, then they can go and write their own blog or travel journal exactly the way they wish. To work on a wiki, means working cooperatively. This does mean that sometimes a blog of someone who has done the trip, or a tripadvisor or thorntree forum is going to provide better info. That's great. If you think you're going to receive a friendly and more open reception at WT, I doubt it. Been there, done that. --Inas (talk) 03:34, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh I AM on Wikitravel . I've been there longer than I've been here. And I've never had the problems there that I've had here. But in all fairness, the situation on the talk page in question seems to be resolving now. Regards, --Neotarf (talk) 13:21, 14 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Time-traveller guidebooks

(Posting here because this is the central disscussion hub.)

Is there anyone familiar enough with the way Wikivoyage gets written to help advise on a tangentially related project I had in mind?

It is noted that in April Joke articles get written. However I had a slightly more serious idea than that.

The idea was to develop (possibly over on Wikiversity) a set of 'Time-Traveller' Guidebooks for places at various time periods in order to support history education.

Would there be any interest from Wikivoyage people in contributing to this, given that you know your respective areas and history better than some people.? :) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 12:24, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds extremely interesting to me. Could you be a little more specific as to what kind of help you need? Texugo (talk) 12:43, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have a great guide book for South Korea written in 1975. It is a completely different country today, and in many ways visiting 30 years ago would be akin to visiting a new place. I'd be interested to see what you have in mind. Andrewssi2 (talk) 13:38, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well in essence I was needing some writers, as I'm better at ideas then actual writing. Essentailly what I am aksing for is for someone to write a guide according to the Wikivoyage style guide for an historical place and time (albiet writing from a modern perspective). If someone wants to attempt writing a contemporaneous (to the period) style I won't mind, but the idea was "Time-Travel" guides, not a Bradshaw pastiche ;) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:16, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The first thing to determine (as with the Joke articles) would be a possible location... And to me some easy locations would be:

New York 1965
London 1967
London 1890
Oxford 1955 (But then Oxford hasn't changed that much...)

I suggest picking one and working on it... Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:16, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some of our itinerary articles like Silk Road or Lewis and Clark Trail are already partly historical. Two that I mostly wrote are On the trail of Kipling's Kim and On the trail of Marco Polo; is there anything you can use there?

I based those on books downloaded from Project Gutenberg. They have thousands more including many historical novels and things like the journals of 19th century explorers or missionaries in various odd places. I think your project might use a lot of quotes from the best of those, or sometimes just give a link.

I'd be much more interested in more exotic time travel, medieval Oxford, Rome under the Caesars, Tang China or Ashoka's India. Pashley (talk) 17:48, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking along the same lines. London on the eve of the Great Fire, Philadelphia in the 1770s, Seville under the Muslims, Heian Kyoto... More difficult research involved, but wouldn't it be awesome! Texugo (talk) 19:34, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK.. I'll open up a page , if someone wants to suggest a suitable host project...Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:47, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You have a landing page - [] , Start from there :) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:43, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I made a start on Wikicronos's article on https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:ShakespeareFan00/Wikicronos/London_%281951%29 I could do with some help in expanding it. :) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 22:25, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like a really exciting and interesting project! Definitely worth a go! May I humbly suggest that we call it Wikichronos (with an 'h'), if that's what we're to call it, as that was the Ancient Greek personification of time. Would we leave it on Wikiversity or have it as a sub-project on here? --Nick ^talk 22:38, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK - It's currently at Wikiversity, because of scoping rules.If the Wikivoyage community has no objections to hosting it here under a Wikichronos banner (And obvious disclaimers it's not real content) I have no objections, but that would have to be a Community disscussion not mine. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 23:37, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is OK in English as "chronos" or maybe "kronos", but it's not with just the 'c'. English has the 'ch' in "chronology". and other words. If it is going to be a multilingual project, we should ask some people from other languages. Include a modern Greek or a scholar of ancient Greek if possible. Pashley (talk) 01:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well obviously we need some scholars. You expect someone from 2013 to understand colloquial Latin (which of course differs from purely 'classical' <grin>. I hadn't used Kronos directly because of trademark concerns? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:01, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am awaiting an OK from the community on this Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:23, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am afraid it would be out of scope here, in my opinion. LtPowers (talk) 01:47, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I would suggest however that anyone interested , contact me directly so it can be developed on a more suitable project. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 10:07, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think that I agree with LtPowers. It is an interesting idea (and I added a few words on food rationing), but I see several potential problems. For serous educational use, I think that facts would need references (like WP, but unlike here), as unlike normal travel destinations there are no primary sources and the article is not going to be refined by people actually going there. There is also the difficulty of avoiding somebody mistaking the article for a regular travel guide, and I think it is against policy as it is not a destination open to visitors. Are you aware of much demand from schools for this sort of guide?

However I think that we could have a travel topic (or itinerary) to guide people to sights visible today that relate to a particular period, which might help parents looking to bring school history to life. I am thinking of Roman Britain or A tour of 1950s British Architecture etc. AlasdairW (talk) 23:54, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The concerns you note were why I was prototyping this over on Wikiversity.

i) I have no objections to references being included to support historical fact or conjecture. (Horrible Histories I think includes notes confirming historical sources), I also have no objections to there being a 'Basis' page where the credibility or accuracy of the guides can be discussed (This is something the Alternate History Wikia's done.)

ii) I'm not aware of any specfic demand from schools, but the approach of a 'time-traveller' guide has been used by some UK museums and heritage bodies to present social history material. Wuikichronos was largely my own idea, but I hope to gain support in disscussion.

iii) Would a suitable disclaimer work, so that it's not mistaken for real content.. (At the moment it's in my userspace at Wikiversity for a reason? (And this disscussion should probably transfer there in time).

iv) Creating travel topic/itenaries with an Education focus is something WikiVoyage could do as well. This is something I would support. (I also have no objection of course of WikiChronos pages linking to the Actual Wikivyoage page).

The topics you mention could be exciting. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Problem with export to epub

Hi there,
First of all - thank you guys for doing such a great job keeping this site up and running. I've already shared it wit some of my friends at work. Wasn't sure if I should add new question at the end or should I hook to a relevant topic that's already here.
Now to the issue - I'm trying to export my book to an epub to have it handy on my kindle when traveling (I love this feature) however no matter which format I choose it is always saving my book to a pdf. Is the functionality currently broken or is it something i'm doing wrong? Regards Iwwwwwwi (talk) 23:03, 6 December 2013 (UTC)iwwwwwwi[reply]

I guess this is because we're missing an extension. --Saqib (talk) 07:50, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Any ideas when that functionality might be fixed ? I remember it was working perfectly more than a month ago. Iwwwwwwi (talk) 10:29, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not a missing extension, and it probably did work a month ago. Looks like the bug was introduced on Nov 15 - Bugzilla: 57975 and Bugzilla: 57920, placed on high priority for WMF techs. -- torty3 (talk) 01:17, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Google search data

Looking at WV's Google Trends page, it seems that interest has stabilised since the drop-off after the 'boom' launch period early this year. Local data for the United States shows a bit of a slight decline, but still suggests that there is a consistent stream of visitors that can surely be built upon. --Half past (formerly SUFCboy) 13:16, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And comparison shows we're still very down. --Saqib (talk) 13:53, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sapphire's comments on this thread (timestamped 17:31, 7 December 2013) provide a huge glimmer of hope. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:52, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Opening hours: OpenStreetMap has a clear and well-thought standard, should we switch to it?

Here is how OpenStreetMap expresses opening hours: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours#Examples http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours:specification

We also have such a standard: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Time_and_date_formats

If we are happy with our standard then no problem. But I am running a validation script and a large part of the data is not respecting our standard, so I was thinking we might as well piggyback on OpenStreetMap. Standardization is good for everyone, it makes it easier for us to integrate with other tools. I am not saying we should switch now, I am just asking for your feedback on this idea. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:23, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem you'll run into is that 24-hour time is seldom used in the US except for military time, and a lot of Americans have trouble with figuring out what, for example, "20:00" means. I know that I also do the subtraction of 12 from the PM times when I'm in Europe, to figure out what they are. I think that enforcing 24-hour time in articles about the US would go even more against the grain than enforcing British spellings would, and I have to say that arguments of convenience in integrating with other tools don't carry the day with me, as this kind of change would really create trouble for American users editing articles about American destinations, and wouldn't help travelers to the US understand actual opening hours signs they will see. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:37, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't thought about this, thanks! That would not be user-friendly indeed. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:34, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we should switch to the OSM standard. Pashley (talk) 13:52, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if I can fully understand the implications of that technical description, but I agree with Ikan Kekek that it would be very unnatural and potentially problematic to enforce 24-hour time for US destinations. Texugo (talk) 14:00, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't want to focus too much on the "U.S. is weird" aspect, because the real problem is that those OSM standards are intended to be machine readable. Our standards are intended to be human readable. That's a fundamental incompatibility. We can not and should not try to rigidly fit our operating hours into a strict format. Frankly, I'm not sure what Nicolas' script is looking to validate. LtPowers (talk) 14:45, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What do OSM standards do with operating hours which vary seasonally? Depending on the destination, travel and voyage listings are infamous for half of the attractions being closed by Labour Day or Thanksgiving. K7L (talk) 15:57, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, this is the biggest argument against doing something like OSM's format. WV listings are fairly simple, with only a handful of fields to convey general categories of information like "hours" and "price". I've often entered listings with hours like "M-Sa 9AM-5PM, tours on the hour, closed alternate Tuesdays" (yes I made that up just now) or some other combination of words that's easy for humans to understand, but would be very verbose to put in machine-readable format. This change would eliminate the possibility of using natural language; in order to not lose any information, you'd need a much more complicated format. (OSM gets around this because you can always tag things like opening_hours:tours=Mo-Sa 09:00,10:00,11:00, whereas we can't just throw in extra fields to our listings.) And if it were in a consistent, concise format, what would be the advantage? Do you have something in mind to do with our listings that can't be done now, but could if we changed the format? --Bigpeteb (talk) 22:08, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Of course there will always be POIs that require non-machine-readable hours. To answer LtPowers' question: My script finds cases such as: hours="Closed" or hours="jonron49@bigpond.com" (yes, these are in Wikivoyage right now), and cases where the syntax could be improved, such as hours="8 am to 10 pm". Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:42, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

All listings in a CSV

Here is a CSV file of all the listings of the English Wikivoyage: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-SI__O0UX9ob2JLRmNkeE41UEU Enjoy!

I am now working on converting it to the OpenStreetMap format, so that it can be used in apps like OsmAnd. Source code is at https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/wikivoyage2osm Nicolas1981 (talk) 12:55, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One suggestion, currency converter

I think it would be a good idea to specify the prices of things using a template ({{currency|5.36|USD}}) and the user could select in some way (in preferences or at the top, where you want) to watch prices in a particular currency, euro for example. The template "currency" would contain a table (updated regularly with a bot) to perform conversions from the original local currency to the currency specified by the user. An easy way is to have the conversion between dollars and all other currencies and make de conversion local currency => dollar => user currency. It's just an idea. Greetings. --Kizar (talk) 22:18, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is not a shopping website, prices either in local currency or USD is enough I think. --Saqib (talk) 22:23, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Expressing prices in local currency sounds good, but in U.S. dollars is not a good idea for two reasons. 1) Rates are continually changing and the price may no longer be valid in short time. 2) Not everyone uses USD, I think people from UK should review. --Kizar (talk) 23:02, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Along with images, the weather and dynamic maps, prices are one of the most common things travellers are interested in. There are sites out there that use dynamic converters such as http://dynamicconverter.com/ to allow the choice of showing each and every price in the reader's selection of currency (updated pretty much in real time).

You might also be interested in reading this very simplistic discussion from a couple of years back: Wikivoyage_talk:Currency#Exchange_Rate_Bot. There was also a more interesting discussion initiated by one of the webmasters of one of the 4WD wiki sites a while ago but I haven't managed to remember where I saw it...

Thanks for all the terrific material you have been adding to some of our hispanically connected articles, Kizar! --118.93nzp (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Kizar, and thanks for presenting an idea that could help readers. However, I think that anyone who wants to find foreign exchange conversions can do so very easily by inputting "foreign exchange rates" into any web browser and then inputting the numbers on that site. Not everything that could help readers is really in scope for this guide, and I don't think we want to include currency conversion tables in every article on this site. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:17, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, certainly not conversion tables but, in the same way we don't necessarily want to send people off to Google maps (or, at the moment, to Wikipedia), we might want to develop the technical ability to set their user preference to display (a) a secondary contemporary currency conversion {b) choose what that secondary converted currency display should be (in a similar way to the thumbnail display size choice we should be able to offer registered and logged in readers...) --118.93nzp (talk) 01:34, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you - if someone wants to develop a program that will do that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:50, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Developing such a program is easy, however finding a web service that can provide free, reliable and unlimited calls to current FX rates will be difficult. Of course the rate doesn't have to be up to date in the last hour.

I'd suggest we need to be careful to integrate with external services out of our control, since suddenly losing one will impact the quality of this site greatly. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:57, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Relatively decent currency conversion could probably be done with a template (possibly also requiring some additional Javascript) but getting agreement on the implementation and then implementing it across the site would be a lot of work. I would suggest that this is something that someone could begin drafting a proposal for and add it to the roadmap as a "consider in the future" sort of thing, but given the number of other site issues to address is probably not something that is feasible to implement right now. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:29, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How about a user preference and a client-side JavaScript gadget that would load rate data and suffix your preferred currency to each listing price? For instance: JPY1500 (10.6€). Prices that are not machine-readable would be left out, of course. Guessing what currency the user wants is tricky, so we could choose to not show anything until the user sets the preference. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:17, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Using Wikidata might be an option, so that this can be shared across language Wikivoyages. --Rs chen 7754 10:01, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it's not necessary to use templates. Just one optional gadget writed in JavaScript to perform text replacements. For example the listing editor change the page content to put the "edit" links in the listings. The program will obtain the exchange rates, search expressions in the text like "5.23 €" or "$2.33" and replace the old text with converted value.

The exchange rates can be obtained from this page for free, just need to create a free account to get something like this and it's really easy to change the format to Javascript array . The JavaScript code could be stored in Wikivoyage, Metawiki, Toolserver... and of course, it can be updated each day by one bot.

The gadget just import the .js file and use the array.

Example: The user previously defined somewhere he want to see prices in EUR (euro, €). In one article there is the text "1000 JPY" (JPY = Japanese yen). The Javascript code get this text and convert 1000 JPY to 9.74518 USD an then to 7.06396 EUR. The operation is simple (1000 / currency_ex['JPY']) * currency_ex['EUR'] and you get euro. Now replace "1000 JPY" with "7.06 EUR". The other prices in other currencys also will be converted in to euro and the user just see everything in euro without change anything in the article source. --Kizar (talk) 15:03, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever solution we may find, I think it should augment (in parentheses) rather than replace. But at any rate I think this should be thought over a little more. For example, I think it would need to round numbers reasonably. When we have a hotel whose price range is given as "doubles R$60-80", we don't want it to come back with "doubles USD $23.17-31.48". That would be unreasonably specific. Texugo (talk) 14:50, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If the price in user currency is < 10 round with 2 decimals else, round without decimals. Anyway what I am proposing is that an external gadget which does not alter the current code of the article. If the user has selected in preferences to disable this gadget, he will see the page as it looks now. Even so it is possible that only one symbol is displayed near the price and when you click a small popup appears. --Kizar (talk) 15:03, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So if something costs $100, you want it to display "JPY 10238"? That's not how rounding and significant figures work. LtPowers (talk) 20:30, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that it should display more than 2 significant figures. So the example becomes JPY 10000. Any figures displayed are going to be subject to a change of 2-5% over a few days, and a traveller is going have commission etc to pay. Overall, I am not sure of the benefits of this as, when I am travelling I generally want to see prices in the local currency, so that I get used to the prices I am going to pay. AlasdairW (talk) 22:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Language of dynamic maps

I've just returned from some weeks in Asia, including Thailand, and for the first time ever I've found WV guides so complete that I could really use them, and even found them better than my LP book. Quite exiting, actually! However, it has also given me some insights in what (imho) is missing or lacking or less practical in our set-up. One of the main things I found, was that the Thai-language dynamic maps are virtually unusable for me, making me turn to other online apps and my book to find the way. Road signs in major Thai destinations like Chiang Mai are in fact bilingual, including English. That's not only easier to read, it also gives a rough idea of what the name sounds like, which is useful in explaining a taxi or tuk-tuk driver where to go. How does it work? Do we have choices for which language the map uses? Has there been a discussion about this somewhere? JuliasTravels (talk) 15:19, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is some discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Dynamic maps Expedition#Shanghai map. Pashley (talk) 16:17, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

...discussion which can be summarized, essentially, as "there's nothing we can do about it". It seems to me that the only viable solution, barring any future developments on OSM's part, is to create and maintain static maps for destinations where the native language is written in a non-Latin script. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:38, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Then that is a misconception which I haven't cleared up or updated. It is essentially part of the WMF's overall plan to have localised OSM maps for all Wikipedias and thus for all Wikivoyages to follow, and the initial target was due at least six months ago but have been continually pushed back due to technical problems on their part. It's possible to have localised maps right now, though there is a very very big difference between a development server (subject to timeouts) and a ready production server, which is why fast load times and steady uptimes have been prioritised instead.

A more promising development is that ShareMap has applied and looks likely for a grant, and that would do a whole lot of improvement towards exporting the coordinates of Wikivoyage listings together with OSM SVG files for customisation in Inkscape (ie creating and maintaining static maps). Please understand that every single latitude/longitude added will bring static maps for all articles closer to reality, and if dynamic maps help people to visualise and add them, then great! Which is why it isn't as simple as saying static maps good, dynamic maps bad or vice versa. -- torty3 (talk) 17:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for clearing that up, torty3. I eagerly await further information about this. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Phone syntax checks

I have found a huge number of phone numbers that do not comply with our phone syntax.

I don't expect anyone to go fix them all. Human time is best spent on latitudes/longitudes, which is a smaller list where human judgement is needed.

But anyway, here are the phone numbers, hopefully it can give some people ideas about how to deal with them: page2 page3 page4

Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In both lists, there seem to be a few common errors that might be good candidates for a 'bot script. A (0) in a telephone number can safely be dropped, bad lat/long values are usually either DMS (so suited for conversion) or stray text (which could be removed). Perhaps some who are running 'bots may be able to comment? Ideally, manual editing should be directed to issues that can't be fixed automatically as we have a limited number of human editors to make the changes. K7L (talk) 18:11, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

skobbler

"

BERLIN, December 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Worldwide online/offline mapping and navigation - premium performance at a pocket-sized price

Complete app redesign to offer even more fluid and intuitive operation
True offline functionality (via in-app purchases) for all features, including country, continent and world downloads alongside cities and states
Updated and fresh map data from OpenStreetMap, the future of digital mapping
New streamlined and improved maps provide crystal-clear detail and smooth browsing when they are most needed
Built on NGx, the most powerful digital mapping engine in the world, to offer seamless map operation and customisation
Integrated 'Wikitravel' and TripAdvisor data delivers fast, up-to-date information on the local area

skobbler, innovators in mobile location-aware services, has announced a major update to its enormously successful GPS Navigation - the most popular navigation solution for iOS. With a range of powerful new features and functionality designed to turn an iPhone or iPad into a top-end satnav, it offers premium performance without the price tag. Whether at home or abroad, GPS Navigation is the ultimate in flexibility, allowing consumers to utilise an internet connection for online use when available, or download maps (via in-app purchases) to store on a device - from individual cities to the world - for use in poor connection or data roaming areas.

"

My emphasis added. Shouldn't someone tell them Wikitravel is obsolete? (I'd do it myself except that I'm anonymouse and low status and reaching out would be better done by someone who is neither...) --118.93nzp (talk) 02:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A look at 'recent changes' at WT would suggest that the site is moribund, although there is nothing that can point to it being obsolete. (There are some active users bravely trying to add content under a barrage of spam)

BTW, it probably isn't a good idea to refer to yourself as 'low status' since that is a concept that most people here (admins included) try to avoid. Anyone who has constructive contributions (of any frequency or amount) should have equal status. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Gadget requests

Not sure where to make this request, but can somone import w:en:Special:Gadgets/export/righteditlinks & w:en:Special:Gadgets/export/addsection-plus? Thanks Smokestack Basilisk (talk) 15:41, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It might help if you could provide a little bit of background on each of those gadgets. LtPowers (talk) 21:32, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, w:en:Special:Gadgets/export/righteditlinks Placed the edit link back to the right side of the screen, and ~~w:en:Special:Gadgets/export/addsection-plus~~ is already installed. The other one that I find useful is w:en:Special:Gadgets/export/OldDiff which reverts the diff coloring to the original mediawiki format of red/green, and also changes the space formatting of diffs. I find that the traditional diff format is easier to read than the newer format. Because these are just user gadgets no defaults would be changed it just would enable users to change their preferences for that. Smokestack Basilisk (talk) 22:02, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, gadget importing is disabled on this wiki, so you must copy and paste the source code from enwiki. --Rs chen 7754 10:03, 14 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Repeating text

Hello.

Israel has one major airport. Most pages for Israeli cities have the "Get in / By plane" section. The idea is the same, but the wording and level of detail differes. For example:

Is there a way to standardize some of the repeating text, if by a template or any other mean?

TaBaZzz (talk) 07:05, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. That's exactly the sort of job that templates are good at, so that info can be updated in one central spot rather than have to updated in multiple articles... Thanks for helping improve our travel guides! --118.93nzp (talk) 07:17, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Better yet, one should simply refer to a single airport page that contains the details and is easily updated. That is what we have airport pages for. If you believe there is too little information to create a separate airport article, have it contained e.g. in the Tel Aviv article and link to Tel Aviv #By plane from other city articles.PrinceGloria (talk) 09:33, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There's also Israel#By plane. I'm guessing that Ben-Gurion Airport would be a major enough airport for its own article, if someone wanted to write one. We could discuss this more at Wikivoyage talk:Airport Expedition, where a consensus is usually developed for an airport article or not, but I doubt anyone would object. It's Israel's major international airport, and there's a lot to say about security procedures and ground transportation. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:44, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Snowolf

This is a note to let people know that User:Snowolf has resigned, since the rights removal was done at Meta: --Rs chen 7754 02:46, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I thank you all for your kindness and trust in me in first choosing me as a temporary admin and then confirming me as a permanent one. I never was able to put as much work into this project as I would have liked, and over the past couple of months my available time has shrunk significantly and as such I do not foresee a change in my ability to be active here. I also would like to apologize to you all for my poor activity record here, which I did not foresee when I asked for your trust. I remain active in my duties as a steward, meta-wiki admin and in my role on our IRC channels and I can be reached on Meta as always if needed. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 03:03, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your contributions here. It's a pity your suggestion here was not progressed... --118.93nzp (talk) 03:10, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's good to see you, Snowolf, even for this. No need to apologize. If you do find you have more time, I know everyone will welcome your coming back to edit more or take part in more policy discussions. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:34, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Stars in hotel names to indicate their ratings

Some articles contain star characters * in the name of a hotel to indicate its rating. See for instance https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Beruwela#Sleep

Is it a recommended style, or should they be removed, or is the statu quo OK? I compiled a list of the 146 articles that contain such stars, feel free to fix them as appropriate: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User:Nicolas1981/Syntax_checks#Stars

Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:19, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the star system somewhat dubious? In many places non-chain hotels can advertize themselves as a 'four star hotel' as a self assessment rather than as an official accreditation. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:37, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There has been no consensus to include star symbols in hotel ratings, and some users delete them whenever they see them. I think it's OK for the number of stars to be indicated in prose in the "content" tab of a hotel listings. I don't think stars should be officially allowed in hotel listings. However, while I wouldn't put star symbols in hotel listings, there are more pressing things to do than delete all the stars included in hotel listings, which are often for hotels in countries like Italy where stars are generally emphasized in local hotel listings. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:44, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The rating is dubious in countries where it is not regulated, but can be useful in countries where it is regulated. The level also depends on the country. Anyway, I don't think this info belongs in the "name" field... maybe in "content" as Ikan suggests? In many years (when we have achieved all of our great projects and have nothing better to do) we could even create a special field for it. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:03, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well it then becomes dubious by virtue of not being consistent between countries. :) Anyway, happy for such ratings to be mentioned in 'content'. Andrewssi2 (talk) 09:38, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This has come up a number of times before, most recently at Wikivoyage:Words to avoid#Stars Ratings. I think consensus is that we should not use star ratings at all unless there is some very special reason to do so. There are too many different rating systems out there and it's too easy for establishments to make up their own rating, and if we encourage putting the stars and naming the rating system, it would imply that our evaluation may be based on that rating system rather than on personal experience of travellers. One of our most important guidelines, WV:The traveller comes first, states:

Regions, price classifications etc are based on the convenience and expectations of travellers, not bureaucratic fiat (administrative districts, formal star ratings and so on). (emphasis mine)

I actually thought our aversion to star ratings was encoded in policy somewhere, because we have taken a pretty consistent approach to it over the years. Apparently it is not, but I certainly would not mind if we put it in writing somewhere. Regardless, in no case is an unqualified string of asterisks part of the name of an establishment, so nobody should be putting asterisks in the name field. I am one of those who always remove them when I see them, and I actually do feel like it is always worth doing so. Texugo (talk) 11:00, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There's rating systems, wikivoyage:don't tout and wikivoyage:words to avoid. I'd suspect vague claims like "five star service" are words to avoid as overtly promotional, unless a specific rating system is identified and that rating agency actually sends inspectors out on the road to evaluate under established criteria. "Awarded four flat tyres in the Michelin guide de la route, 2001" is valid if Michelin actually sent an inspector, "our five star service will delight business and leisure travellers" is meaningless. There's a huge difference between getting one star from a local directory which lists every hotel/motel/youth hostile/abandoned cave (so 1* is the worst place in town) vs. one star in a specialised high-end guide where a bad or even average property just doesn't get listed. An asterisk in the name suggests "* batteries not included" or some other disclaimer, not an award, unless it's explained somehow. K7L (talk) 18:41, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I do not think using these ratings is a good idea. See the opening part of Rating systems. Pashley (talk) 21:49, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Listings as CSV

I improved the CSV of all Wikivoyage listings, I think it looks pretty good now and should allow for many mashups:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikivoyage/files/Listings-as-CSV/enwikivoyage-20131130-listings.csv

Please tell anyone who uses data from WT, that they have no excuse to not switch to WV: It is so much easier to use a CSV file than to do web-scraping.

Any other CSV or data that you would find useful?

Google Code is closing downloads, so I resurrected good old SourceForge. Yes, I got bold and create a "Wikivoyage" project. If Wikimedia has an account, I will be glad to transfer the project to them. Meanwhile I will distribute all of my Wikivoyage-extracted data there. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:34, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

w:WP:GP#User:Yair_rand/PanoramicBanners.js

Just FYI, I'm proposing on Wikipedia a gadget that makes use of Wikivoyage's banners via Wikidata. --Yair rand (talk) 05:28, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What in your opinion are the best banners Wikivoyage currently got?

I tried to compile such a list here. Please let me know if you know of any additional banners (not included in this page) which are particularly successful and which you believe are of comparable quality. I am well aware that such a list eventually would be based on the personal taste of each user, nevertheless, I would still be grateful if people could mention here what specific banners they currently think look best. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 23:43, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We have Star banners page for this but it never really got off. I think Inkey's, Armigo's and Danapit's uploads are all really great. Jjtkk (talk) 07:13, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see. That reminds me, might there be by any chance a link which would automatically produce a list on wikicommons of the latest banners created for Wikivoyage? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 15:49, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

commons:Category:Wikivoyage banners. --Saqib (talk) 15:52, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The files there are divided into a lot of subcategories - there are actually too many subcategories for a user to get a quick indication of the latest additions. That's why I was hoping that there is a way to quickly and automatically produce a list on wikicommons of the latest banners created for Wikivoyage. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:14, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The ones on that link are almost all land/cityscapes, but I think some of our best are less obvious. Kyoto has a nice one. One of my favorites is Hiroshima. The image quality is great but even beyond that, the cranes are something that represent the city well but are not necessarily the most obvious symbol (like Genbaku Dome or some other monument would be). The ones on the list are all nice looking, but they are basically all the same style. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 05:45, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have Android? Import all Wikivoyage listings!

Dear Android users,

Here is an easy howto describing how to import all Wikivoyage listings to the OsmAnd maps app (free, open source, GPS navigation/maps work even when offline).

Scenario: You are parachuted in a random country with zero preparation and no Internet.

Just open OsmAnd, and the Wikivoyage hotels/etc show on the map!
Once you have chosen a hotel, let the GPS guide you.

OsmAnd + offline world base map: 150 MB
Wikivoyage listings: 3 MB
OxygenGuide to have not only the listings but also the full guides: 475 MB
Independence: Priceless

Don't hesitate: You NEED this on your phone :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:19, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have not tried yet, but it looks great! Could you share the secret of listings export? We would like to do it for other languages as well. --Alexander (talk) 07:27, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My secret is open source on Github :-) Please git-fork, or even better implement internationalization directly in the script, I will be glad to pull your contributions! Validation/generation takes more than a day on my laptop, so I am now trying to get the script to run automatically on Wikimedia Labs every time a new dump is available, and once your code is ready I will set it to run for Russian as well, of course. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:44, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, let me give it a try. I am not good in writing codes and know only basic Unix commands, but I should be able to run your code against the ru: dump and then see what should be changed. Hopefully, only few changes are required.

Can you think of keeping/generating POI numbers, so that they are consistent with Wikivoyage articles? --Alexander (talk) 09:27, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

These IDs are necessary for the OSM format, but they actually do not appear anywhere in OsmAnd... good idea though! We could calculate POI numers and concatenate them to the POI name, so that POI name becomes for instance "3: Bar Chez Roger". What do you think about it? Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:03, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that's already something different. I was thinking of making the OsmAnd map similar to our dynamic maps, where each POI has its number displayed as part of the symbol. But I am not sure it is possible with OsmAnd. --Alexander (talk) 07:16, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Loves Monuments Photo Competition

The winners of the photo competition run in September have been announced. These are great photos of historic buildings on a national register (criteria varies by country). I think that we should make use of some of these - we might benefit from any publicity about the results. AlasdairW (talk) 23:33, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Most comprehensive guides

I think we've got some very comprehensive guides if compare to traditional guide books. Do you guys think we should create a list similar to star articles where we can list our most comprehensive guides? --Saqib (talk) 11:36, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No. Star articles need to be comprehensive so that's partly covered. If we have some that are comprehensive but not high quality, nominate them for Wikivoyage:Collaboration of the month; maybe we can get them up to star. Pashley (talk)

Okay but unfortunately, CotM seems defunct now. --Saqib (talk) 09:13, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Defects in listings editor

Please forgive my whining, but the listings editor is just one way that we have the potential to be vastly superior to Wikitravel.

You know what I mean - the thing that pops up if you click the little grey "edit" text at the end of a listing?

1) Sleep type listings do not display (and neither do they destroy) the "checkin" and "checkout" fields

2) Wrong examples are given for 24 hour time formats (which are the ones that should be used in most of the countries of the world outside of the US).

My suggestion is to change the example from
9AM-5PM or 9:00-17:00 to
08:30-16:30 or 8:30AM-4:30PM so that editors have a clue that we use a colon to separate the hours from the minutes and that two digits are always used for the hours when using the (more universally used in print) 24 hour format...

3) Currency symbols for

₹ ₪ ₱ Kč

are missing.

(These symbols are recommended at Wikivoyage:$#Universally_known_currency_notation_exceptions for Indian rupees, Israeli new shekels, Philippines pesos and Czech crowns, respectively. It might also be worthwhile adding the RM, Rp and Rs notations, but that's not so pressing).

If there is a way that I can fix the last two points myself, please tell me... --118.93nzp (talk) 23:51, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

External links to downloadable open-source comprehensive free GPS map files (of countries or continents) created using the OpenStreetMap

In the Hebrew Wikivoyage we have recently added external links at the bottom of many articles to such free legal files which might help out the travelers tremendously. I myself used such a map last year and it helped me navigate while driving a vehicle in a country I never drove before in Europe, without needing to purchase a new GPS device for that country (the GPS producers apparently hope that travelers would do so, even though nowadays one can legally download a free open source GPS map of most countries world wide and load it on ones GPS device). The way this is done is quite simple - many of the GPS devices these days have a memory card slot, where you put in a memory card containing any free open source GPS map. Since the map of each country takes up a large portion of the available space on the memory card, and since these memory cards are quite cheap these days, in may cases it is easier for the traveler to copy each GPS map of each country one would travel to into separate memory cards and carry them all in the camera's case ) .

You can see an example of such a link here (the link appears next to the GPS icon and it says "Free downloadable GPS map for Garmin GPS devices - a free GPS map generated on the basis of the maps from the free maps website OpenStreetMap. It should be noted that this map is developed, updated, and distributed by private parties and not by Garmin. Installation instructions in English").

Would you support doing the same thing on the English Wikivoyage? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 07:01, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

you can see a list containing many links to free downloadable open-source Garmin GPS maps on this page at the OpenStreetMap wiki. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 07:05, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would be in favor of adding such information, but maybe in a more compact format? A whole section is a bit big, maybe a link in the left bar would be better? By the way, it is a pity that the linked page is only in German. It is mostly for country articles, right? Data files are usually for a country or big area rather than for a single destination. I don't have a Garmin, but I think the tip would be very useful for Garmin owners! By the way, downloadable maps are similarly available for OsmAnd (all files downloadable here). Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:18, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Missing interwikis

Apparently something has happened to the language links on some pages: Recent changes, Special pages, etc. Does anyone know what has happened? Did they have their wikidata items revoked or something? Texugo (talk) 10:35, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Recent changes item should be back now. There is a discussion on the matter at d:Wikidata:Requests for comment/Interwiki links for special pages. --Rs chen 7754 18:54, 24 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Calendar of events and festivals

The Calendar of events and festivals pages have been ignored for some time. I would like to propose changing the format, but before I spend many hours on this (unless other willing to help) some feedback would be useful. Thinking of using this format but merging all the month and subject pages into a single page. This table method allows readers to sort by month, location or subject. For or against? Suggestions for improvements? --Traveler100 (talk) 13:13, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The nature of a wiki is that there's no way to guarantee that your work won't be deleted (at least from public view) at some point. However, I noticed what you were doing, and I appreciate it. I think that a calendar of events can be useful if there are sufficient people to maintain it (which is a potential problem with any article but more acute when there are holidays and festivals whose dates change every year). I don't have any specific suggestions right now, but I would like to encourage you to continue plunging forward and experimenting. Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:33, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

{edit conflict}

Preliminary thoughts:

That'd be one huge table, especially if we populated it as thoroughly as needed to make it comprehensive. Even if broken down by continents the tables would be pretty unwieldy.
It wastes quite a bit of white space, and the longer the description, the more space wasted in the other fields.
The image field, when used, greatly multiplies the amount of wasted space in the other fields.
Having to define a set of subjects into which we can categorize everything is problematic. To what extent is Oktoberfest a cultural event, and to what extent food/drink? São Paulo's Festival do Japão is as much a trade show as it is a cultural expo and a food festival. The Texas State Fair is a livestock show with carnival rides and cultural attractions and also well known for its unusual fried food items. Many other events are similarly difficult to classify definitively.

I appreciate the experimentation, but I'm not yet convinced that tables are the answer. Texugo (talk) 13:43, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Texugo (talk) 13:43, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another idea is an event listing template. Rough example here. This could be used on the events pages and within location articles. The advantage of this over the current free format that is being used is that out of date events could be easily identified (category or bot) so they can be updated. --Traveler100 (talk) 15:34, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As the event calendar pages have had little attention and will always be a problem to maintain, how about having then automatically complied from event listings on location article pages? Method would be to have a event listing template on article pages, this would have a month and type parameter that would then place that location page in event type and month categories. The contents of these categories then listed on the event calendar pages. Thus contributors would only have to add events to location article the event calendars would build automatically.--Traveler100 (talk) 10:21, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think that is a good idea. I would suggest some kind of an importance rating e.g. 1 = Worth going to if you are in walking distance ... 5 = Worth taking a long haul flight to get to. This should stop the World Cup getting lost in dozens of village football matches. AlasdairW (talk) 11:22, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was wondering about how to handle the different importance (local or global) of events, that's good idea. --Traveler100 (talk) 11:37, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So have method of organising an event by type, month and country but what is listed is the article, i.e. place, name. For example the Dinagyang Festival is listed under Events in January and Cultural events but as its location Iloilo (city) and not event name. Unless a page is create for the event, like Sochi 2014, I cannot see a better way of doing this without making the input for the user too complex. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:27, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I hate to sound hypercritical since I haven't been offering any better suggestions in this department, but creating 72 new categories divided into a rather subjective 5 categories sound like it would require more maintenance effort rather than less, and the fact that those category pages could never be more than simple unbroken lists of destination names that would require clicking through to each to find out which event(s) are concerned does not strike me as an improvement in user-friendliness. Texugo (talk) 02:30, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Totally see your point. Just searching for a solution by experimentation and suggestions. Only other idea I have at the moment (except deleting the calendar pages altogether) is to use the event listing template on location article pages, do not use the categories directly but use a bot to compile the calendar of events pages. Not sure how to write such a bot though. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:46, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why not use links to Wikipedia, or utilise Wikidata for much of the information rather than recreating it all here, especially for major events like Socchi, World Cup etc where they carry the full schedules, for a whole of WV approach events should be limited to only major internationally events which can be mainpaged. Then have the calander options for national, regional, city events, maintance by a bot would be achievable by including dates as a category and having a bot run to remove expired events say 7 days after its happened. Gnangarra (talk) 01:35, 25 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Created {{Event}} which can be used on the calendar pages and in location articles. Provides a standard format which is useful for maintenance (create category with out of data events). Also creates hidden categories by type, date and location which can be used to see what is available to update pages. This is similar to the listings templates, if this experiment works could consider merging the functions. --Traveler100 (talk) 12:35, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to see a halt to creating more categories for this until it has been evaluated and discussed more thoroughly. What I'm see is a flurry of creation of "Events in XXX" categories. The way things are being done so far, the pages for January, February, etc. will eventually belong to hundreds of such categories (they already have quite a pile of categories), which doesn't exactly make much sense. Plus, this method basically starts to recreate the whole geographical hierarchy in "events in" categories, something we have just recently backtracked from doing for topic articles. Texugo (talk) 16:31, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The categories are not meant for readers, the idea was to use as basis of getting the month pages of Calendar of events and festivals to a usable level. But quite frankly going through these pages I am thinking maybe they should just be deleted. It is clear no one has updated in a long time and are useless to read. Maintaining these is a lot of work that no one appears to be interested in. Suggest moving all to appropriate location pages and using the event template (can switch off categories if you wish) so that at least we can easily keep them up to date (template has a check category). --Traveler100 (talk) 18:39, 28 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Copy Mapframe to other language Wikivoyage

I copied Mapframe and PoiMap2 to the Dutch Wikivoyage. However, I think there has to be done more than that to make it working. I do not get a map, only the link under the map that opens a full screen version of the map. I get no error messages, so I don't know what is missing. Is there anybody who could help me? --FredTC (talk) 10:17, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly there are changes to site-wide Javascript or CSS (in the MediaWiki: namespace)? K7L (talk) 05:10, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for reacting. Can you tell me how I can access the Javascript and CSS? Then I could compare the versions of both languages. --FredTC (talk) 09:35, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki:Gadget-MapFrame.js --Adehertogh (talk) 11:47, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it is a different problem, but on the English Wikivoyage as well, maps often don't display. A refresh (F5) usually fixes the problem. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:28, 24 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I never had that problem with the English Wikivoyage. However I tried the F5, both in IE and in Mozilla on the Dutch Wikivoyage but no map appeared. So I think I must find the solution of the problem in JS and CSS files. --FredTC (talk) 05:38, 24 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please consider the documentation of Template:Mapframe ( paragraph code: Used in Conjunction with a gadget: Mediawiki:Gadget-MapFrame.js. If the gadget is disabled, users will only see a caption linking to a full-screen dynamic map. Uses HTML5 data parameters to pass variables to iframe, will need advanced POST query to further affect iframe. ). Maybe that's the solution? -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:56, 24 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas

May this day bring you health and success. May you and your family experience God’s loving embrace and your holidays season be blessed with Love, Joy and Peace. Wish Merry Christmas to all! --Saqib (talk) 14:06, 25 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And to you as well, Saqib. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:56, 25 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I wish you and everyone here the same! And also a happy, successful and hater/troll-free new year! (Oh my...) ϒpsilon (talk) 09:32, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Saqib! Merry Christmas to everyone on here as well! :) --Nick ^talk 12:13, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

1984 or 2014?

We have our own problems with some admins interfering with other user's user space unnecessarily, but it's often easier to spot the mote in your neighbours eye: a short while after removing Evan's sysop privileges, Wikitravel's IBobi re-writes history - again. --118.93nzp (talk) 21:57, 30 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]