Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2017

Most viewed articles

Not sure if people have seen this new list of most viewed articles?

Best Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:31, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for stopping by, Travel Doc. Really interesting list! A lot of the rankings seem counter-intuitive to me. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:35, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Travelling with a criminal history both here and on WT are top results for related Google searches. Apparently there aren't a lot of resources out there on that topic. Powers ^(talk) 19:04, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

That wasn't the result that surprised me most. Why is Deauville the #1 destination guide? Why is Tianjin the 2nd-most-viewed city article? Why is Bikol phrasebook the top phrasebook, and viewed more than any city guide other than the two already mentioned? Why is Al Khor more popular than China and London? Etc. There's a lot to wonder at, but that's what makes the results interesting. And perhaps the list might impel us to improve some of the most viewed articles. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:30, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

I was wondering about the popularity of the Tswana_phrasebook , which is rather niche. A quick google search shows that we are 5th ranked for that, which unfortunately goes to show how important SEO is. Still it should inspire us to develop new niche (and valid travel!) articles that will gain higher SEO ratings and help the site's overall traffic. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:57, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Andrew. The popularity of our obscure topics is because we're the only online travel guide that has written about these things. I also wonder if social media played a role. A few of those niche articles may have been shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. and they may have gone moderately viral. Gizza ^(roam) 23:57, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

New template to replace magic words

Template:ISBN I have ported over w:Template:ISBN and w:Module:Check isxn from en.wp. Magic words as links are being phased out and although we don't have to replace all instances of them now, they will all be removed from MediaWiki in 2017. See mw:Requests_for_comment/Future_of_magic_links. We have about 50 entries in Category:Pages using ISBN magic links. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:28, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

That's fine, but they should be marked experimental and discussed before widespread deployment, per our Wikivoyage:Using MediaWiki templates policy. Powers ^(talk) 00:08, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Wikimania 2017

I wish the WV community a happy and peaceful new year 2017. After the presentation together with Doc James in 2013 I decided to attend the Wikimania 2017 (if I will be one of the happy ones with a scholarship granted). After bad experiences at the WikiCon (denied submissions). I think about a lightning talk and a poster or WV booth. Maybe I will present some of our Wikidata features together with the Wikidata guys. Will some of you guys be around there?

What feature should be presented and talked about? I have the map features and our full automatic infoboxes and Wikidata features on the list. How about you? I think about your banners, listings but I am not 100 per cent up-to-date. I would be happy for some information and suggestions? -- DerFussi 07:21, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Look forwards to seeing you there :-) Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:55, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I think features that distinguish Wikivoyage from other Wikimedia wikis include the breadcrumbs, the use of dynamic maps (Wikivoyage seems to be an early adopter of changes including the new OpenStreetMap integration via {{mapshape}}), the listing editor (particularly the new integration with wikidata), and the banners. There will probably be presentations at Wikimania about plans for better utilizing Wikidata as well as using structured data on commons for map shapes and tabular data like climate tables, both of which would be of huge benefit here, so any news you hear would be great to share. Enjoy the conference! -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:58, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks I will keep that in mind. We have talked with Wikidata project manager about climate data at our association birthday in Berlin. We think only a bot should transfer the huge amount of data to WD. Do you know any free source for such data? Or a project that would provide the data under a free license. We have somebody here in Berlin for official communication. But currently we have no ides where we should the data get from.

Wikimedia Germany would like to have some little items made for us, like WV pens WV leaflets. Do you have any ideas what kind of items would be good to be spread out on meetings or at tourist information offices? Any ideas are welcome. I'll keep you up-to-date. -- DerFussi 06:54, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure about non-US sources for climate data, but for the US the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides public domain data. I built a climate table generator that can be accessed at . I would expect that Wikipedia may eventually transfer their climate data to Commons in order to take advantage of the new shared data capabilities, at which time Wikivoyage could then make use of the data as well. -- Ryan • (talk) • 07:03, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Just because I don't see it mentioned above, Montreal will be the location this year. I still feel bad that I didn't get to visit the one in Hong Kong a few years back because of a crazy work deadline Andrewssi2 (talk) 09:52, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Dates are August 9-13th. Details at .

Lots of WV folk are nearby. I will be by then, User:AndreCarrotflower is not far, the original WT founders User:EvanProdromou and User:(WT-en)_Maj live in Montreal, and there are others. Pashley (talk) 11:38, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot to mention the venue for Wikimania. @Andrewssi2. Yeah. Would had been great to meet in Hong Kong. That was the Wikimania when I did the presentation with James. Nice to hear that some of you guys will be nearby then. -- DerFussi 13:33, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

User:DerFussi, I think that a travel-related gift might be appropriate. A luggage tag or a pair of disposable foam earplugs (in a box with the Wikivoyage logo) could be relatively inexpensive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:56, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

User:WhatamIdoing. Both ideas are really great. I'll put it on my list when I talk with the WMDE guy. Thanks. -- DerFussi 19:36, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Have a great 2017 - goals and projects for the new year

So this year is invariably drawing to a close and while we have had some successes here at WV, we are far from finished with anything (no wiki ever truly is). I think the past year has been mostly positive for the community (I neither recall any high profile conflicts nor anybody of note leaving, but I may have overlooked something), although it was not a good year for people interested in travel as a whole. War zones seem to be getting worse, not better, and the calls for ever tighter "security", especially in the context of borders bear ill for the future. Brexit may well mean travel between the UK and the EU becoming more difficult. But at any rate our community here can do nothing about those developments and I hope we can keep discussions as apolitical as possible, even if some users might be able to guess the political biases of some others.

So, let us not further focus on what was in 2016, but rather what we want to do in 2017. I think there are some ongoing projects as well as some new ones to keep us busy starting tomorrow.

1. Develop at least one of American football, Intercity buses in Germany or rail travel in Germany to be ready to be featured
2. Continue SEO edits, especially to high profile articles (countries, continent(al section)s, major cities) in order to hopefully draw more eyeballs our way
3. Reduce the number of bare outlines through mergers, deletions and more content, promoting them if possible to usable
4. Hopefully do some on the ground research for articles on Nicaragua
5. If possible do some on the ground research on other destinations as well

At any rate, I hope you have a safe and pleasant New Year's Eve (take a piece of advice from a New York Giants fan: Be careful around fireworks) and a good 2017. I would love to hear your plans on wiki, and if you want to share them off-wiki. Guten Rutsch Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:03, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

@Hobbitschuster: My only big goal is really perfecting Indianapolis and building on all of the hard work that Sarah did and that I have done since. I wish I could have found the time to polish it up as featured for the Indy 500 but it wasn't going to happen with my schedule. I will be more free this year which is exciting. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:10, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Review of initial updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

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Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. Message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

The Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. For 15 years, Wikimedians have worked together to build the largest free knowledge resource in human history. During this time, we've grown from a small group of editors to a diverse network of editors, developers, affiliates, readers, donors, and partners. Today, we are more than a group of websites. We are a movement rooted in values and a powerful vision: all knowledge for all people. As a movement, we have an opportunity to decide where we go from here.

This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve. We hope to design an inclusive process that makes space for everyone: editors, community leaders, affiliates, developers, readers, donors, technology platforms, institutional partners, and people we have yet to reach. There will be multiple ways to participate including on-wiki, in private spaces, and in-person meetings. You are warmly invited to join and make your voice heard.

The immediate goal is to have a strategic direction by Wikimania 2017 to help frame a discussion on how we work together toward that strategic direction.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Beginning with this message, monthly reviews of these updates will be sent to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a review of the updates that have been sent so far:

• Update 1 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (15 December 2016)
  • Introduction to process and information about budget spending resolution to support it
• Update 2 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (23 December 2016)
  • Start of search for Lead Architect for movement strategy process
• Update 3 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (8 January 2017)
  • Plans for strategy sessions at upcoming Wikimedia Conference 2017
• Update 4 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (11 January 2017)
  • Introduction of williamsworks
• Update 5 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 February 2017)
  • The core movement strategy team, team tracks being developed, introduction of the Community Process Steering Committee, discussions at WikiIndaba conference 2017 and the Wikimedia movement affiliates executive directors gathering in Switzerland
• Update 6 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (10 February 2017)
  • Tracks A & B process prototypes and providing feedback, updates on development of all four Tracks

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 20:31, 15 February 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Is there a way to see whom are the top contributors for a specific article + how much they actually contributed?

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If I'm not mistaken, there is such a tool that does this quite fast (and I am hoping such a tool would help me tremendously in locating the most prolific and knowledgeable "local experts" over at Wikipedia for specific destinations, whom I'm hoping would agree to help expand the parallel articles on Wikivoyage). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 02:31, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Yup, there is https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/index.php?article=busan&project=en.wikivoyage.org --Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:39, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Andrewssi2. I tried using this tool in order to find out if any Hebrew-speaking "local experts" took part in the the creation of specific top destinations articles over at the Hebrew Wikipedia since the early 2000s... unfortunately, I ended up finding out three things - (1) even prominent articles on Wikipedia, that appear to be very complex, and have been gradually improved for a very long while, aren't very big in size or complex with travel oriented details in comparison to our Wikivoyage articles (2) most top contributions on those Wikipedia articles were actually made in the previous decade (3) to my surprise, in many cases there are very few people whom actually contributed most of the content to each of those articles, and most of those people are the same ~40 most active editors on the Hebrew Wikipedia whom in many cases contribute translations from the English Wikipedia content and therefore it seems that many Hebrew speaking "local experts" were involved the creation of the content, but in reality it usually is only 1-3 translators translating the majority of the content about a destinations they most likely have never been to.

Here's an example of what I mean.... a comparison of the top 10 editors of the Barcelona article in the Hebrew Wikipedia (this has been the most popular destinations among Hebrew speakers) with a comparison to the top 10 editors of the Barcelona article in the Hebrew Wikivoyage:

Top 10 Editors of the Barcelona Article in the Hebrew Wikipedia Username #1 Minor edits % First edit Latest edit Added (Bytes) Deror avi 57 25 43.9 2005-02-17, 17:04 2013-04-02, 07:00 15,292 Bytes ליז'אנסק 11 2 18.2 2007-01-14, 20:13 2007-03-05, 16:11 3,077 Bytes אריאל 11 2 18.2 2006-09-26, 20:40 2006-10-10, 20:05 2,048 Bytes רפאל לירז 11 0 0 2004-03-21, 15:15 2004-03-21, 16:27 2,025 Bytes הידוען האלמוני 5 1 20 2009-02-17, 17:36 2009-02-17, 18:07 1,419 Bytes Poxsi 3 1 33.3 2008-09-02, 21:33 2011-01-15, 15:47 1,324 Bytes Hmbr 3 3 100 2010-07-19, 23:06 2010-07-24, 23:01 1,187 Bytes Tt100 11 0 0 2009-10-05, 19:07 2013-10-12, 09:26 1,060 Bytes Alonr 4 1 25 2007-05-16, 09:52 2008-01-27, 17:58 1,039 Bytes 62.90.235.244 1 0 0 2004-03-21, 15:02 2004-03-21, 15:02 753 Bytes

Top 10 Editors of the Barcelona Article in the Hebrew Wikivoyage Username #1 Minor edits % First edit Latest edit Added (Bytes) ויקיג'אנקי 103 0 0 2013-02-25, 06:00 2017-02-14, 23:30 58,293 Bytes אלמוג שווד 1 0 0 2016-01-20, 15:15 2016-01-20, 15:15 4,789 Bytes יעל י 11 0 0 2013-03-31, 08:55 2013-07-27, 19:04 3,154 Bytes בנימין 5 0 0 2013-03-18, 13:16 2015-01-05, 14:27 2,066 Bytes Urilei~hewikivoyage 4 0 0 2013-09-13, 22:12 2013-09-13, 23:39 1,019 Bytes Tzafrir 2 1 50 2013-04-11, 13:42 2014-03-28, 09:30 748 Bytes DL3222 4 3 75 2013-04-09, 14:27 2014-04-20, 13:06 321 Bytes Guycn2 1 1 100 2016-12-30, 13:45 2016-12-30, 13:45 248 Bytes 24.1.7.5 1 0 0 2013-05-12, 15:09 2013-05-12, 15:09 1 Bytes DekelEBot 3 3 100 2014-01-03, 06:53 2016-02-06, 15:00 0 Bytes

As you can see, my contribution alone, on the Barcelona article in Hebvoy, is much bigger than all top contributions to the same article on the Hebrew Wikipedia.

This method might work better for getting English speaking local experts from the English Wikipedia. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 01:32, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Mobile mode

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As mentioned above most web interaction is now by smart phone. To get more visitors to this site we need to get the mobile app more useful for users and easier to use. Do we have a forum page to discuss ideas and suggest improvement? If not how should this be structured? Would this be a Wikivoyage Expedition page? Sort of ideas I am thinking about see User:Traveler100/mobile, where should I copy/move this to? I have no idea how the mobile app is managed and who controls it. --Traveler100 (talk) 10:04, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Is there a Wikivoyage app for android and where can I get it? I think it's OK if this is handled in an expedition page. --Zerabat (talk) 20:39, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

@zerabat: There is this one and a European one from m:Wikimedia CH. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:53, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Having a central page where pointers to merger discussions can be put or merger discussions can be had

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So merger discussions are a rather frustrating experience on this wiki. Usually the merge template sits on a page for weeks or even months without much input. Votes for Deletion has much more participation, but the consensus seems to be that vfd is not for discussing mergers (even though there are preciously few articles for which vfd is even the right page - many pages are either candidates for speedy deletion or for mergers). So what should be done about this? My proposal is to have one page similar to vfd where proposed mergers have to be put and people can argue there whether the mergers makes sense or not. What do you say? Hobbitschuster (talk) 00:05, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Support unreservedly. Sometimes you never know you want something until someone else mentions it. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 00:15, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Mild Support. I'll agree that merge discussions on individual articles has low visibility, although I'm not keen to set up more bureaucracy. Would like some alternative suggestions how this can be achieved. Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:37, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Why?. There is a list here, text should be in the template and further discussion on the talk page. Also for countries with active Expeditions have an additional central point to highlight. Why do we need more? --Traveler100 (talk) 00:55, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Clearly nobody uses those. I think it would be better not to have the merge discussion at individual talk pages but rather at something like WV:Merger discussions that would work similar to vfd. Hobbitschuster (talk) 01:19, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

It should not be about another talk shop page but about doing. --Traveler100 (talk) 03:45, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure you quite understand what I'm saying. Imagine all vfd discussions were held at the talk pages of the article nominated for deletion. This I think is an absurd thing for a wiki of this size. What I propose is in essence to have the same collection page for merge discussions as we have for deletion discussions and for discussion to take place there exclusively, which reduces the need for pointers and reminders. Of course the actual discussion process will be slightly different as we have no policy not to redirect real places and so on, but I hope you get what I am aiming towards. Hobbitschuster (talk) 03:47, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Why do you think more attention will be paid to merge/redirect discussions if they're held at a dedicated page? I'm unconvinced. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:38, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Because people can watchlist that page, while they probably do not have the random to-be-merged articles on their watchlist. The cure is for everybody to watchlist Category:Articles to be merged – that works nowadays. Also, if that does not work, why not just go ahead and merge, if nobody interested in the involved articles (and therefore noticing the merge suggestion) cares enough to voice an opinion. --LPfi (talk) 11:57, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

(starting at the left again) the event that caused me to raise this issue is that Soazza was merged not following established protocol, likely out of frustration how that usually goes and then unmerged by another user who thinks it should not have been merged. I think vfd for all its faults works better than having deletion discussions on individual talk pages or the pub. Why not do the exact same thing for merger discussions? Maybe we can introduce it with a trial period and if after x amount of time we decide it didn't work we can go back to the old way or try an entirely different approach... Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:44, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

You know what? I want to be able to have these conversations in both places at the same time. I want it on a central page and on the article's talk page, and without any participation-preventing complications like transcluding subpages. This kind of multi-location discussion was planned years ago for mw:Flow (along with features such as being able to watch one discussion but not the rest of a page), but it hasn't been implemented anywhere. It would be ideal for something like VFD.

As an aside, the more I use Flow at mediawiki.org, the more I like it. (Just don't tell the devs that, because I have a long list of demands friendly requests for improvements, like "remind me of this discussion next week, especially if nobody's commented since then".) If you haven't seen it before, then you can try it out at mw:Flow/Sandbox. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Support - I reverted the merger of Soazza, partly because I was irritated that it was done with no discussion just a few hours after I had done several edits and added a banner photo. So I would emphasise the importance of providing the opportunity for such discussions. Mergers should only be done without discussion if there have been no edits in the last year (ignoring technical edits by regular contributors, but taking particular note of content additions by occasional editors or IPs). We don't want to frustrate the occasional editor that drops by once a month. I think that the article talk page should be used for the discussion, but a central index page would be useful. This could just have a link to the article, the country and the date. A central discussion page might be off-putting to occasional contributors. It is important to provide the opportunity for discussion, even if most times there are no takers - this can be taken as approval after a few weeks. I do like the sound of Flow, but it is probably not today's solution. AlasdairW (talk) 23:33, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Technical question Is it possible to have some script that has a discussion transcluded to another page? What I mean by that is having the discussion displayed both on the talk page and on (tentative name) WV:Votes for Merger and users able to contribute to both. That way many of the potential downsides (that I frankly don't see, but whatever) of having the discussion only at one central page would disappear. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:37, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

We already have Requests for comment. Should we simply use that page to advise everyone about merge/redirect discussions? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:47, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

I myself hardly ever read requests for comment and I fear the same is true for many users here. Hobbitschuster (talk) 01:19, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Pardon me for putting it this way, but: So what? If you knew merge/redirect discussions were pointed to there, you'd look at it, and if you think no-one would, then your proposed new page won't be followed, either. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:57, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I just looked at requests for comment - apparently there is one request from way back in 2015 still up there. And I still don't get why we should handle merge discussions and deletion discussions so fundamentally differently. Imho we could also have articles nominated for redirecting on vfd, because "deletion" is a valid outcome in only a fraction of the articles we have as is. Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:24, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I think the point is that merge/redirect discussions should be on the talk page of the relevant article. Anywhere else, they would be pointers to that page. And I still doubt your point about Requests for comment is valid, unless there's some psychological reason people dislike the phrase "Requests for comment". But as I see it, either people will pay attention to pointers or they won't, regardless of what you call the pointer page. Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:57, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

As others have noted, "merge" is often the outcome of a VfD discussion. Since the VfD page is not overly burdened, how about combining the two sets of discussions into a "Votes for deletion or merger" page? Or, if that is a problem, and I don't know why it should be, then at least allow pointers to merge discussions on the VfD page. Ground Zero (talk) 15:37, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

So how would you handle something like Paradise (Michigan) and Whitefish Bay where there was some disagreement as to which direction the merger should go? Paradise is a tiny speck-on-a-map village which had just one {{listing}} for some venue which is now closed. As a destination, it was useful primarily as a target for jokes about the distance from Paradise (Michigan) to Hell (Michigan). Whitefish Bay was created as a large, sparse rural area - there's a lighthouse and museum on Whitefish Point with some tie to the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking but little else. IIRC, someone tagged {{merge}} onto Whitefish Bay because they didn't like bodies of water, then someone else tagged {{merge}} to go the other way (merging Paradise village into the larger rural area as there's nothing there). I look at the history of both pages and see little or no actual discussion taking place - just randomly merge this somewhere on the assumption the next editor could undo the mess? K7L (talk) 15:47, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

One important thing to remember is that mergers do not necessarily require a discussion. For pages where others have invested time, especially recently (like AlasdairW's example) it is common sense and proper courtesy to discuss on the talk page first. In most cases, such talk pages are also on those editors' watchlists. For underdeveloped, more straightforward cases I don't see why we would let go of the "plunge forward" principle by introducing a new VfD-like discussion page, with accompanying policies and waiting times. That seems like bureaucracy - which is the last thing we need. If we think more pointers are needed, we could simply start by using the requests for comments page more extensively for that purpose. If there is more "traffic" on that page, I imagine people with an interest who haven't done so yet can simply put that page on their watchlist. I don't see why we need a new page because "some" people hardly read requests for comments. JuliasTravels (talk) 17:05, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Hobbitschuster, on your technical question: You can do that, sort of, by creating a separate page. You can see how it works (or doesn't) on a page such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Henrietta_Lacks#GA_Review That's only transcluded onto the one talk page, but it could theoretically be transcluded to a nearly infinite number. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:50, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I was the one who did the merger in Soazza and I wanted to give my inputs on the whole topic. I have done a couple of merges in the past year or so, as I was trying to clean up regions and articles in Switzerland. There is quiet a few small destinations with articles which have not been edited in sometimes 10 years and with very little content and not fulfilling the criteria to merit an article on their own. I found that, as mentioned above, most of the times calls for input on talk pages have no to little effect, which is a bit frustrating, especially when it comes to more complex merges such as reorganisations of regions etc. (For instance here: Talk:Surselva#Should_we_simplify_the_region_hierarchy or Talk:Graubünden). As pointed out above by others, I'm not sure whether creating a new page to centralise these discussions will help, as this just adds another page people might not notice. What would help in my opinion is clearer guidelines on when it's okay to merge without having to wait for inputs and what an adequate period of time would be to wait for inputs after starting a discussion on the talk page. For instance, I do agree that for Soazza I should have started a discussion, as there were recent edits, but I don't think an article that hasn't had any substantial content added since 2007 needs much discussion (such as Talk:Finhaut). Wikivoyage:How_to_merge_two_pages is rather vague on this. Drat70 (talk) 04:07, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

There is the general problem that some "specks on the map" are clearly candidates for merging, but the person who sees that is not necessarily willing or able to do the legwork of finding out what a good reorganization of the hamlets in the area would look like. In general geotagged listings would help a bunch, because when you look at the map of Soazza, you can see that those listings cover a linear area. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:25, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

In some cases, the {{geo}} tag on individual articles is enough to flag that two very tiny places are adjacent, for instance Blumenort and Steinbach, Manitoba. Unfortunately, the 'nearby destinations' layer on the dynamic map doesn't indicate whether the actual articles are outline or even rubbish - only that two point to almost the same geographic area. K7L (talk) 18:46, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

The question of how long is reasonable to leave a merger discussion open is a good one. I just came across Sevagram, which I have proposed to merge. There has been little activity on the article, and its creator has not been seen for two years. I have posted on RfC, and plan to complete the merger in one week unless there are objections. I think that is a reasonable time, as we do want to keep things moving here. Is one week too short? Ground Zero (talk) 18:21, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

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Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:

• Update 7 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (16 February 2017)
  • Development of documentation for Tracks A & B
• Update 8 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (24 February 2017)
  • Introduction of Track Leads for all four audience tracks
• Update 9 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 March 2017)
  • Seeking feedback on documents being used to help facilitate upcoming community discussions

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Upcoming changes

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There are a lot of small changes happening in the next couple of weeks, and I wanted to give you all a quick heads-up about them. Please share this information with other people/languages/projects that will be interested:

• There's a change to how columns in reference lists are handled, at the request of the German Wikipedia. This change will improve accessibility by automatically formatting long lists of <ref>s into columns, based on each reader's screen width.
  • What you need to do: Nothing visible is happening now. If your project uses the normal <references /> tag (or doesn't really use refs at all), then file a Phabricator task or just tell me, and I'll get your wiki on the list for the next config change. If your project uses a "reflist" template to create columns, then please consider deprecating it, or update the template to work with the new feature.
• The label on the Save changes" button will change on most projects tomorrow (Wednesday) to say "Publish page". This has been discussed for years, is supported by user research, and is meant to be clearer for new contributors. (Most of us who have been editing for years don't even look at the button any more, and we all already know that all of our changes can be seen by anyone on the internet, so this doesn't really affect us.)
  • If you have questions or encounter problems (e.g., a bad translation, problems fixing the documentation, etc.), then please tell me as soon as possible.
  • When we split "Save page" into "Save page" and "Save changes" last August, a couple of communities wondered whether a local label would be possible. (For example, the Chinese Wikipedia has some extra language on their "Save page" button; I think it's about the importance of previewing.) Whether the Legal team can agree to a change may depend upon the language/country involved, so please ask me first.
• As part of the ongoing, years-long user-interface standardization project, the color and shape of the "Save changes" (or now "Publish page"), "Show preview" and "Show changes" buttons on some desktop wikitext editors will change. The buttons will be bigger and easier to find, and the "Save" button will be bright blue. (phab:T111088) Unfortunately, it is not technically possible to completely override this change and restore the appearance of the old buttons for either your account or an entire site.
• Do you remember last April, when nobody could edit for about 30 minutes twice, because of some work that Technical Ops was doing on the servers? The same kind of planned maintenance is happening again. It's currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 19th and Wednesday, May 3rd. The time of day is unknown, but it will probably afternoon in Europe and morning in North America. This will be announced repeatedly, but please mark your calendars now.

That's everything on my mind at the moment, but I may have forgotten something. If you have questions (about this or any other WMF work), then please {{ping}} me, and I'll see what I can find out for you. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

The time for the server switch project has been confirmed. All of the wikis will be in read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on two days soon:

• Wednesday, 19 April 2017, starting at 14:00 UTC
• Wednesday, 3 May 2017 (two weeks later), starting at 14:00 UTC

If you are a MediaWiki hacker, then please note that the normal deployment schedule has been canceled during both of those weeks.

There is more information at m:Tech/Server switch 2017, including a link to the official schedule. Please leave a message on my user talk page or "ping" me if you have any questions. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

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This message, "We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)", was sent through multiple channels by Gregory Varnum on 15 and 16 of March 2017 to village pumps, affiliate talk pages, movement mailing lists, and MassMessage groups. A similar message was sent by Nicole Ebber to organized groups and their mailing lists on 15 of March 2017. This version of the message is available for translation and documentation purposes

Dear Wikimedians/Wikipedians:

Today we are starting a broad discussion to define Wikimedia's future role in the world and develop a collaborative strategy to fulfill that role. You are warmly invited to join the conversation.

There are many ways to participate, by joining an existing conversation or starting your own:

Track A (organized groups): Discussions with your affiliate, committee or other organized group (these are groups that support the Wikimedia movement).

Track B (individual contributors): On Meta or your local language or project wiki.

This is the first of three conversations, and it will run between now and April 15. The purpose of cycle 1 is to discuss the future of the movement and generate major themes around potential directions. What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?

We welcome you, as we create this conversation together, and look forward to broad and diverse participation from all parts of our movement.

• Find out more about the movement strategy process
• Learn more about volunteering to be a Discussion Coordinator

Sincerely,

Nicole Ebber (Track A Lead), Jaime Anstee (Track B Lead), & the engagement support teams

05:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

A local page for this at Wikivoyage:Wikimedia Strategy 2017 has been created, if you'd prefer to participate here instead of on Metawiki. Looking forward to your input! :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:42, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Commons Picture of the Year

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The annual Commons Picture of the Year competition has started, and I think that it may be good to see if there are any pictures there that could be put in the articles here, they are all high quality pictures.  Seagull123  Φ  16:59, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Start of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections

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Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.

The Board of Trustees (Board) is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. More information about this role can be found on Meta-Wiki. Please read the letter from the Board of Trustees calling for candidates.

The candidacy submission phase will last from April 7 (00:00 UTC) to April 20 (23:59 UTC).

We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates from April 7 to April 20. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki.

Once the questions submission period has ended on April 20, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to beginning on April 21.

The goal of this process is to fill the three community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The election results will be used by the Board itself to select its new members.

The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.

• April 7 (00:00 UTC) – April 20 (23:59 UTC) – Board nominations
• April 7 – April 20 – Board candidates questions submission period
• April 21 – April 30 – Board candidates answer questions
• May 1 – May 14 – Board voting period
• May 15–19 – Board vote checking
• May 20 – Board result announcement goal

In addition to the Board elections, we will also soon be holding elections for the following roles:

• Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
  • There are five positions being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.

• Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson (Ombuds)
  • One position is being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.

Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.

More information on this year's elections can be found on Meta-Wiki. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the election talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-electionswikimedia.org.

On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 03:37, 7 April 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

The last week of the 1st cycle of Wikimedia strategy conversation

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Hi, I'm Szymon, a MetaWiki Strategy Coordinator. 3 weeks ago, we invited you to join a broad discussion about Wikimedia's future role in the world. The discussion is divided into 3 cycles, and the first one ends on April, 15. So far, Wikimedians have been discussing mainly about technological improvements, multilingual support, friendly environment, cooperation with other organizations and networks.

• If you'd like to get detailed information about the discussed topics, have a look at → that page.
• If you'd like to join the discussions, please comment → on the talk page of that page or on Meta-Wiki.
• If you have any questions that weren't answered there, feel free to ask me.

I'm pinging a few recently active admins. I hope you'll help me with passing along the news, maybe even join the discussion. @AndreCarrotflower, Andrewssi2, ‎Ikan Kekek, WOSlinker, ‎Shaundd:.

Looking forward to your input. Thank you in advance! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Szymon's "real" name is Tar Lócesilion, and I suspect that some of you have encountered him under that name. I encourage you all to take him up on the invitation to talk about what you'd like to see happen during the next 10–20 years. Better mobile experience? Easier cross-language or cross-project integration? Efforts to engage potential editors, maybe with something that uses smartphone-based geolocation to request specific updates and edits? Whatever's on your mind, especially if it's a big idea, it should be proposed now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Not a big idea by any means, but today I found myself copying geo-coordinates by hand from de-WV Herzogenaurach to the en-WV equivalent and was thinking to myself: There's gotta be a better way. Hobbitschuster (talk) 02:02, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF), WhatamIdoing: in Russian Wikivoyage, we came up with a rather long list of thoughts and ideas concerning the strategy and the strategy-building process itself. We have a short English summary toward the end of this page and plan on translating the rest later this week.

As a side note, the Russian-speaking strategy coordinator, who promised to make the translation for us, already disappeared, which kind of tells us what to expect from this strategy in the future. --Alexander (talk) 23:21, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Now we have a full English translation for our vision of the strategy. A significant part of it describes the development of Wikivoyage. Any comments are welcome. --Alexander (talk) 19:56, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Proposal: Use new modernised version of Extension:RelatedArticles

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Wikivoyage currently shows related articles on a handful of pages where editors have added them for example on the New_York_City page New_York_City_with_children appears in the sidebar (Although it's rather hidden away!) of the desktop skin and does not work on mobile.

It uses the mw:Extension:RelatedArticles extension.

Wikimedia recently enabled a much more visual form of the related pages feature on a variety of projects. I was curious if Wikivoyage were interested in switching from the sidebar view to the footer view?

Benefits:

• More visual and discoverable
• It can be configured to algorithmly suggest related pages (you can see how this would look by scrolling to the bottom and clicking on links in https://trending.wmflabs.org/en.wikivoyage/Bagan )
• It works on mobile

An illustration can be seen here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Readmore-_desktop-_prototype.png

and you can see what it looks like on Vector by looking at Haitian Wikipedia: https://ht.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank%C3%A9tienne

No pressure!

If you are interested I can enable it at a time of your choosing, and revert back to the old view if you decide you do not like it. Let me know! Jdlrobson (talk) 22:39, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

I am in favour of having trying this :-) I often fail to discover relevant articles when preparing a trip, and learn about them only after my trip is over. Syced (talk) 05:55, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Jdlrobson, that sounds interesting. Could you elaborate on how this system chooses related pages? I read the descriptions but did not understand much. Thanks! --Alexander (talk) 07:40, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

I think this looks cool! --ButteBag (talk) 14:55, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

The algorithm version uses a CirrusSearch feature which relates pages with similar text. For instance if the phrase "Roman architecture" appears in two articles frequently they would be judged similar. All results can be overriden by editors using

{{related}}

magic word. The results are not always great as with any algorithm. Some pages, especially smaller articled may spit out strange related articles but it's a great way to encourage exploration and create editing opportunities IMO. Jdlrobson (talk) 15:39, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

I've had it turned on at a couple of wikis, and overall I like it. The last time I checked, the three articles it selects were usually next three articles that you'd find if you did a regular search on the current article's title. So for New York City, I'd expect it to list New York (state), Metro New York, and New York City with children, because those are the next in the normal list of search results. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:31, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Personally I don't generally like sidebars (though some for apps they are appropriate). The problem with them is that the sidebar content is invariably a different length from the main content so you invariably end-up with a column (normally in the sidebar) of blank space wasting screen space (many users will probably be on netbooks of small laptops with limited screen space). And on mobile where I don't get a sidebar I also lose the related Wikipedia link from the sidebar. So I think reducing the sidebar is a good thing, moving related links to the bottom is a good idea (including any wikipedia link). Unsure about algorithmically doing it through making "Read More" more prominent (as in the linked example) looks good and may encourage contributors to use it more (which must be a good thing). So I like the proposed change (even though I realise it will not get rid of the sidebar) PsamatheM (talk) 09:41, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Would the Read More be limited to internal WV pages or external web sites and Wikipedia articles also be allowed. I can think of at least one example page I've contributed to where is more than one relevant (non-duplicate, non-overlapping wikipedia article thinking of Blakeney (Norfolk) where Wikipedia has seperate pages on Blakeney and Blakeney Point but WV only really warrants a single page for the two destinations). PsamatheM (talk) 09:41, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I am not keen on a text based search that takes no account of geography. If I am reading York, I have no interest in New York City, or other random towns that have a York Hotel or York Road. What would be useful is automatic suggestions of places within 100 miles that had the matching text. AlasdairW (talk) 14:07, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes it doesn't take into account geography and that's something important to factor in but it's also a little more clever than that for well written pages like York (it shows Bradford and Lincoln). The lack of geographical awareness isn't necessarily a bad thing as it may be useful (at least it is to me) to discover places in countries that the reader hasn't been to that might be related to places in countries they have been. Remember go next is about geography and this would not try to replace that.

As I've mentioned editors can override all articles related pages with whatever makes sense for the community definition of related.

Given the lack of use of related pages (it's on very few pages) and the increased invisibility of putting these links in the footer I would expect turning on the algorithm to increase editing of these results. Jdlrobson (talk) 14:57, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

If the automated results can be overridden then it just becomes part of authoring and maintaining the page. If you manually set the related pages (even just one) does this disable all the automatic ones - so if the automatic ones give "bad results" you can disable all the automated with just one manual one. Or is there some way to add something

{{ related }}

to just disable the automated system if the results are just bad. PsamatheM (talk) 15:12, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

This is currently not supported, but probably could be added. Jdlrobson (talk) 18:01, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Where can I find a list of Wikivoyage articles sorted by the amount of articles that exists for each destination in each wikivoyage edition?

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Does such a list exist already or is there any way to generate such a list?

Such a list would be very handy for each Wikivoyage edition (including the English Wikivoyage) to get some more insight into which of the most popular travel destinations around the globe world didn't get yet their own articles (and by focusing on creating those articles, instead of articles of less popular destinations, eventually increasing the web traffic much more significantly for the same amount of work). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 19:25, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

The problem with this is that most editors are unable to churn out article level prose in more than one to three languages. And even those that can may not want to spend their time writing about New York in Swahili, when they'd much rather cover stuff they personally know and care more about. Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:28, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I understand that eventually each editor can only produce so much articles, and usually one would prefer to focus on what interests them. I myself have written articles in the Hebrew Wikivoyage for 4 years and 3 months (I mostly translate content from the English Wikivoyage), and I also follow closely after the page view statistics of the articles I have put most work into. Although up until today I have written mostly outline articles on Hebvoy, I have created probably close to a 100 expanded well written articles (some of which took me weeks to finish). Nevertheless, based on the page view statistics... some of them are only read by a few people each month even though a lot of work was put into creating them... simply because people don't necessarily care for well expanded articles if the destination isn't interesting enough to many people (even the Israel article in Hebvoy gets relatively few views every month, probably since most Hebrew speakers aren't interested in reading about their own country when they research travel options/ideas). Because of that, at this point, in order that the the amount of work I put into Hebvoy would eventually yield more interest among potential readers, I tend to prefer focusing on creating the content which is most sought after (rather then guessing what it is). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 19:44, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

I think most potential users of hebvoy are more likely to use engvoy. First of all because many Hebrew speakers also speak at least passable English and secondly because for travel outside Israel, English is vastly more useful than Hebrew. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:38, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Possibly... but that doesn't mean that I should give up on Hebvoy. On the contrary, I believe that eventually the English Wikivoyage and the rest of the Wikivoyage editions are going to be a lot more popular, have a lot more writers whom speak many languages, and that even though the English Wikivoyage would probably always remain the biggest edition of Wikivoyage, the existence of the other editions would help us over time produce much more quality content collaboratively, and have many more people around the world involved in this process (and eventually, just like in the case of Wikipedia, in many instances you'll eventually see a lot of content being translated back to the English Wikivoyage as a result). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 02:25, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Instead, why not translating the articles with the largest number of views (you can get them here for the languages with the largest audience; you can get a rough idea of the audience of each Wikivoyage edition here? I translated pages about Japan from English to French based on both the page size and the audience, but the number of views stay quite limited (though Japan pages in French Wikivoyage have now the second largest audience and pages sizes, after France) so I am afraid that your efforts will only bring limited results. — Fabimaru (talk) 07:30, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Does anyone know if it is possible to produce a list of Wikivoyage articles sorted by the amount of articles that exists for each destination in each wikivoyage edition? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 02:25, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

The relationship are stored in Wikidata, and it may be possible to do a SPARQL query, but after a quick attempt I could not find how to do such a query. — Fabimaru (talk) 08:11, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Ask at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query and you will have your data soon :-) (and the query to check realtime) Syced (talk) 04:08, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Pedantic analysis tools....

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As you know Mediawiki is to get a new parser. I've been over the past few days (in good faith), been trying to repair some of the templates/pages it's flagged up as having problems.

However, in some cases I've been unable to find a 'stable' fix for many of the errors.

I'm thus coming to the conclusion that I am either too stupid to actually understand what's going on, or that the analysis tool is being pedantic about something that's not techincally broken.

As such I've had enough of trying to work around an analysis tool that is being pedantic about precise nesting, matching of tags etc., Please either take the time to PROPERLY fix the relevant templates once and for all, or make very strong representations to the Mediawiki developers responsible for the new parser/Linter extension about it's inability to recognise otherwise valid situations, so that I'm not wasting my time apparently "breaking" templates, that did not need to repaired in the first place ...

The pages with "apparent errors" are here: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:44, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

I see what you are saying, some I cannot see what is wrong, others are very subtle. These got rid of errors markings: italics inside italics not sure maybe the web address in content or is there a spellchecker. --Traveler100 (talk) 09:26, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

I've been talking to the Parsing team about this off and on for a few months. The stuff that's flagged is stuff that "works" now but is going to break pages later (probably later this year). User:SSastry (WMF) has been awesome about answering questions, so if you have particular pages that you can't figure out from the documentation on mediawiki.org, then let's get a list together and ask him for help. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

User:ShakespeareFan00, thanks for your proactive work trying to address this. This flow topic is relevant to this discussion. But, this is also the reason why we haven't yet made a wide announcement about Linter since we are trying to figure out the best way to provide actionable guidance. But, we have been discussing whether it might be better and more useful to categorize this in terms of specifying which class of linter warnings/errors to fix to aid which goal. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 01:17, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

User:SSastry (WMF) , Thanks for the response. As a side effect, the Linter extension HAS exposed some things that weren't considered when certain templates were originally designed. Like a template that uses a span, instead of a div, because it wasn't considered that the relevant paramater in the span may contain (multiple) block level elements. Trying to resolve this exposed a futher concern about how "Mediawiki" was scoping where to put end of element markers. (See my last 2 reports on Phabricator for example.) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:53, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps someone can explain why this template (which should be relatively straightforward to fix so that it WILL work with the new parser is creating SO many issues? https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Warningbox&action=history , I've tried at least three times to get it to behave in a consistent way, and I'd now like an apology for my wasted time. Thanks.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:32, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

What is the lint error you are trying to fix there? Can you point me to a page / lint error that you encountered? SSastry (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

The issue was that in the template (pre my efforts) you have a span for styling, inside which is a list. Under HTML5 structuring, you can't put a list (block level item) inside a Span.

I've tried following the last three attempts to fix the 'live' template, put an attempt at a DIV based version here :- Template:Warningbox/sandbox, However if certain (optional) parameters are omitted, there's some undesired whitespace, that shouldn't be there.

Fixing Template:Warningbox should have been a simple effort, but for whatever reason owing to some limitations or other processing Mediawiki does, what should have been simple apparently isn't.

The issue of trying to put 'block level elements' inside a span also crops up with other templates, and may be why a large number of pages are showing up on the relevant Special page, because Template:Listing uses a span internally, despite on a number of pages, the relevant paramater to that template contains block level elements such as lists or wiki-text style paragraphs.

The thought was to convert spans like that to divs, but this ran into a different issue, namely that reported in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163650, meaning that even if the template was converted, paragraphs would still need to be explicitly laid out using <p></p> which is time consuming.

It also doesn't help that elsewhere people seem to have a cultural issues with admitting that using unmatched </p> or <p>, is a 'bodge' to cover up a limitation of what could be a scoping glitch in the parser itself.

I've got a "little list" of other concerns about various 'bodge' or 'clever' solutions that shouldn't be necessary if certain things were properly fixed or re-desgined, but here probably isn't the best place to discuss them. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:43, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

And another thing, which is a very big 'breaks everything' point, is that the colon notation used to indent on talk pages, are technically supposed to be for creating a definition list, NOT for indentation apparently. Of course changing this and getting EVERY talk page updated appropriately would be a massive undertaking. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:46, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I wanted to clarify something here. Not all the lint errors being identified are related to the replacement of Tidy with RemexHTML. Some lint errors are just markup issues that the new and old parser can "handle fine". But, this is in the same way that humans can understand most grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors just fine. Some of it is definitely pedantic related to cleaning up markup for clarity and being explicit about intentions. Anyway, this will get clearer as we figure out the best way to categorize the lint issues we identify and surface them for editors. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 17:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Summarising

Is it fair to summarise that moving from the sidebar to the footer is uncontroversial but using the algorithm requires a little bit more thought? If so would there be any objections to me enabling the display in the footer? Do I need to create an RFC to do that or can I just do it? Jdlrobson (talk) 18:01, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

User:Jdlrobson, go ahead and make the change. You'll wait forever for explicit consensus here. =) If we don't like it, we'll ask you to switch it back. Powers ^(talk) 20:35, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

The mobile version seems to suck

Swept in from the pub

I am trying out a smart phone that I will be switching to very soon, and I found that in the mobile version, there are no images on the front page. When I switch to the desktop version on my smart phone, I see the banners for the featured articles (dotm, etc.), but everything is too wide to the right for me to be able to work with it effectively. It's very hard to find recent changes in the mobile version (I couldn't figure out how to do so).

So are the rest of you finding that the mobile version sucks? Is anything planned to improve it? Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:17, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I raised this a while ago, got no response. Willing to help improve this but have no idea how to do that. How is the format of the mobile addition controlled? Who has access to the code to define what is shown and how the mobile form works? More to the point how can we change it? This is an important topic as most web browsing today is on mobile devises. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:26, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I asked around, and local admins can make (at least) some changes. See mw:Mobile Gateway/Mobile homepage formatting for more information. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I think the current mobile view is a result of the limitations with the current architecture.

I had a look at this in a user page User:Jdlrobson/main_page to see how this might be improved.

A few suggestions after looking at this. 1) The map/ links at the top of the page are not as exciting as the content that follows and given search is so prominent in mobile (and branding) it doesn't really add much value there. Consider moving them down or removing them altogether from the mobile experience via nomobile class. 2) The banners are not mobile friendly - Inside the banners apply a mobile friendly min-width: e.g. 260px to the banner-box2 so that on mobile it takes up as much space as it possibly can. Shrink margin top from 2em to 0.2em. Update the css rule in MediaWiki:Common.css to 2em via media query. 3) Stop using a table based layout for Discover/Get involved. Tables are the most unfriendly mobile element you can use - use div's that stack in mobile.

Some limitations with the current design: 1) Mobile doesn't easily allow changing the color of link. The TemplateStyles extension is coming soon which will correct this. This will also allow you to put media queries in the Main page which will improve things a lot. 2) There is a bug that messes up formatting of headings for section collapsing (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T152055 will fix). In mean time you may want to use divs or strong tags instead of h2s and h3s in banners. 3) Currently page banners are used for these boxes. The problem with those is they are not ideal for mobile usage (short and wide) and they tend to be lots of kb to download - consider switching to image thumbnails so that they format more nicely on a 320px device. This also impacts the text inside the banners as they have limited vertical space to work with. 4) The carousel JS will not load on mobile. I'm not sure how friendly it is to mobile devices but that can be checked and added if the other problems can be worked out.

Hope this helps! Jdlrobson (talk) 16:52, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Banner contest during the Wiki Loves Earth 2017

Swept in from the pub

Dear Colleagues,

Wiki Loves Earth 2017, the photo competition aimed at collecting photos of protected natural areas, has started today. We seek to collect photos that can be used on Wikivoyage and also organize a satellite competition dedicated to page banners. We have held such a competition already last year and received 88 beautiful page banners for Russia, many of them currently used on Wikivoyage.

The submission rules are described here. In short, only banners which are made of your own regular submissions to WLE 2017 are eligible, and they must be uploaded via a special link. If you fancy page banner for a Russian destination, use a different upload link, because we will award a separate prize. The competition runs till the end of May.

All banners submitted for this competition will be evaluated by our jury. We will consider both artistic value of individual banners and their merit for Wikivoyage, namely whether the banner is used or can be used in Wikivoyage articles, how well it conveys the feel of the destination, etc. We will have two small prizes, one for banners of Russian destinations and one for banners from abroad.

If you don't fancy uploading page banners but feel interested in our initiative, you can join our jury and help us in grading the banners. Just leave us a note here or contact us in person, and we will get back to you.--Ymblanter (talk) 06:37, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi Ymblanter . As far as I can tell the 'special link' is actually just the standard Upload Form with a new category ( Category:Page_banners_from_Wiki_Loves_Earth_2017 ) added. Can we just tag banner images with this category? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:56, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, all banners are uploaded into the special category. That's the idea. --Alexander (talk) 06:59, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

What happens if someone uploads a Crimea banner? Do the Russians start a war with Ukraine to claim it for themselves? K7L (talk) 13:29, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Nothing happens. Since last year, Crimean natural objects are part of both Russian and Ukrainian competitions. The uploader decides which one he or she wants to be part of. --Alexander (talk) 19:41, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Found a mistake in the dynamic maps. How do we fix it?

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look closely at the dynamic map of Sydney/City Centre - according to this map the water in the bay that surrounds the Sydney Opera House has all dried up. How do we fix this funny mistake ASAP? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:48, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Interesting. The source map on OpenStreetMaps (LINK) looks OK, but the cached version on WikiMedia Maps (LINK) has this sudden land fill.

The help page suggests to fix OpenStreetMaps directly. It is possible the somebody vandalized the OSM map and it was cached before it was fixed. Perhaps look again later? Andrewssi2 (talk) 21:41, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

If it does not fix when the caches update, I have seen similar strangeness with water/land divisions under some rendering of OSM. In the case I have previously seen it was where the renderer (one of the best 3rd party rendering apps with an excellent reputation) was mis classifying area classed as "marina" as "water" rather than land, but these strange effects can come from minor issues with the renderer. In my own case it was a small area only apparent where river boundaries extended too far. openstreetmap.org rendered it fine, app just got land vs water wrong in the detail. Just a thought and I've not looked at why the harbour in Sydney appears empty. PsamatheM (talk) 21:51, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

If you zoom out - eventually the water reappears which may also be a clue - other maps appear to work fine. -- Matroc (talk) 21:54, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Does anyone know whether the images are SVGs? There's some talk this week about w:en:WP:VPT about odd artifacts in SVGs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:49, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

PNG's PsamatheM (talk) 17:04, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Who can we contact when stuff like this needs to be fixed? No one can do it from the Wikivoyage/Wikimedia community? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 20:16, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Beta Feature Two Column Edit Conflict View

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From May 9, the Two Column Edit Conflict View will be available as a beta feature on all wikis. The Two Column Edit Conflict View is a new interface for the edit conflict resolution page. It highlights differences between the editor's and the conflicting changes to make it easy to copy and paste pieces of the text and resolve the conflict. The feature fulfils a request for a more user-friendly edit conflict resolution from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well!

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:29, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I haven't tried this out yet, but it's supposed to be good.

Also, Birgit's super nice and helpful, so if you try it and run into any problems, then just ping her. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2017

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Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

Did you know that you can review your changes visually?

When you are finished editing the page, type your edit summary and then choose "Review your changes".

In visual mode, you will see additions, removals, new links, and formatting highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

The wikitext diff is the same diff tool that is used in the wikitext editors and in the page history. You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and adding the new visual diff tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

• A new wikitext editing mode is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. The 2017 wikitext editor has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures to enable the ⧼Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-label⧽.
• A new visual diff tool is available in VisualEditor's visual mode. You can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. More features will be added to this later. In the future, this tool may be integrated into other MediaWiki components.
• The team have added multi-column support for lists of footnotes. The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. You can request multi-column support for your wiki.
• You can now use your web browser's function to switch typing direction in the new wikitext mode. This is particularly helpful for RTL language users like Urdu or Hebrew who have to write JavaScript or CSS. You can use Command+Shift+X or Control+Shift+X to trigger this.
• The way to switch between the visual editing mode and the wikitext editing mode is now consistent. There is a drop-down menu that shows the two options. This is now the same in desktop and mobile web editing, and inside things that embed editing, such as Flow.
• The Categories item has been moved to the top of the Page options menu (from clicking on the "hamburger" icon) for quicker access. There is also now a "Templates used on this page" feature there.
• You can now create <chem> tags (sometimes used as <ce>) for chemical formulas inside the visual editor.
• Tables can be set as collapsed or un-collapsed.
• The Special character menu now includes characters for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and angle quotation marks (‹› and ⟨⟩) . The team thanks the volunteer developer, Tpt.
• A bug caused some section edit conflicts to blank the rest of the page. This has been fixed. The team are sorry for the disruption.
• There is a new keyboard shortcut for citations: Control+Shift+K on a PC, or Command+Shift+K on a Mac. It is based on the keyboard shortcut for making links, which is Control+K or Command+K respectively.

Does not seem to support listings like the current text editor does (i.e. the buttons to add the different types of listing). I tried it for a bit but fiund it slower to load and visually harder to use than the old one so I quickly switched back. PsamatheM (talk) 18:24, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Future changes

• The team is working on a syntax highlighting tool. It will highlight matching pairs of <ref> tags and other types of wikitext syntax. You will be able to turn it on and off. It will first become available in VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode, maybe late in 2017.
• The kind of button used to Show preview, Show changes, and finish an edit will change in all WMF-supported wikitext editors. The new buttons will use OOjs UI. The buttons will be larger, brighter, and easier to read. The labels will remain the same. You can test the new button by editing a page and adding &ooui=1 to the end of the URL, like this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit&ooui=1 The old appearance will no longer be possible, even with local CSS changes.
• The outdated 2006 wikitext editor will be removed later this year. It is used by approximately 0.03% of active editors. See a list of editing tools on mediawiki.org if you are uncertain which one you use.
• If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

—Elitre (WMF)

18:05, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Does not seem to support listings like the current text editor does (i.e. the buttons to add the different types of listing). I tried it for a bit but fiund it slower to load and visually harder to use than the old one so I quickly switched back. Font too large (and fixed width) meaning you get less on the screen (not an issue for large screen users but some of us use small laptops and I can't see many people on their travels using a 42" monitor, more likely an e.g. 11" screen. If it's going to default to such large text font size (and fixed width font) then it needs options to change the view (i.e. shrink the text and change the font). PsamatheM (talk) 18:26, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

RevisionSlider

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RevisionSlider will be available as a default feature for all users on all wikis from May 17. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page so that you can easily move between revisions. The slider view is collapsed by default, and will load by clicking on it. It can also be turned off entirely in the user preferences. RevisionSlider has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia for 6 months and a beta feature on all wikis for 8 months. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Thanks to everyone who tested RevisionSlider and gave valuable feedback to improve the feature! We hope that RevisionSlider will continue to serve you well in your work.

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:39, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Mobile Site: Banner Image Looking Rather Terrible

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Just tried the mobile site on my iPhone 5 and the banner photos are looking "terrible" (being polite). Nothing wrong with the banners (I tested a couple where I knew they were of more than adequate resolution and worked fine on laptop). They are coming out truncated (right side and some of left but not centred) and almost blurred (but not zoomed to cause blurring. I've no idea how to look into what might be the cause (they do look bad!). I'm unable to upload files to WV and seems a bit bad to upload a example of something for sort term to commons, but happy to take some screenshort and post somehwere if that helps anybody diagnose and fix. PsamatheM (talk) 22:06, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

If you decide to do that, then my favorite set of instructions for this may be useful to you: w:en:Wikipedia:Screenshots of Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:30, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, a screenshot would be helpful :-) Thanks for the feedback! Syced (talk) 07:24, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

3 examples. Wroxham and Hoveton looks bad and Norfolk Broads and Wymondham probably illustrate the cause also don't look great.These all appear fine in desktop browser (Safari on Mac).

Wroxham and Hoveton

Norfolk Broads

Wymondham

Screenshots from Safari on iPhone 5S iOS 10. PsamatheM (talk) 09:11, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

n.b. please, if anybody can layout these screenshots on the page better please do edit (and I'll learn how to d it in future. I tried left, centre and right but too big gap. PsamatheM (talk) 09:11, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

The pagebanner template/extension could show the normal image on mobile websites delivered by Wikidata instead of the banner. -- DerFussi 11:51, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I am just guessing here, but I think there is some kind of "most interesting" algorithm that runs against the banners to generate the mobile banners. You can see it's trying to pick out a focal point within the image, and not simply centering it. Maybe there could be an override option on banner templates? FWIW, the mobile crop of the Boston banner works well, (and probably many others) so I wouldn't throw out this functionality altogether. --ButteBag (talk) 13:47, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

One thought I've had since is that on a desktop/laptop (larger screen) the banner adds a lot and includes the section links/menu. On the small phone screen it contains nothing but takes up a lot of screen space and does not look great. My guess (without trying it) is that if the aspect ratio were maintained and the image shown full width(i.e. a lot smaller vertically) it would take a lot less screen space and generally look a lot better. At the moment it's taking up over 1/3 of the browser screen space! Then with the breadcrumbs you've lost over half the browser screen space in the examples. (OK that reduced/goes as you scroll but not a useful starting point for getting info to the user. PsamatheM (talk) 15:09, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Oh just noticed this. There is an "origin" param you can use documented here: Template:Pagebanner. Disagree about keeping the desktop aspect ratio on mobile, but agree the breadcrumbs and page actions could be handled better (made less tall somehow). --ButteBag (talk) 21:01, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I've brought this up before. Essentially the problem here is that landscape banners dont look nice on a mobile screen. I think you use a 7:1 ratio but what this means is a banner to fit on a mobile screen will have a tiny height to the point is it tiny. Thus the banners have a fixed minimum height on mobile.

I think the banners being used need to be reconsidered. Either

1. relax the ratio a little. Banners will clip on desktop too (todo: i'll add an example)
2. choose banners which can be clipped using the origin focal point.. For instance a banner for London might show tower bridge on mobile but the entire city scape on desktop.

Jdlrobson (talk) 14:47, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

How we render PDFs will change – feedback?

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Hi everyone,

I’m looking for feedback from people who use the function to create PDFs on the Wikimedia wikis, which feels relevant for the travel guides on Wikivoyage. In short, the main technology we’re using to render them – OCG – is breaking down. The code is old, it’s difficult to maintain, and if we don’t replace it now we might suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we'd have to take it down without having planned to do so.

We have some plans for the future at mw:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality. If you care about the PDF function, please head over there and tell us on the talk page if anything is missing, or if there’s something in there we shouldn’t spend our time and energy on. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:24, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Use to often render articles using the function when they were displayed as they appear before rendering. Then took them on trips using laptop. When they changed PDF output to two columns, I had to switch to PDFs rendered by my search engine (i.e., Firefox) in order to retain original format for ease of highlighting and to avoid many page-up/down reading actions on-screen. Now encounter loss of only a few pictures...usually the banner, but no text. If we choose a new "converter", suggest it allow users to designate the basic output format. Regards, Hennejohn (talk) 18:20, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Left an extensive comment here. --Alexander (talk) 18:57, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

@Johan (WMF): How is that page different from mw:Reading/Web/PDF Rendering? I left a detailed comment on that talk page some months ago. Powers ^(talk) 23:41, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Hopefully slightly clearer. Sorry for the confusion; we should probably post something explaining the relationship between the pages – thanks for asking. You don't need to repost anything that was posted there, it's been noted. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Formerly Wikivoyage used few images to make printed articles more compact and download require less bandwidth. With smartphones/tablets and 3G being more common, we have eased on that recommendation. Now it seems we are back to discussing the images (on the linked talk page).

CSS allows different layouts for different media (desktop/tablet/print/...). I think it would be possible to use that feature, and the possibility to choose between style sheets, to indicate what images to include in different situations. We should be able to make better default choices than the PDF rendering engine. This would need some changes in guidelines and probably some new templates, in addition to the MediaWiki/Electron support.

Do we want a mechanism for marking important and less important images? There is already the suggestion to render some images as larger for offline use, where you cannot expand the image. Other variants?

--LPfi (talk) 07:06, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, there should be a mechanism for marking important images = images needed in the print version. But the problem is that images are included directly without any templates, so we can't define their CSS classes or anything. Placing each image inside a template would be an awkward solution. Therefore, I thought of labeling a few 'important' images with a template, where CSS classes can be eventually defined, and leaving all other images as they are. That would be easiest. --Alexander (talk) 08:39, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Start of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee elections

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Translations of this message are available on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, we are pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee and Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson elections. Please read the letter from the Wikimedia Foundation calling for candidates at on the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation elections portal.

Funds Dissemination Committee
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC elections page.

Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson
The Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC Ombudsperson elections page.

The candidacy submission phase will last until May 28 (23:59 UTC).

We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates until May 28. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki. Once the questions submission period has ended on May 28, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to.

The goal of this process is to fill the five community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee and the community-selected ombudsperson. The election results will be used by the Board itself to make the appointments.

The full schedule for the FDC elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.

• May 15 (00:00 UTC) – May 28 (23:59 UTC) – Nominations
• May 15 – May 28 – Candidates questions submission period
• May 29 – June 2 – Candidates answer questions
• June 3 – June 11 – Voting period
• June 12–14 – Vote checking
• June 15 – Goal date for announcing election results

More information on this year's elections can be found at the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation elections portal.

Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-electionswikimedia.org.

On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery • Translate • Get help

21:05, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Commons and deletion of static maps

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I'm wondering if we should reconsider our stance on hosting graphics on Commons? We're losing stuff for no good reason, for instance c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Kimberley map.png just removed the static map from Kimberley (Western Australia) on basically one person's say-so with little or no discussion. As this is happening on another wiki, we usually have no warning until an image (or even a static map) vanishes at the hands of User:CommonsDelinker - and by then it's too late. K7L (talk) 20:43, 23 May 2017 (UTC

@K7L: Definitely. Otherwise, we are hosting maps all over (e.g. Wikivoyage is in several languages). The solution here is simply to keep an eye on Commons. Would you like me to request it to be undeleted? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:33, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I suppose WT was quite sloppy about licences, like most people, while Commons is very strict. In this case the source of the base map seems not to have been explicit. If we know it, that information should be added, in other case we do not really know whether the map is free. In the worst case most old maps have to be redrawn with known base maps. Sad, but possibly hard to avoid. It may of course be that the source is evident or the base map de minimis (too little copyrightable material copied for the result to be a derived work), but not seeing the map or the description page that is hard to know. --LPfi (talk) 15:27, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Commons can be a little overly aggressive / straight on copyright sometimes. Yes we need to keep an eye on things there. But the benefits are generally greater than the drawbacks.Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:47, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Branding

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The idea of better tying together the branding of the various sister sites has been bantered about for a number of years. The idea is basically to also brand Wikivoyage as "Wikipedia Voyage". And to also use the url en.wikivoyage.wikipedia.org

Potential benefits include:

1. increasing the page rank of the sister sites and thus potentially readership
2. making clear to our readers what is and is not a Wikimedia movement sister site

My personal position is that:

1. any such change should only be carried out with the consensus of the sister site in question
2. the changes should be done gradually so that actual benefits can be determined

Would this be something the WV community would be interested in considering? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:02, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

@Doc James: Can you put a finer point on this? E.g. would anyone ever link to en.voy.p.org? Would there be promotional material calling this "Wikipedia Voyage"? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:53, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia Voyage would still be short-enable to WikiVoyage or WV. Would this lead to an increase in readership as WV's association with Wikipedia is clearer? I think it might. Is this worth a try? Maybe. Could it be used in promotional material, sure. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:37, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

@Doc James: Wait--are you suggesting actually changing the name of the site from "Wikivoyage" to "Wikipedia Voyage"?! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:48, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I like seeing a bold initiative around this, but A) are we sure the benefits would be realized? and B) Would this change our current governance structure in any way? Andrewssi2 (talk) 06:20, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

A) No we are not sure. One would have to try to see. We could set it up such that one could switch back if they were not realized. B) No this would not change current governance in any way. Projects shall always be self governing. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:01, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I think we also need to think about what does "Wikipedia Voyage" mean to someone who hears it... Are they going to expect an encyclopedia of travel or a travel guide? It would be great to leverage Wikipedia's name recognition but the two sites have some significant differences and I wonder if it will create an expectations gap with what people expect when they hear "Wikipedia" and what they see with a travel guide. -Shaundd (talk) 06:39, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

None of the other sister sites have "Wikipedia" in their names. I oppose this idea per Shaundd's points. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:50, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Agree with Shaundd and Ikan Kekek and oppose. I do really hope WMF get rid of any ideas about changing how things work for marketing reasons, or confusing facts to make them more attractive. We are not a subproject of the encyclopaedia. If the projects are to be consolidated, it is Wikimedia, not Wikipedia, that is the common factor. To me this sounds as one more indication that WMF has forgot what the movement is about and started to adopt marketing practices from the business world (I stopped contributing to the fund raising when they insisted on calling "wolf" despite criticism from sv-wp).

Wikivoyage needs more users, and I suppose many other projects do, but at least those other projects should be well-known by active wikipedians by now. An awkward url like the one suggested is hardly the way to attract people.

--LPfi (talk) 09:18, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I also support the general initiative but strongly oppose this particular name. It's convoluted, confusing and misleading as we're not an encyclopedia. In many ways, we're the opposite. Original research is often better than sourced material here.

But I have sometimes thought that "voyage" is a somewhat obscure word in the English language and in particular doesn't flow with the word "wiki". There may have been better synonyms of travel to use, like Wikitrips, Wikijourney, Wikiwander, Wikitourist, Wikinomad or even Wikigo since to travel you have to go somewhere. They sound better to my ear but everyone is different and Wikivoyage might sound good to others. Gizza ^(roam) 10:25, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I could see it causing confusion amongst some. Casual users might look up e.g. Paris on Wikipedia or Wikipedia Voyage or does it matter or why are they different ... "I've checked one why check the other" ... "Wikipedia does not tell me about good places to say for that place". I see the sites as having ver different purpose and the different branding helps distinguish that different purpose. I think more cross links Wikipedia to WikiVoyage for e.g. matching subject pages (in the Wikipedia "See Also" at the bottom) would help, but merging the branding - oppose. PsamatheM (talk) 10:36, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes. I think many wikipedians who come to Wikimedia Commons are very confused, regarding it an en-wp subsidiary, and quoting (English) Wikipedia policies to defend their point of view. Few regulars would have such expectations here, but I think the example shows that clear separation has its merits. --LPfi (talk) 13:14, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

The question is does Wikipedia only mean an encyclopedia? Or can it be applied in a broader manner to the entire movement? Should all the sister sites contain "Wikipedia" in the name? Should the chapters be "Wikipedia Canada", should it be the "Wikipedia Foundation"? Basically should "Wikimedia" simply be replaced by "Wikipedia".

I agree there are potential pluses and minuses and we do not know the exact result that will occur if tried. Wikimedia however does result in a lot of confusion and I frequently heard "you mean Wikipedia Canada right" when I called it "Wikimedia Canada".

Another benefit is that while we do not own the term "wiki", we do own the term "Wikipedia". That is likely a lessor benefit though. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:55, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Oppose this specific idea, but I really like your moxie! To most internet users the answer to the question "does Wikipedia only mean an encyclopedia?" is definitely yes. I would actually be fine with all urls being brought under the wikimedia umbrella. So like, en.wikipedia.wikimedia.org, en.wikivoyage.wikimedia.org, etc. Although, it's a bit overlong now that I type it out... Anyway, good luck! --ButteBag (talk) 14:48, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Adding another voice to the oppose chorus. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:07, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks all for your perspectives. I will bring this view forward and oppose such a change on your behalf. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:29, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

User:Doc James : Thanks for your bold initiative. I was really hoping this would be the genesis of a new discussion rather than just simply shot down. I'm personally quite in favor of looking for radical ways into improving the site and would like to see more discussion around it. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:39, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree that your boldness is to be praised, and I'm sorry I have no alternative suggestions at the moment, except that I agree with ButteBag that explicitly adding "Wikimedia" to the URL is totally fine. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:59, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Always happy to consider other suggestions. Wikipedia is our best known brand and the though was to simply try to leverage that to the benefit of the sister sites. We could try to improve awareness around Wikimedia and it might be similar enough to succeed. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:45, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Thinking aloud (i.e. not thought through/off-top-of-head) what about a "Part of WikiMedia Group" small graphic that is added to the existing logos. Maybe based on the Wikipedia "W" (to keep it small and already well recognised), some element that can be added to without swamping each of the project icons indicating it's part of the "group" (a bit like companies do except they tend to use text as in "a member of the xxx group of companies". So everybody gets to keep their icons, individuality, separation but at the same time the icon/logo shows it is a member of the WikiMedia Foundation. BUT, the trouble is that the WikiMedia icon/logo is not well recognised amongst the users of most of the sites (even aid Wikipedia users are probably unaware of the way the organisation is structured or even that it is even structured and has other projects). The idea behind the original proposal to leverage off the Wikipedia widespread awareness is a good idea but I don't think general users are aware of WikiMedia so it would have to be Wikipedia based PsamatheM (talk) 16:29, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree with the idea of having a "Part of Wikimedia", or something similar, displayed at least on the front page (on every page would be fine with me, too, if it's visible though not cumbersome). Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:33, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

What, something like https://en.wikivoyage.org/static/images/wikimedia-button.png at the bottom of every page? K7L (talk) 20:30, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, and preferably bigger than that image. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:42, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

I would agree. My only question is about how widespread "WikiMedia" is understood (or even known about) in the general public/users. I wonder if it's an association with Wikipedia that would help most rather than WikiMedia. And in some regards (maybe I've misunderstood) WikiTravel also uses WikiMedia software so would the WikiMedia association distinguish enough (they and many others start with "Wiki" and many would think beyond that). Original proposal was to associate closer with Wikipedia which is where I think most of the benefit would be (mainly because most internet users are aware of Wikipedia). PsamatheM (talk) 08:42, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@PsamatheM: Wikimedia is the non-profit that operates these sites; MediaWiki is the software. The WMF never had any association with Wikitravel but Wikitravel is built on MediaWiki. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:08, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

So if I had understood it wrong (and given I contribute here sometimes, made a couple of corrections to WikiData and Wikipedia) what chance do others who e.g. just use Wikipedia sometimes have and thus would they appreciate the difference between WikiMedia and MediaWiki and thus would WV get any benefit from association from MediaWiki rather than Wikipedia? PsamatheM (talk) 09:20, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@PsamatheM: 0%. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:23, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@ Koavf: Afraid I don't understand that (I must be having a "senior moment"?) PsamatheM (talk) 09:25, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@PsamatheM: No problem. Your question was: How much will rebranding the site help, since these names can be so confusing. My answer was: I do not think it will help. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:15, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Here's how I think it could work: If it could be agreed on, it would be good for every Wikimedia site to have that same notice on every page. Then, over time, it will become more highly recognizable as the Wikimedia brand. I think it's worth trying and arguably a per se good thing to do, regardless. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:47, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

I would agree. Whilst I think Wikipedia is the publicly recognised "brand" as you say, if all Wikipedia pages included the same notice on every page then the "brand" get broadened. For me the crucial site is Wikipedia as without that site doing it it would be much less effective. But a move I'd be in favour of but how does such an initiative/change get agreed on Wikipedia and how does it get implemented ? PsamatheM (talk) 22:07, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, we agree: Wikipedia's participation is crucial. I don't know how we could best propose this to all Wikimedia sites. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:40, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm more incline to change wikipedia.org into wikipedia.wikimedia.org than to change wikivoyage.org into wikivoyage.wikipedia.org. We are a part of wikimedia not a part of wikipedia. --Andyrom75 (talk) 10:27, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

I could get on board making the Wikimedia "family" brands more prominent on each of its wikis, including WV but I'm not a fan of lengthening the url at all, or making our name longer. The world's leading web/app brands all have short, sharp, easy-to-remember names and urls: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Tumblr, eBay, Skype, Tinder. Nearly all of them are 2-3 syllables, 10 letters max. Wikipedia has 5 syllables but still flows well while Wikivoyage feels long with 4. In the travel space there's Airbnb, booking.com, hotels.com, Kayak, Uber, Agoda, Trivago, with only TripAdvisor being the big exception (but still much easier to say than either Wikipedia Wikivoyage or Wikimedia Wikivoyage). We shouldn't swim against the tide. Gizza ^(roam) 11:45, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Have I been overlooking the two logos bottom right of each page (on WV as well as Wikipedia) "A WikiMedia Project" and "Powered by WikiMedia" or are they new ? (I can stare at things and not see them (as witnessed by supermarket assistants ...). Nice if they were more prominent (e.g. same size at the top of the page maybe (e.g. under the project logo) but I'd never noticed the branding there. PsamatheM (talk) 23:00, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

@PsamatheM: Yes, you have--those buttons have been there for a decade. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:09, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Merging articles

Swept in from the pub

We have a bunch of outstanding propsals for article mergers. In principle, the idea of getting consensus for article mergers makes sense, but where only one or two people have commented over a period of months, it is clear that there isn't enough interest to settle the discussion, and we end up with "merge" tags cluttering these articles indefinitely.

I have gone through most of the articles (listed here Wikivoyage:Requests for comment). I have plunged forward and completed some mergers where the article clearly did not meet wia or where there was negligible information to merge into another article.

I am proposing to define "consensus" on other articles as follows: after a further ten-day comment period, I will execute proposed mergers where there is no "oppose" vote. Where there is an "oppose" vote and no large number of "support" votes (e.g. Talk:Petersham), I will close the discussion as "no consensus to merge" and remove the "merge" tag from the article. Please add your comments to any of the discussions. Merger discussions can be re-opened at any time, and merged articles can be split out at any time if someone wants to put the work into creating an article with information (and the subject meets wia).

This should clean up most of the outstanding merger proposals, aside from a few where I lack the knowledge or interest to join the discussion (e.g. Filipino phrasebooks). Ground Zero (talk) 15:29, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree, it's quite frustrating for the person suggesting the merger as well. There was a discussion on this a while ago, after I (wrongly in hindsight) merged two articles without putting it up for discussion, and I think the conclusion was that it was okay to go ahead with the merger if there's no opposition for a while after the merger has been proposed on the talk page. Drat70 (talk) 01:19, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

I would suggest that if you know a given area quite well, going ahead and merging within a week or perhaps even a day or less if you know there couldn't be a reason for controversy is fine, but if you don't personally know an area and it's not blindingly obvious that a given place couldn't have a good article, you might want to delay merging if no-one comments, or at least delay for a week or so. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:30, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

With the help of some other editors, many of the mergers have been completed, and other merger discussions have been closed. I don't know what to do about some cases where editors do a "drive-by" tagging, i.e., they proper a merger or article move, there is support for it, but then they leave it and move on to other stuff. In some cases, if the merger is straightforward, I'll do it, but where the merger is more complex or requires local knowledge, I'm inclined to remove the merger tag if the proposer can be bothered to compete the merger. This sort of tagging strikes me as a bit of "someone else should do this, but I'm not willing to." These sort of tags are not helpful, and clutter the articles without adding value. Ground Zero (talk) 14:12, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Easier discussions?

Swept in from the pub

I was thinking about this comment, and thinking how common that kind of problem is for new people. How many of you have tried mw:Flow? I've been using it more this last year. It took me a little while to get used to a few of its quirks, but I'm pretty satisfied overall.^[1]

It works pretty well for basic discussions. I think it is better for talking to newcomers, and highly effective at getting responses from people. It has an explicit reply button (two of them, actually), which is really helpful to new contributors, and replies appear in Echo (unless you disable that in your prefs) as well as your watchlist (very handy for reaching the person who doesn't use a watchlist or doesn't visit your wiki very often). You can even watch a single thread, rather than a whole page. I was thinking that it might be appropriate to try it out at the Tourist Office sometime, since that page brings in a higher proportion of non-editors.

If you haven't used Flow, then perhaps this is a good way to start: Go to mw:Flow/Sandbox and start a new discussion. Feel free to ping me or your favorite contributors. Be sure to click the pencil icon in the lower right corner and try switching between visual mode (handy for newbies) and wikitext (familiar to us).

[1] Please do not tell the Flow devs that I'm satisfied. As far as they are concerned, I will only be satisfied when they add all of my favorite feature requests. 😉

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I have understood it has some pretty serious shortcomings, e.g. regarding history. We have not enabled it on sv-wp, so I have very limited experience, but I hope it will not be introduced without a thorough understanding of the problems. --LPfi (talk) 09:39, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

I think that a lack of integration with Special:Search is the biggest practical problem. (Each thread has a history page, and changes appear in your watchlist.) But search is perhaps less critical to the Tourist Office. (Also, I hope that fixing search will be high on the list of improvements that are scheduled to begin next month). I really think that you need to use it a few times to know how it works. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:25, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Removing opacity from table of contents dropdowns

Swept in from the pub

There is a longstanding bug on phabricator regarding the opacity of the table of contents dropdown. Is this a problem shared by other community members? Please comment on the task (using your Phabricator account). If I don't see any objections I am going to remove the opacity from the menus. Thanks in advance! Jdlrobson (talk) 18:45, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Do you like this idea? Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#Alt_pagebanner_layout.3F Would be easy to roll the opacity fix into that. --ButteBag (talk) 22:18, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

What do you care for most? What are you concerned with? Take part in the strategy discussion

Swept in from the pub

Hi!

The more involved we are, the more ideas or wishes concerning the future of Wikipedia we have. We want to change some things, but other things we prefer not to be changed at all, and we can explain why for each of those things. At some point, we don’t think only about the recent changes or personal lists of to-dos, but also about, for example, groups of users, the software, institutional partners, money!, etc. When we discuss with other Wikimedians, we want them to have at least similar priorities that we have. Otherwise, we feel we wasted our time and efforts.

We need to find something that could be predictable, clear and certain to everybody. A uniting idea that would be more nearby and close to the every day’s reality than the Vision (every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge).

But people contribute to Wikimedia in so many ways. The thing that should unite us should also fit various needs of editors and affiliates from many countries. What’s more, we can’t ignore other groups of people who care about or depend on us, like regular donors or “power readers” (people who read our content a lot and often).

That’s why we’re running the movement strategy discussions. Between 2019 and 2034, the main idea that results from these discussions, considered by Wikimedians as the most important one, will influence big and small decisions, e.g. in grant programs, or software development. For example: are we more educational, or more IT-like?

We want to take into account everybody’s voice. Really: each community is important. We don’t want you to be or even feel excluded.

Please, if you are interested in the Wikimedia strategy, follow these steps:

• Have a look at this page. There are drafts of 5 potential candidates for the strategic priority. You can comment on the talk pages.
• The last day for the discussion is June, 12. Later, we’ll read all your comments, and shortly after that, there’ll be another round of discussions (see the timeline). I will give you more details before that happens.
• If you have any questions, ask me. If you ask me here, mention me please.

Friendly disclaimer: this message wasn't written by a bot, a bureaucrat or a person who doesn't care about your project. I’m a Polish Wikipedian, and I hope my words are straightforward enough. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 11:02, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikivoyage at the Wikimania 2017

Dear Wikivoyage community members. The Wikimania 2017 conference will take place in August 2017. I am going to take part and I hope to meet some other community members. To prepare for the conference properly I would like to know more about all your wishes, problems and ideas related to Wikivoyage. I have created a small site on the meta-wiki where you can drop all your thoughts, wishes and concerns. Feel free to create sub sites if needed. It would be great to have a meeting at the conference venue or anywhere in town. -- DerFussi (talk) -- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:04, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Fires and other Emergencies

Swept in from the pub

Yes we have a short article on Wildfires, but what about how to handle fires in other travel related situations?

Is it Captain Obvious to tell people to ensure they know evacuation procedures in a hotel and so on?

Related would be how to check that the travel industry operators have done their bit as well?.

Both these questions are prompted indirectly by claims in the UK media, that Premier Inns (a major motel operator in the UK), was looking into the cladding it used on it's locations following the major incident at West London tower block last week.

I am not sure consumer safety/protection as it relates to travel is something Wikivoyage does, but perhaps it should be borne in mind? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:53, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

My initial reaction is that this is unnecessary. Most people spend a lot of their lives in or near buildings, and have been doing fire drills since primary school.

Wildfires and campfires are certainly travel related. Fires on a cruise ship would also count. But a fire in a hotel is no different than any other building, and I think we can reasonably expect almost everyone to already know what to do. --Bigpeteb (talk) 18:26, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

We do run into third-world destinations with lax regulation in which there are no consequences for builders if a structure is a fire trap and no consequences for proprietors if they've blocked the emergency exits to prevent patrons sneaking out without paying. At least there are no consequences until tragedy strikes – and then it's too late. How do you advise the voyager spot these issues? K7L (talk) 13:17, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes. I think locked or blocked emergency exits can be found even in EU countries, as can safety instructions copied from some other building or not updated when there were changes. And I think fire drills are mostly to train staff and check procedures are working, not much about how to act in an emergency in an unfamiliar environment where you do not (or should not) trust procedures.

Also tent fabric, gas installations and camping stoves are things not all are sufficiently acquainted with. Perhaps a short note about the importance of following safety directions is enough, perhaps some more advice and reasoning is needed.

These things may be best handled in Stay safe sections and the Stay safe article. Perhaps just checking them and adding any important missing stuff would be enough.

--LPfi (talk) 15:29, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

I am also assuming fire safety signs and building evacuation routes are now (or should now) all be ISO ones, so most travellers would be familiar with them? (On the other hand would some local variations need to be noted in relevant region articles?). All the ones I've seen in the UK were standardised since at least the mid 1980's (albiet BS not ISO until a few years ago.).

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:59, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

I spend about 3 to 4 months of the year in different hotels. Have had to evacuate a few times over the years. I now make a point of checking the fire exit route (walk down stairs at least once. It is surprising how many stir wells from room floors come out in strange meeting rooms or in the kitchen or back loading bay. Can be a challenge in calm good visibility conditions to find the way out the building, best to know before you need it in a dark smokey building. Have also twice been stuck behind locked doors and have had to call hotel reception on my mobile to let me out or back into the main building! --Traveler100 (talk) 16:33, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

(Performance) Magic

Swept in from the pub

Okay, I couldn't find Magic, as a topic, and didn't want to create a redirect to Fringe Phenomena as what most people call magic is of the distinctly non-supernatural performance kind.

Wikivoyage doesn't have an article on Performance Magic so I am considering what to put in a stub (currently here)

The main focus of a travel topic, should be venues that have regular live "magic", prop museums, or sites connected with famous illusionists.

I'm not sure but there may be some Stay Safe advice that could be added as well, although most of it is of the "don't get ripped off" design, already covered in Commons Scams, ( Like the "Find the lady" confidence trick in particular.).

Thoughts? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:42, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Seriously getting frustrated by the recent trend of creating two sentence Travel Topics. They serve no use to readers, just gives the impression of a very bitty amateurish web site. Not just a comment about this topic but others too, if you do not have a good amount of information on a subject do not start a stub page on it. --Traveler100 (talk) 12:51, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough. I'll review some of the other articles recently created as well.

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:16, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

I really couldn't agree more with Traveler100 on his general point. Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:21, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Right a few marked for direct deletion, some others at VfD. Thank you for your co-operation so far ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:40, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

I disagree with edits like Special:Diff/3194593/3227197 and Special:Diff/3209556/3227190. If something's up for discussion on VfD, it would be best to let that discussion run its course before removing all inbound internal links to the page in question.

We do normally wait until a page is usable before tagging {{wikivoyage}} boxes onto the corresponding Wikipedia article "external links" section, but no corresponding restriction applies to internal links to articles from within Wikivoyage. K7L (talk) 14:17, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

But do not get me wrong, a number of new contributions I do support. For example I actually think Inland waterways in the United Kingdom would make a great article, I though about it myself but would take a little time to write. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:22, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

We don't have a Draft: namespace at Wikivoyage, hence why Performance Magic was in userspace, but certain comments here have suggested even a user-space stub isn't appropriate. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:26, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Did not intend to give that impression. Developing in user space is fine, just stay away from adding tags that put it into clean-up lists. And I was talking about travel topics with just a couple of lines not ones with a reasonable number of entries or locations with just a couple of listings. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:36, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

(Personal opinion:) For me the priority is getting the many existing destinations and articles up to a better standard. As a general comment on the Votes for Deletion, I'd prefer time spent on adding content to the destinations rather than spending time trawling through emptier places or creating stub pages for others to write. I suspect we all have great ideas for new pages that would enhance the site, but we don't have time to write them and creating "stubs" for others to do the hard work on ... I find adding content to the vast number rather "empty" destinations quite a hard and boring slog but it needs doing. I think better to write and create one new page with adequate content to stand alone than throw many "ideas" out there in the form of "empty" pages. I feel content for many existing destinations really needs to get done to improve the site. PsamatheM (talk) 16:06, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Join the strategy discussion. How do our communities and content stay relevant in a changing world?

Swept in from the pub

Hi!

I'm a Polish Wikipedian currently working for WMF. My task is to ensure that various online communities are aware of the movement-wide strategy discussion, and to facilitate and summarize your talk. Now, I’d like to invite you to Cycle 3 of the discussion.

Between March and May, members of many communities shared their opinions on what they want the Wikimedia movement to build or achieve. (The report written after Cycle 1 is here, and a similar report after Cycle 2 will be available soon.) At the same time, designated people did a research outside of our movement. They:

• talked with more than 150 experts and partners from technology, knowledge, education, media, entrepreneurs, and other sectors,
• researched potential readers and experts in places where Wikimedia projects are not well known or used,
• researched by age group in places where Wikimedia projects are well known and used.

Now, the research conclusions are published, and Cycle 3 has begun. Our task is to discuss the identified challenges and think how we want to change or align to changes happening around us. Each week, a new challenge will be posted. The discussions will take place until the end of July. The first challenge is: How do our communities and content stay relevant in a changing world?

All of you are invited! If you want to ask a question, ping me please. You might also take a look at our the FAQ (recently changed and updated).

Thanks! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:53, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

New "flag" for certain edits?

Should we introduce a "flag" - similar to existing flags like "mobile edit" or "smileys" - for edits where an URL is replaced which has not been marked as a dead link? That way stuff like this would be more immediately obvious, without having to look through all edits first. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:34, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

It's a good idea. You can create a new filter here: Special:AbuseFilter/new Powers ^(talk) 20:39, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

don't you have to be an administrator to do that?Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:22, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, you need to be an admin. As far as I understand it you want to detect if a URL has been changed and Tag it as such? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:31, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

So can we make that flag? Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:54, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Someone has to code the regex to detect it. Powers ^(talk) 00:32, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

You do not need to be an admin for that part (although having been one on some MediaWiki project may help getting the regex right). --LPfi (talk) 09:46, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Commons Android app - IEG renewal proposal

Hi folks,

The Wikimedia Commons app (a community-maintained Android app that allows users to upload photos to Commons from their phone) was funded via an Individual Engagement Grant last year and has several new features - a list and map of nearby places that need photos (based on Wikidata), category suggestions based on the image title and location (if geotagging is enabled in camera app), prevention of duplicate uploads, and a new tutorial to educate new users on what types of photos should or should not be uploaded. The final report for the completed IEG can be viewed here.

While we are very happy with the progress made, there are many other improvements that we would like to make but were not able to fit into the scope of the previous grant. Thus we are proposing a renewal of the IEG in order to work on these. Highlights of the proposed improvements include:

• Enhancing the "Nearby places that need photos" feature by (1) allowing users to upload their image directly from a location on the list or map, with suggested title and categories based on the associated Wikidata item, and (2) displaying the user's real-time position on the map to allow easier navigation to the location they wish to photograph
• A sleeker, more intuitive, and more interactive user interface - a floating action button for uploads, "Nearby places that need photos" in a tab alongside the user's contributions, and a panel to display Commons account notifications and information about the nearest place that needs photos
• Various technical and quality-of-life improvements, such as two-factor authentication login, multiple uploads, preventing overwrites, and fixing memory leaks and battery drain issues
• Improving user education by displaying Commons account and user talk notifications (e.g. picture nominated for deletion) in the app, adding a gallery of featured images, and adding various notices and explanations in the upload screen

We would very much appreciate feedback and suggestions on the renewal proposal - we are especially excited about the "Nearby places that need photos" feature, as we feel that it can help close the gap of geo-located Wikidata items that lack photos, and provide photos for articles that need them. Please do take a look at our proposal, feel free to ask questions and make new suggestions on the Discussion page, and/or endorse the proposal if you see fit. If you would like to be part of the project, new volunteers and additions to our diverse team are always welcome - please visit our GitHub repository or Google groups forum and say "Hi". :)

Many thanks! Misaochan (talk) 10:28, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

What is this?

It seems somebody attempted to do something with this some four years ago (maybe even with some consensus behind it) but now? What are we to do with this? Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:37, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Ahh, I remember this. This was a pet project of a no-longer-active user that he started shortly after our move to the WMF, then abandoned somewhere along the way. As I remember it, it was an attempt at a more interactive and personalized user experience. One of those ideas that frequently come along that are good but we don't have the manpower to see through to fruition. I'd say the best course of action would be to move it to his userspace in case he comes back and wants to pick up where he left off, or some other user happens across it. However, I'd wait to do that until you get feedback from other people besides just me. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:29, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Andre's approach makes sense to me. Ground Zero (talk) 11:14, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Usage of <center>

So in topics like Early United States History we previously had a line break between <center>United States historical travel topics:</center> and '''[[Indigenous cultures of North America|Indigenous nations]] → [[Early United States history|Pre-Civil War]] → [[American Civil War|Civil War]] → [[Old West]] → [[Industrialization of the United States|Industrialization]] → [[Post-war United States|Post-war]]''' - now the <center> has recently been removed resulting in what looks to me a less aesthetically pleasing layout. Now if it only produces a change in layout on my OS/Browser, why are we changing it? And if produces the same outcome in other OS/Browsers, who thinks that that outcome is better? Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:30, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

The center tag is a legacy browser feature. I've now switched this out with some CSS but still keeping the same layout. -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:56, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

This looks to be related to #Lint errors, above. I'm seeing cases where editors are actively removing <center> tags, affecting the formatting of existing text, just to make this rather trivial and pointless warning go away. Is this necessary? K7L (talk) 21:22, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes. Or, if not strictly "necesary", it is at least highly desirable.

I have no view on whether the tags should be removed or replaced by the modern HTML equivalent, but the center tags themselves should not be be used. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

And let me add to the chorus: we shouldn't deliberately make pages which are not valid HTML. MediaWiki should be able to strip that out and replace it with a style but until/unless that happens, we should still not be intentionally adding bad HTML. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:05, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Would a center template be useful at all? -- Matroc (talk) 05:02, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

@Matroc: It could be very useful, certainly but all that MediaWiki code like {{center|...}} will still translate into HTML since this is the Web. The question is if it will be valid or invalid HTML. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:56, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry to ask so "stupidly" but why do those tags have to be removed and or replaced? Hobbitschuster (talk) 11:54, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

MediaWiki is planning to implement a new parser that will have much stricter requirements about markup than the current parser (which is already stricter than your average web browser). Powers ^(talk) 13:55, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

And what's the benefit of that? Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:12, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

@Hobbitschuster: There are rules to how HTML should be written and when authors ignore those rules, it makes it much harder to predict what behavior a browser is supposed to have or how things should render. This makes browsers far more difficult to create. If web pages use HTML properly and everyone obeys the rules, it will be much more efficient for everyone: indexing robots will easily understand what is in a page, browsers can more effectively render content, etc. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:56, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

The behaviour of <center> is perfectly predictable as it's part of the original HTML 1.0 spec and has always worked the same way. It's individual editors here randomly pulling the <center> tags and leaving text left-justified not for valid editorial reasons, but because they're on a technical crusade against the <center> tag, that are the unpredictable factor here. The effects are subtle and annoying. I've seen a couple of examples; one was a navigation box linking to a list of U.S. history articles, the other was an infobox on Oregon Trail#Across Nebraska where Susan has died of cholera was centred over her grave stone until somebody disturbed her grave, believing the <center> tag is so evil that they just had to leave a left-justified title over a centre-justified image instead. The formatting is an editorial decision, its removal should also be subject to editorial consensus instead of just "I hate <center> tags". K7L (talk) 13:02, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

I think we might want to go easy on removing those tags for a bit... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:33, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

UEFA Women's 2017 template.

I have no idea whether this is still worth doing, as the championship is long underway, but I've made a mock-up of an event template for the UEFA Women's 2017 European Championship Football/Soccer, currently taking place in seven host cities in the Netherlands.

I doubt that it's useful to add at such a late stage, though if anyone thinks it should be added, then please go ahead. On the other hand, I haven't seen that many event templates (I've only seen the Sochi 2014 one since I started editing here), and am not even sure whether this is still something that is done in general. Please feel free to talk me up-to-date on that subject. The additional info about the event you would need is listed on the template page.

The event takes place until the 6th of August. Please ignore this subject when reading this after that date.
-- Wauteurz (talk) 16:58, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

I agree that it is too late to usefully add a template - it would be best added 6-18 months before the event starts. I doubt that the championship has a big enough impact on the host cities to justify having a template - several stadiums used seat 10k spectators, whilst the smallest used for football in London 2012 Olympics seated 30k, with the rest 50k+. (The logo on the mock-up also needs to be changed or removed.) AlasdairW (talk) 21:36, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

I am aware of the logo needing a change - just to get that out of the way. It being too late to add the template is something we agree on, though I disagree that the impact on the host cities is minor. I myself live in Doetinchem, one of the host cities, and during the time that the event has been going on, I've seen loads more foreign tourists come to the city (the number has been doubled several times over), whereas usually around this time we're mostly seeing German and Dutch tourists. The span of the event however, is bigger than just the host cities. While the amount of occupied hotel rooms might not change a lot due to the low amount of hotels in, for example, Doetinchem, the greater area benefits from the event as well. Duiven, for example, has a very large hotel that houses many visitors as well as one or two teams. But yes, compared to the Olympics UEFA Women's is rather small, as are many more international and continental events.
-- Wauteurz (talk) 10:10, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Wroclaw currently hosts the World Games and even though I live rather close to the Polish border (though thanks to disinvestment in the railway infrastructure you wouldn't know that from casual observation), I only know of it because there was an American Football tournament involved... Hobbitschuster (talk) 11:48, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

I think that the Olympics is the only event for which we have created templates. One of the uses of the template is to direct the reader to our article on the specific games, and I think that it is best not to create a template without first creating the Sochi 2014 games article explaining ticketing, special transport provisions etc. The Olympics causes serious disruption to the host city - new stadia being built, large areas blocked off behind security cordons, road closures etc - to the extent that some travellers may wish to avoid the city for the time around the games. AlasdairW (talk) 22:11, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

A 180-degree turnaround at dotm

Swept in from the pub

Folks, I wanted to note (and do so on as highly visible a page as possible) the marked improvement I've been seeing vis-à-vis the earlier situation at DotM. As I noted elsewhere, when I sounded the alarm about Groningen, we pulled together and whipped the article into shape in record time, and now we're in the process of doing the same with the even bigger task at hand at Aarhus. (Kind thanks go out to Andrewssi2 and Pashley for their help with that latter article.) This is the kind of thing that makes me feel very heartened, and very optimistic about the future of DotM and Wikivoyage in general. You guys are all doing great. Keep it up!

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:53, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Script oddity

Using a Linux version of Firefox, and I keep getting this error message:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. ...

Script: https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/lo…ts&skin=vector&version=02u0abl:12

I do not recall seeing such messages before on WV, though Facebook gives them fairly often. Since I started editing the Aarhus article, though, I am seeing them often, I think only for Aarhus & mostly when I go to edit a listing. Pashley (talk) 12:16, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Lint errors

See m:Wikivoyage/Lounge#Lint_errors. --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:04, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

@Andyrom75: I've fixed several hundred myself now. If you can amend {{Regionlist}}, then I think that would empty out Special:LintErrors/bogus-image-options. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:33, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf:, sorry the delay but I've been pretty busy. That template is different from the one used in it:voy, but at a first glance it seems that it doesn't produce issues anymore. Whether I'm wrong, please highlight me the category and the page where you have seen the issue and I'll take a look. --Andyrom75 (talk) 15:01, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Accessible editing buttons

Swept in from the pub

The MediaWiki developers have been slowly improving the accessibility of the user interface. The next step in this transition will change the appearance of some buttons and may break some outdated (non-updated or unmaintained) user scripts and gadgets.

You can see and use the old and new versions now. Most editors will only notice that some buttons are slightly larger and have different colors.

• Comparison of old and new styles
• 
  Buttons before the change
• 
  Buttons after the change

However, this change also affects some user scripts and gadgets. Unfortunately, some of them may not work well in the new system. If you maintain any user scripts or gadgets that are used for editing, please see mw:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons for information on how to test and fix your scripts. Outdated scripts can be tested and fixed now.

This change will probably reach this wiki on Tuesday, 1 August 2017. Please leave a note at mw:Talk:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons if you need help.

--Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Edit dates for listing

Swept in from the pub

Is there a general agreement whether to keep or drop the edit dates (lastedit) for any listing (see, do, etc.)? They are sometimes helpful but also make articles less nice to read.

Cheers Ceever (talk) 07:18, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

• Keep - if I see an edit date of May 2017, I'll go to the restaurant or museum with some confidence that the time and price info are fairly correct. If I see an edit date of 2008, I will verify the existence of the place before setting foot out the door. People updating articles will likely choose to focus on checking the oldest listings. Ground Zero (talk) 12:22, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

I know we had a discussion ahead if implementing this, but I don't know where it is. I think the lastedit field is very valuable and it gives an idea as to how up-to-date an individual listing is. If the aesthetic considerations are indeed so major, we might make it an opt-out feature for registered users or for the printable versions... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:32, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

I think we should keep the field, but should stop auto-populating the current date into the field every time a user adds a new listing. Often, listings are added based not on the contributor being physically present at the venue today, but based on secondary sources or even the property's own promotional website - which might not have been updated in years. If a user finds a motel website for tiny Cartwright (Labrador) today and adds that listing, but the motel last updated their website on Tripod in 2004, that should be lastedit=2004-01-01 not lastedit=2017-07-25 as much of the info risks being out of date. We know this place still exists and passed an annual provincial inspection, but any info we obtained from their website is of historical interest only. K7L (talk) 14:37, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

We can manually remove or alter the date there. And I think only experienced users (who'd know how to do that) add listings based on the website of the business. Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:51, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Another advantage is you have and idea where to look in the history if you want to find out who did the last edit. Use when I have a question about an entry. --Traveler100 (talk) 18:32, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

I think the discussion was here. The autofill for the date saves a lot of time, and normally will produce the right result. The Cartwright error was mine. I believed when I updated it that the website was valid, and would have manually added the date if the line had been blanked. I learned from that mistake to be on the look-out for out-of-date websites. I have not come across another Tripod site since then. Cartwright was a pretty unusual circumstance, and should be used to set policy. Ground Zero (talk) 11:05, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

The tiny motel in Cartwright isn't the only business to have outdated information on the web. They're plentiful. I only mentioned Cartwright as it was a particularly blatant example and I know some of the info on that site is wrong (the Eagle River CU branch does not exist, as it's not in the list of branches on the credit union's site, but the motel lists it as available). I don't know how much of the info is wrong. The only conditions under which today's date should be inserted as lastedit=... ("mark as up to date") is if the Wikivoyager is either (a) in the destination city right now to see first-hand, (b) picks up a telephone and verifies this directly with someone at destination, (c) has other current communication (e-mail, carrier pigeon, whatever) to the venue or some source of local info (like a destination marketing organisation or visitor info booth) at destination or (d) is looking at something which was posted today with a clear date - they're still getting online reviews, the food inspector posted this year's results today, they're posting timeline to blog or social media with today's date stamp (on a page they control, the existence of a "facebook unofficial page" is meaningless and useless per-se), they just made the front page of the Cartwright Daily Codswallop (extra! extra! read all about it!) and the article is on the newspaper's website with an actual dateline. Otherwise, outdated info stays around for years online, where it risks being sucked into WV and stamped "current" by well-intentioned armchair Wikivoyageurs. Not helpful. Don't add "lastedit=2024" unless you've verified the info is still valid in 2024.

The timestamp isn't intended to determine when the listing was added to the article. On the article's "view history" page, there's a link "External tools: Search" at the top to do what you're looking for. The lastedit timestamp indicates a Wikivoyageur directly verified the information is still current as of that date. Lose that concept, and the datestamp becomes much less valuable. That's why I think we shouldn't be autopopulating 2024 in this field. K7L (talk) 14:31, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

It is only populated with the current date if and when we checkmark "mark listing as up to date". And when a listing is created from scratch. However, in the latter case it's almost always a) someone who is there / has been there recently b) the owner or someone close to them trying to tout or c) an experienced wikivoyager. In the first two cases, we don't have to worry about the up-to-dateness. In case c we only have to worry about the subset of experienced Wikivoyagers doing armchair research online who find something that is not up to date any more and who do not verify with more than one source. Now of course there is also the unlikely case d) - someone doing armchair research who doesn't know how to remove the "current date" from the field, but really, how likely is that to be a bigger problem than hypothetical malicious editors making stuff up? That said, maybe I should depopulate the "last edit" field when I add the one eat or sleep listing to places in e.g. Switzerland. Even though I think my method of finding them is quite good at catching what might not be up to date. I go to the town tourism site, then see what hotels / restaurants there are, chose one at semi-random (I try to prefer local cuisine) go to the website of the business to fill out the fields, go to a map service to get the coordinates and then hit safe. I really doubt that a listing would be listed in those three and not exist at the time of writing, but other than physically going there, there is probably no way to make sure... Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:51, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

It's not a case of "someone doing armchair research who doesn't know how to remove the 'current date' from the field" but of the date being there as a default on a new listing unless conscious and repeated efforts are made to remove it, manually, every time. This exploits user inattention and laziness - unless the user is ever-vigilant to remove this, they get put in whether the info is fresh today or just the leftovers from a venue's out-of-date website or an outdated secondary source. The default should be to leave lastedit= blank unless the user actively is saying 'yes, I verified this with someone at the destination today'. K7L (talk) 18:31, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

The default is that lastedit is filled in with the current date in one of two cases: The listing is newly created or the listing is updated and the checkmark "mark this listing as up to date" is explicitly set. Your wording implies that it is also changed in other cases. That's not the case. Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:35, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi there guys. I would like to reignite this discussion again on another point of view. I noticed that when editing listing where the date is older, the date does not get updated (see line "762" in this history: https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Yerevan&type=revision&diff=3258608&oldid=3239980).

This is not just bad, because of the inaccurate date. In general old dates like 2015 give the impression to the reader that the listings are out of date, which they not necessarily are. This, in turn, might be bad publicity on the internet if people start thinking that the information on WV is outdated and rather opt for WT or LP. Btw, the latter is often praised with "completely new researched", which , of course, just seems to be good marketing.

So, maybe it would be a good idea to at least remove older lastedit dates, because then it just says "that it is not the newest information but might still be reliable", instead of say "look, this information is from 2015 and two years old, rather go and get an up to date LP".

Ceever (talk) 13:38, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Please stop removing the edit dates while this discussion is on-going. When you update a listing, you have to update the edit manually (type the new date in). It doesn't update automatically. I'd like to know if the information is two years old (i.e., still pretty relevant, or seven years old (probably not useful at all), so yes, I think an edit date of 2015 is useful, and fair to the reader, so they don't go expecting the prices to be the same. LP tells you when the book was published, but not when the info was collected. We win by being more transparent. Ground Zero (talk) 13:50, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

In the listing editor? There's a check box "mark as up-to-date". Checking that inserts today's date, unchecking this leaves the original information. Unfortunately, two options are missing:

• There's no way to tell the listing editor to blank the field. If someone's bringing in new info from a secondary source or from a venue website, they might not know when the upstream source was last updated. In that case, leaving the date blank is best.
• There's no way to tell the listing editor to leave "lastedit" blank when creating a new listing. The "mark as up-to-date" box is gone.

I run into this constantly when I find some small town which has no article at all, construct something from online sources and need to leave "lastedit" blank on everything as I don't have any info on when those upstream sources were last updated. Usually, I just edit the page manually (without the listing editor) and remove "lastedit=" from each newly-created listing. K7L (talk) 13:56, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but regarding the older dates, this does not look like a consensus to me. @Ground Zero, stop playing police if there is no law here. More importantly, if there is a bug such that the update of lastedit to the current date does not work, I have even more reason to remove such confusing information. Ceever (talk) 16:36, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

The lastedit function was added as a result of consensus. It is clear that you don't like it, but that doesn't mean you get to remove it from listings. Furthermore, there is no support for your campaign to remove it. The lastedit function remains a part of our listings, so your claim that "there is no law" is invalid. Further, there is no bug, as you call it. The edit date is auto-populated when the listing is createdted, and then must be manually updated if the listing info is updated. As the discussion shows, there will be lots of cases where auto-updating would be the wrong thing to do (e.g., someone fixing phone number or time or currency formats, or removing touting). Unless someone can devise programming that can determine what kind of edit it is, there is no bug. Ground Zero (talk) 02:20, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Ok, agreed. Ceever (talk) 12:17, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

I would prefer that people don't remove the last-edit dates. If you think it's embarrassing to tell readers that a listing hasn't been verified for two years, then it would be more appropriate to request that the template not display that information to readers, than to remove it. Removing it means that editors don't know which listings are in the most urgent need of review.

Also, updating the lastedit parameter works perfectly in my experience. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:53, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

I like to see the last edit dates. At the moment we don't have any really out of date ones here, as we have only been adding dates for a couple of years. There may come a point in future when we want to hide the last edit dates from readers who are not logged in, but I think that is some time away. I do sometimes find it irritating that last edit is added if I convert a text paragraph to a listing, but the date can easily be deleted in this case. If I add somewhere new, I will usually be fairly sure that the place was still going quite recently (e.g. an online review 2 months ago, or a hotel offering an online booking for next month). AlasdairW (talk) 22:16, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree, I do think we should not remove old dates from the listings. This is very valuable information to the traveler. If I'd see a listing with a date of 2013, then I'd go research online more on it before attempting to visit the place. Also when I go through articles, I will sometimes check those listings with no date/an old date and update whatever needs to be updated, so I think this information is also very valuable as an editor, just to see which listings probably need checking whether they are still up to date or whether they even still exist. However, I agree, it is an issue if the field gets autopopulated when creating a new listing, this should definitely be changed and only be added as a conscious choice. Drat70 (talk) 01:02, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Is it possible that some here are talking at cross purposes due to misunderstanding one another? Hobbitschuster (talk) 03:42, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Collaboration of the month and phone numbers

Swept in from the pub

Having had the same collaboration of the month since September 2014 I think it is time for a new one. I would like to propose that we complete cleaning up phone numbers on the site. After 4 years of work by a small number of dedicated editors we have Category:Listing with phone missing country code down to just over 200 and Category:Listing with phone format issue down to 8 from what was originally in the thousands of pages. The bot is no longer a productive tool for what remains so this will be a manual task, but I think with a little extra help a very achievable one. Should with make this Collaboration of the month for August (and September if needed)?. --Traveler100 (talk) 08:21, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm fully in support of this telephone number initiative, but I doubt that naming it CotM would draw any interest to it that it wouldn't have accrued otherwise. Frankly, I honestly don't know why we haven't killed CotM yet. The fact that we have a supposedly monthly feature that hasn't been updated since 2014 is an embarrassment to our site. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:54, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Andre. We have enough trouble maintaing Destinations of the Month. Let's focus on that page. Colloborations can be managed through the pub. Ground Zero (talk) 17:55, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

You are both probably right, lets just remove CotM from the main page. --Traveler100 (talk) 20:56, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I have looked a couple of pages on the list, and I think that quite a few of these numbers are ones which won't work from outside the country, e.g. the two on Pyeongchang 2018 or Melbourne/Inner north. Maybe we should add another keyword to list of descriptions which result in the number being ignored: "domestic" or something similar. AlasdairW (talk) 22:21, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Great Work, and I have been advocating for this since 2004 Wikivoyage_talk:Phone_numbers. A key for for local numbers is a good idea. And it could be used to show a diffent icon so WV users know which ones to use from outside the country. I also think we should have a keywork for toll free number, which also normally do not work internationally. Eg North American 800 numbers can be said to have a +1 prefix, but does not really work outside North America. Elgaard (talk) 23:30, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I have added the option to add after a number (in country only) , this will remove the country code check. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:52, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Have changed the collaboration of the month. If it works and other suggestions come forward later we can re-energies this, otherwise after a couple of months if little action, suggest removing the Cotm from the main page. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:54, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

A possible future collaboration, in a similar vein, would be fixing dead links: Category:Articles with dead external links. I've been fixing a lot of them, but often I come across one where I can't figure out if the POI still exists or not or where all the information online is in a language I can't read, so help from people with more local knowledge would be great. —Granger (talk · contribs) 10:54, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Great job by all involved, first time on the site, no phone format or country code error checks!!! --Traveler100 (talk) 18:37, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, well done everyone. And I agree with Mx. Granger on fixing the dead external links. But it will definitely take more than one month to clean the category (still over 5000 articles with dead external links). Perhaps CotM can alternate between a maintenance category and improving articles/content every month? Gizza ^(roam) 22:23, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I like that idea. So next month would be an articles/content month. —Granger (talk · contribs) 03:26, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Just throwing a suggestion out there. How about Chennai, this is the largest city article that is at usable status. Plenty of listings to be verified, expanded or deleted. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:08, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. For anyone who is interested, there are now four nominations at Wikivoyage:Collaboration of the month#Unscheduled nominations. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:08, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikivoyage for local

Swept in from the pub

Love the Wikivoyage idea! Great for tourists to get around. Is there a similar project for locals to share tips, tricks and best experiences? --Orschiro (talk) 09:44, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

We certainly appreciate and encourage local knowledge, but keep in mind that the traveler comes first Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:14, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Sure! Is there a sister project for locals? --Orschiro (talk) 15:39, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

There is not, but I am not entirely sure what you think such a project would do / try to accomplish... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:53, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

For instance, a tourist is not interested in where to find local traditional shops that provide general high quality goods or services for the household. Locals, however, are. Hence, sharing best practices and knowledge on good alternatives to the mainstream, essentially. --Orschiro (talk) 17:54, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

This might be what you're looking for (not a sister project but an unaffiliated wiki): https://localwiki.org/ —Granger (talk · contribs) 15:59, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Looks interesting. Would be nice to see this under the Wikimedia umbrella for it to gain critical mass. :-) --Orschiro (talk) 17:54, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Since the four ways that you might be looking for that I can think of haven't been mentioned yet, I think I shall:

1. We have some sort of a project for locals to help travellers visiting the place they live, or regions they know a lot about in general. Have a look at Wikivoyage:Docents for that.
2. Aside from that, no-one is stopping you from working out some more in-depth travel guides in your own userspace.
3. Furthermore, we are writing a travel guide on this project, and we want to tell our readers all about their destination of choice. Adding some quirky facts or trivia about the destinations you know a lot about helps keeping hold of their attention, so feel free to plunge forward.
4. Lastly, and I am not too sure about this one myself, Trip reports might be an option to write, albeit one from a local's point of view. There aren't any of these reports yet, and I am not sure if this is a concept that was mocked up and then abandoned or something scrapped all-together.

-- Wauteurz (talk) 21:43, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! I put myself up as a docent. :-) --Orschiro (talk) 03:54, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

There was a Wikivoyage:My Voyage but I doubt the person originally proposing this is still active. Is the trip reports category part of this? K7L (talk) 11:43, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

What's the idea behind? Don't fully understand the connection to my question. --Orschiro (talk) 13:00, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

@K7L: It seems that the trip reports are related to it, yes. The user responsible for My Voyage seems to not have been contributing to Wikimedia Projects since May of 2016 , so the project has basically stranded, though we might want to bring new life into it if people want it. I'll tag @Nicholasjf21: in case he still checks in every so often. He's most likely the best person to explain the thought behind the project.

@Orschiro: The question K7L asked was directed at me and the category I linked. The idea behind My Voyage for as far as I can see is to give Wikivoyagers the ability to report on their travels and make notes of what they've seen and done, seen as how some of us frequently hop across borders. It is however very much an unfinished and inactive project, so don't bother about it.

-- Wauteurz (talk) 16:53, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

I see, thanks. Still don't see how that fits here. I was asking about a Wikimedia Wiki for locals to share their knowledge with each other. Not tourists, not travelers who want to share their travel experience. :-) --Orschiro (talk) 19:01, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

I more interpreted your original question, Is there a similar project for locals to share tips, tricks and best experiences?, as a project within Wikivoyage. That lead to me bringing up Category:Trip reports as a possible way to for locals to contribute to Wikivoyage, which derailed to K7L bringing up Wikivoyage:My Voyage. The thread got a bit derailed is all.
-- Wauteurz (talk) 09:15, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate your help! Let's leave it here for now and I will see myself how and where to best contribute. :-) --Orschiro (talk) 13:15, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Outline Districts once more

Swept in from the pub

So our list of outline districts has grown to almost 200 again. Now some of them are clearly clerical errors, where a region or city article has been labeled a district by mistake, but some are not and have sat at outline for years. I think there should be zero outline districts, as districtification should only be done and done if it is done in such a way as to produce usable or better district articles. The hurdle, after all, is low. A usable district needs nothing more than one listing each in eat and sleep and should there be no possibility for a listing in either of those categories a good reason and explanation for why the district borders have been drawn thusly (e.g. a district has a lot of sights but no hotels, but there are hotels in another district). We should keep in mind that our districtified cities are among the most high-profile and among those where sub-par quality is the most visible. Now I fear some of those district articles sit unedited, because none of our editors know the cities in question, but if more than half the districts of a city have sat at outline for quite some time, maybe it is time to do something about it, and if that means merging the districts into the city article, so be it. Also, if there are geo-coordinates somewhat plausible district boundaries can be drawn even by those who don't know the place... Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:58, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

In addition to the above, there are several existing distrification schemes that contain holes, overlaps or both. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:07, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't think it's much of a problem if one or two districts are just outlines, but sadly it's not uncommon to see a whole stash of outline articles and a great deal of listings in the main article and every time it's frustrating to see that. Otherwise I completely agree with your points. One good thing is that some of these articles might fulfil usable status already but the editors have forgotten to update the status. And yes, while one likely cannot on one's own write up an article of a place one hasn't been to from scratch to Star, it's definitely not rocket science to (even greatly) improve such an article. I'm more and more tempted to write a w:For Dummies essay about the topic. ϒpsilon (talk) 17:42, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

There are places where what would be an obvious DotM candidate if it were guide is held back because some districts are still at outline. See Talk:Shanghai#Getting_to_guide.3F for one example. The Shanghai district structure already underwent one major revision; see Talk:Shanghai#District_changes.3F for the discussion. The current scheme has mostly one article per official district; see Shanghai#Districts for details.

Should the divisions be revised again? Perhaps consolidate some outline districts? Or is there a way to get those outlines up to spec? Perhaps a collaboration of the month? Pashley (talk) 18:32, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

It may just be my perception, but there seem to be a particular overhang of American cities represented on the "outline districts" list linked above.. Asian cities seem to not do so bad. Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:49, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

The most are in Melbourne. I think that one problem is that a district often has enough See, Eat etc to be worthwhile, but may be lacking in Sleep listings. Often hotels are mostly found in a few districts of a city and may be completely lacking in others. I would prefer that we didn't simply list the only hotel in a district if it is not somewhere that would be worth listing if all the city hotels were together. I have wondered whether we would be better to have City/Sleep and put all the sleep listings (arranged by district) in the one article. This is how paper guidebooks tend to do, and I think is better for readers who may not be too fussy about the exact district that they stay in. AlasdairW (talk) 22:37, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Technical question

Swept in from the pub

The admins of the website "The Israel Travel and Bicycle Maps Website" (http://israelhiking.osm.org.il/), whom specialize in developing and sharing different open source maps in Hebrew which are presented as different layers above the original map layer from OSM, have experessed interested creating a map layer based on all the listings of the Hebrew Wikivoyage (they already have a map layer one can use to visually see wherever across the globe places exist which already have articles about them at the Hebrew Wikipedia).

They haven't tried to create this map layer yet, but as far as I understand it , this might be difficult to do since, unlike Wikipedia, where individual articles have a geo location... with Wikivoyage (although we have geo locations for individual articles, that are mostly about bigger regions) they are probably mostly interested in getting the geo locations of the listings (See, Do, Buy, Eat, Drink, Sleep), which as far as I understand are mostly stored within thousands of different articles.

Is there any way they would be able to access one local Wikivoyage file which contains all the geo locations of all the Hebvoy lightnings? or is there any other technical way they would be able to use this info in order to produce a layer with all the Hebvoy listings ? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:04, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

@ויקיג'אנקי: I'm confused: Why would a single geo coordinate be easier to scrape than the structured listings in all our individual {{See}} and {{Do}} templates? Can you point us to any of their conversations? Since a lot of Israelis know English, I imagine that we could talk with them about it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:19, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

I have just invited their developers to participate in this discussion. I guess what I am asking, what would be the easiest way to produce a map layer that would have all the Hebvoy listings that have coordinates? (I assume that there is one main file generated monthly by the Wikimedia Foundation, which contains basically all this info, which they would be able to work with.... right?) ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:28, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf:Our goal is to show individual "See" and "Do" POIs on the map with links to the appropriate place in the relevant Wikivoyage article.
As far as I understand, there is an API for geo-searching articles (for example ). There is also an API for POIs, such as "See" and "Do", on a page-by-page bases (for example ). The API also allows combining the two queries, using one as a pageids generator for the other . In any case, the geo-search is limited to a 10000 meter radius.
Alternatively, the global list of Wikivoyage articles is available from Wikimadia Toolforge. When using either the API or the Toolforge approaches, the client does not directly scrape Wikivoyage.
My question: Is there a way to get all POIs in an area larger than a 10000 meter radius, such as all of Israel? 5.29.181.199 15:58, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

@5.29.181.199, ויקיג'אנקי: Hm. I'm actually not sure. The best bet I would have is generating a list of individual articles from Category:Israel and then combining data from that. The best I can do is @Pigsonthewing:, whom I have known to make some useful tools in the past and to post on phabricator: or maybe at mw:Maps. Have you tried any of those options yet? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:26, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf, Pigsonthewing: I could only find where bug reports for WikiMedia-API can be posted. Is there a place to post questions about the API? For example, using Category:Israel to find all applicable WikiVoyage articles is a great idea. It seems to require some coding on the client side as each API call lists just one level of sub-categories in the category hierarchy. I would like to ask the API experts if the tree traversal can be done on the server side. 5.29.181.199 07:53, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

@5.29.181.199: I would think that between mw:Project:Current issues, mw:Maps, and mw:Project:Support desk, someone could give an intelligent answer to this. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:52, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

It seems to me that the easiest way to do this might be to query Wikidata instead of Wikivoyage. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:55, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

@5.29.181.199: Zeev, in order for you to be able to use ALL of the Destination + Itinerary articles on the Hebrew Wikivoyage (instead of only using Destination + Itinerary articles that are about locations in Israel, I created the following category on the Hebrew Wikivoyage, which I am hoping would be of use to you for this purpose. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 20:15, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your help! I've created a GitHub issue for adding a WikiVoyage overlay to the map, in case you want to follow the progress. 5.29.181.199 21:17, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Displaying currency symbols

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In the discussion about the symbol for the Bangladeshi taka, we found there are sometimes problems displaying "৳", so instead we're using "Tk", which is also commonly used in the country. In a similar discussion about the Armenian dram, it seems that "Դ" is commonly used. Are there any problems with displaying it? If so, it may be better to spell it out as "dram", but it would be best if we could use the symbol that travellers will see in the country. @Ceever: @LtPowers: @Hobbitschuster: Ground Zero (talk)

Well in the above text I am not having display problems (Ubuntu, Firefox) Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:52, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

I do not see and display problems either. Does this display - ৳ - also show a problem? Or how about using {{BDT|2}} to get Tk2--Traveler100 (talk) 21:37, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

The symbol shows up fine with Google Chrome on Windows 7 as well. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:54, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I suppose using the template is safer than using the character directly. It gives those without the character in their font the possibility to hover to see the Tk "title". If this is a common problem we still leave some readers (who do not hover) confused. --LPfi (talk) 15:46, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Since our correspondent on the ground in Bangladesh says that "Tk" is also commonly used, it would be easier to stick with that. Random contributors are unlikely to use the template. As for the Armenian dram, if there are no objections, we can start using the "Դ" symbol. Ground Zero (talk) 15:55, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Could swap the display round to show Tk and on mouse over Դ. --Traveler100 (talk) 15:56, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't follow. We're talking about Bangladeshi Taka (Tk) and Armenian dram (Դ) as two different issues. One taka = 5.92 dram, which is probably not useful information, but I'll mention it anyway. Ground Zero (talk) 18:04, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

I suppose what was meant was swapping "৳" and "Tk", so that Tk was showed by default and "৳" as when hovering (it is the other way round now in the template). --LPfi (talk) 19:09, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

The display issues are likely caused by not having the relevant character-set installed in the user's browser, rather than anything happening on Wikivoyage. That is, of course, outside our control. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:59, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes. The question is whether we want to use characters that are missing from the (default) fonts of many users. I think we should make sure the pages show in a somewhat sensible way regardless of what fonts people use, and in a good way for all common configurations. --LPfi (talk) 10:36, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

That's why I continue to support restricting graphic currency symbols to just the most common (probably Dollar, Pound, Euro, Yen, and maybe Yuan). Powers ^(talk) 01:21, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

How bureaucratic do we want to sound?

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Have a look at these edits to Spain. They seem to violate our WV:Tone by being too bureaucratic sounding. On the other hand, we may want to be as accurate as we can on legal matters... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:14, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

I think the earlier text was about enough, although we could warn about carrying personal use amounts, and update the fines. Those who want to "facilitate consumption of drugs" should seek advice elsewhere, so legalese about that is unnecessary. I also think this is a matter where we do not want to sound accurate: those who want to stretch the limits need better advice than what we can give. --LPfi (talk) 17:56, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure the new edit added anything that was really needed, but certainly there was nothing wrong with it. While we don't want to sound bureaucratic, the "tone" is probably more related to he fun parts of traveling. The law is bureaucratic and talking about it in this way is probably for the best. --Willthewanderer (talk) 22:12, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

When I compare the two versions, the change that stands out to me is all about content: "possession and consumption of illegal drugs at private places is not prosecuted" vs "These rules are actively enforced." Before worrying about the tone, I think it is important to figure out the real risk of criminal charges. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

In fact, the rules in the two versions seem to be the same: the rules that are going to be enforced in the latter version are about public places, not the private places where the former one says you are safe. As I read them, both say private consumption in private places is OK, while possession and use in public is not, and severely punished when not about small quantities and personal use. I do not know how one is supposed to get the drugs for personal use safely to the private place were one is going to consume them, but I do not think that is our problem. --LPfi (talk) 15:37, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

We could vary tone depending on context; Stay Safe and Stay Healthy sections should use serious wording, as well as topics such as Holocaust remembrance. More enjoyable topics such as shopping and nightlife can be described more casually. /Yvwv (talk) 03:41, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Why hasn't the Wikivoyage Pageview statistics Page been updated since July 23?

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? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:29, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

@ויקיג'אנקי: Have you checked with the users at https://stats.wikimedia.org/#fragment-15? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:34, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: which users exactly? (link didn't properly work). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:34, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

@ויקיג'אנקי:Sorry, it's not on that page: Author:Erik Zachte, ezachte@### (no spam: ### = wikimedia.org) —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:47, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I think it's some kind of stats database problem. They're working on it. See w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Pagecounts-ez dataset hasn't generated since JUL-23 if you're interested in this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:23, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Russian or Ukrainian

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Is anyone familiar with these languages? These edits by a new editor appear to me to be converting the translations from the Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic alphabet from from Russian to Ukrainian. Is this an appropriate change for a city in eastern Ukraine? Isn't Russian the principal language there? Perhaps someone more familiar with the region could weigh in. Ground Zero (talk) 02:46, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

It is not an easy question. Whereas Russian is the main spoken language in this area, Ukraininan is the only official language, and its usage has been enforced recently. Ideally, both Russian and Ukrainian translations should be kept, but this renders the listings too long in general. --Alexander (talk) 07:15, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I think that as the traveller comes first, the solution of keeping the Russian and adding Ukrainian is the best one, regardless of length, and it's the one I suggested at User talk:Dƶoxar. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:39, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Air Berlin filing for bankruptcy

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So Air Berlin has had economical problems for a while now and it also used to have Hartmut Mehdorn as a CEO, which usually doesn't end well, but a few days ago it finally filed for bankruptcy. Apparently the German federal government (there is a federal election in September) helped out with an emergency loan but it is clear that something will happen with Air Berlin in the foreseeable future. If media reports are to be believed Lufthansa, which already bought up / leased / whatever several of Air Berlin's planes is interested in taking over either the airline as a whole or some of its assets. However despite Lufthansa certainly being a buyer with the necessary liquid assets as well as the necessary expertise, such a takeover would raise very real antitrust issues and the Bundeskartellamt may not approve it. Another potential buyer is Hans Rudolf Wöhrl who has in the past owned several airlines (ironically selling one to Air Berlin) and seems to have specialized in the "buy cheap, own for some time, sell high" model but it is unclear whether he has deep enough pockets and some have labeled his attempt to take over the airline a "PR stunt". Nationalization - even temporary - seems out of the question despite the Feds already being on the hook for the money they just loaned Air Berlin, but I think we should certainly keep an eye on the situation, not least because several articles for Germany still portray Air Berlin as a bigger airline than it currently is - its domestic network for one is much smaller than just two or three years ago. Hobbitschuster (talk) 12:08, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Please don't link to "London" or "New York City" when you are talking about flights and actually mean airports

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I have seen it very often in "by plane" sections or even airport articles that it says "there are flights from London" or something of the sorts, without mentioning which airport. Sorry, but this is anything but helpful. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:36, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

It is going to be tough to ask that of new contributors. Even if we do link to the city directly, it isn't the worst thing surely? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:00, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Most of those things are not done by new editors, but rather legacy edits that haven't been changed in years. At any rate, many (though by no means all) WP articles on airports contain a list of flights to/from them. Should we copy them? Is there a way to have them stored in Wikidata? Should we simply point to WP for those and not list a single flight connection ourselves? Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:52, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but I think that saying that "there are flights from London" is 98% helpful. I think that we can assume that readers will book a flight, not head straight to the airport. Some cities are served by 2 or more of the 5 London airports, but this is a detail that doesn't matter at the initial planning stage. It is much more useful to say which railway station(s) have trains from London, as it is quite practical to go to the station and buy a ticket minutes before getting on the train (not good value for money for long journeys). AlasdairW (talk) 23:12, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Well when I book a flight I tend to enter various IATA codes into a search engine. There are of course metropolitan IATA codes, but not all search engines know them. What is more fundamentally the issue here however is that we have articles on a bunch of airports, so why not link to them where we are clearly talking about Luton Airport or Gatwick Airport or Heathrow Airport and not London as a city? And besides that, those lists are, I fear, among the most outdated parts of our site. I don't have a good answer as to how to avoid their being outdated, but I fail to see how a list of questionable up-to-date ness including gems like "There are flights to London with Intersky starting in 1979" (exaggerating slightly for comedic effect) help either us as a site or our readers. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:31, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Should we create an article for Jeju airport?

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Jeju airport has passenger numbers above 25 000 000 as of 2015 and likely those are even higher for 2016 and will rise in the future. It's true, most of those are domestic travelers, but it is thus bigger in terms of passenger traffic than Gimhae Airport and several other airports on which we have articles. Should we thus create an article? Hobbitschuster (talk) 17:04, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I do not know if it rates an article of its own, will happily leave that decision to people who know the region and/or are working on the Wikivoyage:Airport Expedition. However, it seems worth mentioning that if there is no separate article immediately, we should create a redirect as I did for Mactan-Cebu International Airport. Other articles can then link to the redirect & will not need changes if the redirect is later replaced by a full article. Pashley (talk) 17:37, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Like many places in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, virtually all flights come and go from the north and it's by no means a transit airport but more of "the end of the line" serving people going to and from Jeju. So no, I don't think it should get an article on its own. Andrew probably agrees. ϒpsilon (talk) 17:47, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

On that note: Link to the redirect itself, do not bypass the redirect and link directly to the target! A lot of people (both on this wiki and others) seem to be in the habit of "fixing" links to redirects by having them point directly to the target. But if a redirect is changed into an article, or re-targeted somewhere else, then the "fixed" links are no longer pointing where they should, and that just creates a huge mess. See w:wp:Do not fix links to redirects that are not broken for more information But in short: Links to redirects are (usually) not broken and should not be "fixed". Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 23:50, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

If the airport guide were simply merged into the Gimhae guide, the content about the airport would overwhelm the city guide. For a merge to work: A lot of the the airport content would have to be cut. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 23:50, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

See also Wikivoyage_talk:Airport_Expedition#Redirects.3F. Probably any further discussion of redirection should go there while this section deals with Jeju. Pashley (talk) 00:48, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I sort of agree with ϒpsilon . Apparently the air corridor between Jeju and Seoul is the busiest in the world, but it is rarely a place of transit. There has been a great increase in the amount of traffic from China in recent years (which has caused some issues for the airport), but again as an end destination. I'm largely indifferent to creating an article about it, but would nudge towards 'no' just on the transit basis Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:58, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Well apparently there are currently plans for a second airport on the island of Jeju to take over most flights of the existing Jeju airport with the existing airport staying open. Unless I am missing something here, that would in effect mean, that whoever decides on stuff like this is basically betting on traffic to Jeju island overall more than doubling (If the new airport is to be larger in capacity and the existing airport is to keep its size, everything else would lead to unused capacity, raising the question why the new airport should be built to such a size in the first place). Yet they say an undersea tunnel would "not be economically viable" (i.e. benefit cost ratio under 1). How people can draw such contradictory conclusions at the same time shall remain their secret, as I simply do not understand it. Anyway, I think we should monitor the situation and maybe create an article on the new airport if/when it takes over most flights and/or proves sufficiently "complicated". The WP articles for the existing airport don't contain much more information than the flights that exist there... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:50, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Could someone explain why Jeju gets so much traffic? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:56, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Tourism, it would appear. Mallorca has similar numbers though not as steep a growth curve Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:44, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing : South Korea was a military dictatorship until the 80's, and its citizens were only allowed passports by special permission. Hence Jeju became the only possible holiday destination for millions of Koreans, and the infrastructure on the island was built almost exclusively to cater to tourism. More recently Chinese have discovered Jeju as being far less polluted than east coast cities and a short flight away, hence an additional growth in tourism. It also helps that the island is genuinely beautiful. Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:43, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Bulgaria

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I'm in Bulgaria at the moment and and a lot of the wiki pages are half filled or oddly arranged. While I will do my best to add a bit to some of the articles, there is a lot to be done.

Specifically I would like to add Rila monastery as it's own destination I would justify this based on the importance of the site, the number of visitors is receives, the fact the monastery has on-site accommodation and is reasonably separate from Rila township and surrounds.

--Willthewanderer (talk) 12:16, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Right now: Rila Monastery redirects Bulgarian Shopluk, but Rila Monestary redirects to Bulgarian mountains. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 12:31, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Also, I'm thinking maybe it would be best to just start an article on the town of Rila and make the monastery a section of "See". If the section ends up overwhelming the article and detracting from other significant content, we can consider separating it into its own article later. Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:36, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

The monastery already has a section at Bulgarian mountains#See. I suppose that could be moved to a "Rila" article. But I'm inclined to agree: Best for the Monastery to stay a section of another article, until it starts overwhelming that article. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 13:18, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Please see wiaa. Individual attractions almost never get their own articles. ϒpsilon (talk) 13:23, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

There are some exceptions, though. If the monastery is huge and complex and there are loads of other attractions in Rila, it could merit its own article. See, for example, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:00, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Yup, which is why I wrote almost never. :) But in that case it should be really big and complex (the Forbidden City also has an article). ϒpsilon (talk) 20:09, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Question about Template:Marker

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I'm finally getting around to adding Wikipedia links to listings in Buffalo and its district articles. Question: is there a "wikipedia=" argument for Template:Marker that's analogous to the one for Template:Listing? If not, can there be one? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:38, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't think there is. But I'd like there to be. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:51, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Why not use a listing, with or without * ? --Traveler100 (talk) 20:54, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

If you use a listing without a * in a normal paragraph, it interrupts the flow of the text with the grey "edit" link and possibly a "last edited date" at the end of the listing, and a dot right after the listing name. I thought that this is one of the main purposes of a marker (as stated in the documentation: "... is typically used in-line in the prose of articles." Having a "wikipedia" and "wikidata" argument with the marker would make sense and the two resulting symbols won't be as interruptive as the above mentioned content. Xsobev (talk) 21:21, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

GPX file flawed by description encoding

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Can someone point me to the right direction here. I noticed that the downloadable GPX files that cover the GPS coordinates of each article have the issue that the description text sometimes is not proper XML style, containing things like "&" or "<br>" which messes up its conformity and breaks functionality with OSMand (for example).

Where would I address this issue?

Ceever (talk) 09:11, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Spam filter triggered by booking.com

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Im having some problems listing a hostels website as their booking.com page Is this a polciy issue or is it a technical issue?

The small hostel prefers travelers to go through booking.com where their information is writen out, and its the best way of contacting them.

Any guidnce apreciated.

--Willthewanderer (talk) 19:14, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Willthewanderer. It looks like booking.com is being erroneously blocked because there are some longer URLS that include "booking" in them that are on the MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. But never fear! There's also a MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist! I've added hotels.com there. Maybe give this a few minutes, and then see if you can save the small hostel's booking.com site. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:34, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Posting of personal information on user pages

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Are these kinds of contributions OK? Especially the phone numbers in the edit description. If the information on the user page is correct it's apparently a very young contributor as well. Didin't we have a case a month or so ago when some kind of personal information was deleted and hidden? ϒpsilon (talk) 08:36, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Good catch, Ypsi. I've deleted the content in question. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:00, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Improved search in deleted pages archive

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During Wikimedia Hackathon 2016, the Discovery team worked on one of the items on the 2015 community wishlist, namely enabling searching the archive of deleted pages. This feature is now ready for production deployment, and will be enabled on all wikis, except Wikidata.

Right now, the feature is behind a feature flag - to use it on your wiki, please go to the Special:Undelete page, and add &fuzzy=1 to the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=1. Then search for the pages you're interested in. There should be more results than before, due to using ElasticSearch indexing (via the CirrusSearch extension).

We plan to enable this improved search by default on all wikis soon (around August 1, 2017). If you have any objections to this - please raise them with the Discovery team via email or on this announcement's discussion page. Like most Mediawiki configuration parameters, the functionality can be configured per wiki. Once the improved search becomes the default, you can still access the old mode using &fuzzy=0 in the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=0

Please note that since Special:Undelete is an admin-only feature, this search capability is also only accessible to wiki admins.

Thank you! CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Articles needing attention

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Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T170039

I usually tackle every day some of the articles listed under the various error categories (Articles needing attention)

• Category:Pages with script errors

Have noticed in the past few days that 20 or more titles are being listed under this category.

99.9% have no error and to clear the listings from this list I have edited and replaced the article (no changes to article)

• Category:Pages with broken maps

Am noticing recent listings under this category - Appears with use of template mapshape following a template mapframe - The pages themselves appear correctly. To clear those listings from this category I simply added the optional parameter type=geomask to the mapshape template. (New Haven as example) -- Matroc (talk) 02:11, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

The first problem is known since about one month and is connected with the usage of Wikidata. The real cause is up to now unknown. Several causes like Lua, Wikidata Lua interface and parser failures are discussed. At the beginning we thought that this was connected with the change of Lua modules processing Wikidata data. But the errors occur also at other times. Most of these errors cannot be seen maybe because of a new parser run while calling the article. It is correct: the only way now to remove these script errors is to make a so-called null edit. --RolandUnger (talk) 17:15, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Share your thoughts on the draft strategy direction

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• 
• 

At the beginning of this year, we initiated a broad discussion to form a strategic direction that will unite and inspire people across the entire movement. This direction will be the foundation on which we will build clear plans and set priorities. More than 80 communities and groups have discussed and gave feedback on-wiki, in person, virtually, and through private surveys. We researched readers and consulted more than 150 experts. We looked at future trends that will affect our mission, and gathered feedback from partners and donors.

In July, a group of community volunteers and representatives from the strategy team took on a task of synthesizing this feedback into an early version of the strategic direction that the broader movement can review and discuss.

The first draft is ready. Please read, share, and discuss on the talk page. Based on your feedback, the drafting group will refine and finalize this direction through August.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:11, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Listing editor for mobile view

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Today I wrote a letter to Andyrom75. But I will call your attention to this problem, too.

Now about 50% of all accesses to Wikivoyage are done with mobile devices. But nobody can use the Listing editor.

The main reason is simple: Two necessary libraries are missing: jquery.ui.dialog and jquery.ui.autocomplete. Within the wikis, we cannot do anything to activate them.

There are three alternatives:

1. Rewriting the complete editor with OOUI libraries. This means a really big effort.
2. Rewriting the jquery libraries. This means a big effort, too. With a medium effort I could rewrite jquery.ui.dialog, but rewriting jquery.ui.autocomplete is really difficult.
3. Trying to add both libraries, jquery.ui.dialog and jquery.ui.autocomplete in the Resource Loader package [By the way, gadgets are not working in mobile view, too]. These libraries are part of the desktop package but not of the mobile package. One cause of doing this is to reduce the traffic, on the other side both libraries are deprecated. We had to open a task at the Phabricator to let add both libraries to the mobile package. To do this we need a strong backing by the communities.

Jon Robson from WMF told me that /resources/Resources.php is to be adapted in the following manner:

return [
         'group' => 'jquery.ui',
     ],
     'jquery.ui.dialog' => [
+        'targets' => [ 'desktop', 'mobile' ],
         'scripts' => 'resources/lib/jquery.ui/jquery.ui.dialog.js',
         'dependencies' => [
             'jquery.ui.core',

The 'mobile' target is now missing.

Do you think that the Wikivoyage communities are willing to give us this backing for a task at Phabricator?

-- RolandUnger (talk) 06:35, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

I for one would love the listing editor to be available on mobile. But all that technical stuff went right over my head... Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:50, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Also, while not connected to this on mobile, and it may not be the right place for asking this, would it be possible to be able to add "fax" to the desktop listings editor? For me anyway, I can only add a fax number if I am editing an existing listing, and there is already a fax number provided. But yes, a mobile listings editor would be great!  Seagull123  Φ  18:00, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Fax is a default blank field if you use the wikitext editor. However as I last sent a fax more than 5 years ago, I doubt that there is much demand for it on the listings editor. I was beginning to think that it was about time to remove all fax numbers from the site, as they just look out of date. How many faxes have you sent in the last year? AlasdairW (talk) 22:41, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

I've sent zero faxes in the last year. The last was probably about five years ago. I suspect that use might vary regionally, though, so perhaps it's still useful? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:50, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm seeing them still in use in certain narrow contexts, such as doctor's and solicitor's offices – possibly in the mistaken belief that a fax represents a tangible, scanned document of some legal weight. Nonetheless, actual fax machines (as opposed to fax modems) are dying due to widespread abuse to transmit unsolicited advertisements, which the victim has to pay to receive and print. Certainly it's a technology that deserved to die a quick, painless death by now (as scan-to-PDF e-mail produces better quality without the need to keep obsolete dial-up modems on-line) but it seems instead to be dying a very slow, very painful death. If a venue lists a fax number, I shall include it in the {{listing}}, but for most non-hotel travel listings it'd be rare to need to send fax to these venues. K7L (talk) 04:42, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I think that mobile users even more than desktop users would like to have them on their mobile devices. When you are at a place that is not listed, it would be very helpfull to have a dialog to add such a place specially for inexperienced contributers. It might be helpfull too to have a button in that dialog for "current GPS position". --FredTC (talk) 11:08, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Roland, we can surely back this proposal, but how? --Alexander (talk) 15:04, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Does such a tool/bot exist or can it be created?

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For the purpose of exporting+translating A LOT of content from the English Wikivoyage to the Hebrew Wikivoyage by myself, I need a simple tool/bot which would enable me, by a push of a button, to completely erase/clean the content that currently exists in 6 different parameters in all of the Listing templates on any given page I will import/translate from the English Wikivoyage to the Hebrew Wikivoyage (the removal of the content would of course be either done in my userspace on the English Wikivoyage or on my userspace on the Hebrew Wikivoyage... and not on any articles in the English Wikivoyage main space).

Having such a tool/bot would save me A LOT of time, as it would help me significantly speed up the process of exporting/translating Listings to the Hebrew Wikivoyage (at this point I import+translate all the listings manually, which means that I have to spend a lot of time manually removing the content from the following 6 parameters - Hours, Price, Content, Checkin, Checkout, Directions in all the listings I translate (I have chosen to remove the content in those specific parameters at this stage mainly because it takes a lot more time to translate the content for those specific parameters, and therefore, in order for me to be capable of importing/translating many prominent listings by myself, this is necessary... otherwise it would take me forever to import/translate all the most prominent listings in around 1,500 - 2,000 of the most sought after articles).

Do any of you know, by any chance, if such a tool/bot exists in mediawiki/Wikivoyage, if such a feature exists in any specific external software, or can if such a tool/bot can be created for this purpose? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:51, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

We'd normally do something like this with a semi-automated script, rather than a bot. I don't think any such script exists, but I believe that Wikivoyage:AutoWikiBrowser could handle it.

However: Hours, price, checkin, and checkout seem to contain pretty standardized content (for most of the entries). I wonder whether we could get a script that translated the simpler ones for you? Something like "11AM" could be converted into the Hebrew equivalent through a search and replace mechanism. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:43, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't know if this is helpful, but when I translate articles from other languages in my user space I use the "Search and replace" function to change parameter names. Open "Advanced" in the editing window and click on the lone icon with a magnifying glass, paper and pen to the far right. Enter what you want to replace in the upper box and what you want to replace it with in the lower, click replace all and proceed with the next thing you wish to replace. Click save when you're ready (or make intermediate saves every now and then) example. Perhaps this could, to some extent, be used for what you need to do. --ϒpsilon (talk) 16:29, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing and ϒpsilon - I am already using a similar "find and replace" script on the Hebrew Wikivoyage (it was initially created for the Hebrew Wikipedia to fix all the common spelling mistakes) to translate all the templates + common parameters (and other common words/phrases) from English to Hebrew in one click of a button. In the last 4 months I have probably managed to import the basic "raw" listings, with the help of that script, of around 140 articles. (I manage to do around 1 or 2 articles per day usually). I am aiming to do this for around 1,500 articles, so I need a faster way to do it.

WhatamIdoing - trust me, most of the content in Hours, Price, Content, Checkin, Checkout, Directions varies in style and content, and therefore there is no reliable way to quickly translate the content for those parameters in one process (I will translate them all one-by-one in the future, once I finish importing all the basic "raw" listings.

Thanks for the tip... I'll try AutoWikiBrowser (can anyone confirm if it is indeed capable of automatically cleaning the content from certain parameters with a push of a button?). Do you by any chance know any specific user/s that might be able to create such a semi-automated script which would be used for this purpose?

ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:27, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

You can see a good example here of the extensive amount of content which I have to remove manually when cleaning the content from the parameters Hours, Price, Content, Checkin, Checkout, Directions - from a 98,076 BYTES article to a 60,892 BYTES article. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:41, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

This is the article I am working on today... so I still plan to translate all the names of the places in all the listings before the day is over (from English to Hebrew). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:44, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Impressive working, I must say! If all else fails, some text editors (for programmers?) might allow more advanced searching and replacing text, say between every "checkin=" and following "|". ϒpsilon (talk) 18:26, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Which specific text editor has such a feature? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:53, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I've no idea, but as replacing parameters is probably something many programmers (among others) need to do on a daily basis, I'd imagine a functionality like this has to be present in some text editors (tried to google it but didn't found anything). ϒpsilon (talk) 19:20, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

vi and emacs are the classic ones in Unix, and yes, they do regular expressions. Then there are sed & al, which are made for automated edits. At least emacs has keyboard macros (in addition to more advanced programmable ones; keyboard macros seem to suffice for this task). Learning one of these editors well does take some time, so not necessarily worth the effort for one project, but they are really efficient when you know how to use them. Regular expressions are a concept on its own, usable in many contexts. --LPfi (talk) 21:00, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

@ויקיג'אנקי: I know that this can be done with regular expressions but I'm pretty ignorant of how that works. I've fiddled around with them in AWB before but only with help. I imagine that someone can help you there. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:07, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

An alternative might be to comment out the text that you don't want. You could use search and replace to change hours= to hours=<!-- and }} to -->}} , or do this on a entry by entry basis and change some of the | to -->| . I also recommend looking into good text editors that let you record macros - I use pspad - a macro can be used to insert a comment start after hours= and then jump to the end of the line and insert a comment end. You may also be able to do this with a word processor Word or Libre Office etc. AlasdairW (talk) 20:47, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

On de-WV they talk a lot about Wikidata integration of their listings (presumably creating a Wikidata field for the opening hours and so on) but don't ask me about technological details... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:20, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Swept in from the pub

Hi, everyone. One topic that comes up a lot in discussions with new users is edit summaries (namely, the need to post one to credit quoted material from Wikipedia or to explain a non-obvious deletion). However, I don't know of any link I can include to a page or section of a page that explains what an edit summary is or how and when to write one. Is there anyplace that currently deals with edit summaries? If not, we should create such a page or section. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:04, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

There is a short description on Wikivoyage:How to edit a page. It should be changed to reflect current (best) practices. I added a section on attribution with permanent links. --LPfi (talk) 19:28, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

w:Help:Edit summary has some useful content, although it doesn't mention using the summary for attribution. I think that this wikipedia article could usefully be used as a starting point for our own. AlasdairW (talk) 20:56, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

LPfi, thanks for helping with that. AlasdairW, my feeling is that w:Help:Edit summary is way too long for our purposes, though whatever truly useful content we can glean from it is fine, because why reinvent the wheel? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:11, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Requests (brought from Wikimania)

Swept in from the pub

Hi there. I've just arrived back home from Montreal. Had some nice talks and meetings. One big fan (his whole family) of Wikivoyage visited me at the community village. People like the listing and map features as well. Congratulations to all of you guys. I have three short points to be discussed here in your community. Got two messages on the poster:

• Please add more links to Wikipedia
• Please add information about accessibility to your listings as well as information for all disabled people (e. g. blind and deaf travellers)

I talked with Ziko about travelling information for kids on wikivoyage. It's missing on almost every article (at least on WV/de as far as i know). -- DerFussi 11:20, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

I must ask what is meant with "more links to Wikipedia"? We have a link in the sidebar for every article where a WP article exists. But as for inline links our policy on Wikivoyage:Links to Wikipedia is unfortunately rather strict and there'd have to be a consensus to change it, which has been elusive in the past. Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:01, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

As for accessibility, you are of course right, but I fear this just reflects the demographics of our userbase... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:02, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

As for children, we have Travelling with children and the likes of Venice with children, but I think having a "for children" subsection in the see or do sections might be better for medium size destinations than dedicated x with children articles... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:03, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

A "for children" subsection to See and Do would work for attractions directed towards children, but also e.g. many ordinary museums do a good job, and moving those to a separate children's section is wrong. A "one floor is planned for children, with possibility to e.g. build brick walls and timber houses or equip and ride or drive a full-size wooden horse" would suite, and perhaps "the exhibits are made more lively by a story of a 9-year boy experiencing the places in their heyday", but sometimes it is difficult to describe the place such that parents can deem whether it suites their children, at least without being overly wordy. And then we have all the Cope issues. --LPfi (talk) 15:32, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Most printed travel guides solve this problem by using small icons 'children-friendly'. Alternatively (or additionally), a separate subsection can be created, where children-friendly places are listed (in prose) explaining how they cater to children. --Alexander (talk) 16:20, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

That may be so,but good prose in the content tab should enable all our readers - including those with children of varying age - to make an informed choice as to whether they would like to spend their time (and perhaps money) at a certain place. Hobbitschuster (talk) 17:12, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

People without kids don't need to know details of kid entertainment, and people with kids need a quick overview of 'where can I go with kids'. The solution I menioned will address both aspects, and it proved to be very useful in printed travel guides. On the other hand, cluttering listings with additional specialized information is hardly useful to anyone. --Alexander (talk) 18:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

The needs of a one year old are vastly different from the needs of a teenager. Plus there is stuff that adults enjoy that can be fun for kids (and vice versa). Have a look at the listing for the "phaeno" in our guide on Wolfsburg. Would you rather we segregate it off into a "for kids" section? Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:08, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Science museum is an obvious case. You don't need any description to understand that it will be interesting for kids. I am talking about non-obvious cases. --Alexander (talk) 06:47, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

A long time ago, the Wikivoyagers of that age decided against having a separate section for LGBT travellers on the basis that most of what they are interested in is the same as everybody else, do we identify in the listing if a venue caters specifically to LGBT people. I think this approach works well for child-friendly listings. There are some that will be of no interest to people without children (a playland, for example), but most (parks, museums, etc.) are of interest to those with or without kids. Parents know what to look for when reading travel guides. Ground Zero (talk) 21:38, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

They do not always know what to look for, and that's exactly the point. In a history museum, you never know how academic it is, whether it simply displays objects with long and boring descriptions, or it also features small games and quests where kids receive a list of questions to find answers and "win" a small prize in the end. Technically, such an information can be added to the listing, but it will make the listing longer, while being relevant to a fraction of readers only. In my opinion, it is better to have a 'children-friendly' icon and, if necessary, a separate section saying that museums XX and YY offer games, whereas museum ZZ offers a quest for children. This will save a lot of space and largely improve navigation for a city with 20 or 30 museums, where you have to decide which of them are suitable for kids. --Alexander (talk) 12:12, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

I suppose the optimal solution varies, depending on destination, content and editor. The symbol probably says somebody at the museum actually thought about children, but not much about whether the games/quests/whatever suite my children. Similarly about mentioning what museums have them in a separate section. A sentence or two about what a specific museum does well for them is much better, and I think it is not too much in the listing, and useful to have there if most museums do something well, but in different ways. The academic vs innovative may be of interest also for childless adults. Then of course also mentioning audio guides, accessibility etc. makes it not one or two sentences but perhaps five or more. If we want to cater to different groups we should still afford that. On the other hand, if the city has three or five top sights for children, and many museums that are hyper academic, then a Children subsection might be a better solution. --LPfi (talk) 10:58, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

About the links to Wikipedia and RelatedSites, what do you think about the external links template proposal from Wikivoyage_talk:External_links#Update proposal. --Zerabat (talk) 17:21, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

If "traveling with children" had it's own section, as well as "LGBT" travelers and "travelers with a dissability" a lot of pages might seriously expand in size if we duplicate information in those sections. Maybe it would be simpler to just add (suitable for X) at the end of regular listings, or have some kind of searchable tag? --Willthewanderer (talk) 14:03, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

It's probably more relevant to provide specifics. McDonald's (the fast food chain) would always get tagged as being "suitable for children", but the words "has a playground" are far more informative. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:44, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

What's useful and what's fluff? Every venue wants to claim to be "fun for the whole family", "ideal for business and leisure travellers" and offer "something for everyone". Perhaps the default should be that any venue (except bars, gambling dens, pornography or sex clubs) is presumed to be marketed to all ages and we note just the exceptions – such as the "adults only B&B" or the museum which teaches everything at a "grade one" primary school level. If there are many kids at a location we say so if they are disturbing other guests or if a venue is marketed only to a specific demographic in some non-obvious manner. Do we need to say that North Pole (New York) is demographic-marketed to little kids if the only notable resident of this tiny hamlet is Santa Claus? K7L (talk) 15:03, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikivoyage talk:About#Travel guide showdown has a fairly long discussion about different "special interest" topics. I think that there have been other discussions, but this is probably the longest.

I think the overall conclusion is that if you know something is good/bad for a particular group, then mention that fact in the listing. "Mention" doesn't require being obvious: A quiet restaurant is good for people who are hard of hearing, and a place with a lot of stairs is inaccessible for most wheelchair users, but it's sufficient just to note that the restaurant is quiet or that there are a lot of stairs, without labeling that information as only being relevant to certain categories of travelers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:34, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree with mentioning suitability or otherwise in listings, generally by just stating the facts - hotel has 3 floors with no lift, or has a garden with a swing. However it may be worth having a separate section in the main page of huge cities for children to summarise which museums etc are good for children among the 50 scattered around 10 districts - a "Bring the children" section. It may also be appropriate there to link to any city specific parent websites. AlasdairW (talk) 22:55, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Well Venice with children for one could use some love. What about other ..."with children" articles? Hobbitschuster (talk) 11:51, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Growth of the site

Swept in from the pub

It's my perception that the number of edits on this site has grown quite a lot. A few years ago, it used to be fairly easy for me to patrol the entire site every day. Now, there are so many edits that the result of trying to do this has me, in Emmette Hernandez Coleman's words, "working too hard". (I realize there was a somewhat different context for his comment, but it fits here.) I think that's wonderful and something to celebrate! But what it also means is that anyone wanting to patrol recent changes to articles will now have to either pick some areas to keep track of or do ad hoc work, as the spirit moves them.

So two questions come to my mind: (1) If you're someone who likes to patrol recent changes, do you have a strategy for what subject matter or types of edits you concentrate on? (2) You don't need to be an admin to patrol changes. Do we need more admins, or do we need more people taking it upon themselves to patrol changes? Either way, I think we should remember to thank everyone who does this work recreationally, because it's so important for the quality of the prose on Wikivoyage. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:10, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

I usually just patrol things on my rather large watchlist and/or look at new user contributions. Pashley (talk) 21:33, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

The problem when I patrol recent changes is that I tend to get sidetracked a lot... Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:43, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Not always a problem. I often look at linked article that haven't been edited in some time, start reading, and find problems that had been missed before. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:51, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

I always hide autopatrolled edits (the ones without red !'s next to them). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:01, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

I normally ignore those, except in articles that are particularly interesting to me. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:05, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

I'd be happy to do a bit more, what is the most efficient way of patrolling changes and keeping a sensible watch-list? I'm honestly not sure what I'm getting notifications for at the moment --Willthewanderer (talk) 13:59, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Do you see the small red exclamation points next to some edits in "recent changes"? If not you've not yet been given the status whose name I keep forgetting... If you do see them, you can get rid of them by clicking "mark as patrolled" on the relevant diffs. Only do this of course if you see no problems with the edit in question. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:23, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

There are two statuses, "autopatrolled" means your own edits don't get the ! and "patroller" is the one you keep forgetting. K7L (talk) 16:01, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikivoyage and Wikitravel links to Alexa ranking, which shows that we are slowly closing in on The Other Site. This year they virtually ceased to develop. /Yvwv (talk) 16:08, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

How reliable are Alexa ranks, though? And what do they actually measure? Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:16, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

The rank is based on an estimate of unique users and pageviews. While not exact, it can reveal long-term trends. /Yvwv (talk) 16:23, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Does this mean that search engines are finally beginning to stop penalising us, at least for all the content that originated here in the half-decade since the WT/WV split? I tred Google for "Oregon Trail travel guide" and Oregon Trail here was the featured snippet. K7L (talk) 17:09, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Tangentially, it would be even better if more new editors would stay as regulars. Many new editors make some great edits for a few weeks or months (perhaps writing up one single article from scratch to guide status) and then vanish again.

Concerning patrolling recent edits, when I come to Wikivoyage I always first go to Recent changes to see if something interesting has happened lately out of plain curiosity and I virtually always have Recent changes in another tab, refreshing it every now and then. Nevertheless, unless if it's an article I think seems interesting or probably vandalism (e.g. obscene edit summary or edits by known vandals) I tend to ignore them. I can't remember if I've ever clicked mark as patrolled, but I do remember inadvertently hitting rollback at least on two occasions.

For the other site, do have a look at their recent changes to see how well they are doing. I'd say we don't need to worry about them :). ϒpsilon (talk) 18:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Side question: Is the change in volume at Special:RecentChanges a recent/sudden thing, or has it been getting slowly larger over time?

Also, how many of you are using the Beta Feature "New filters for edit review"? How is it working out for you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Edit stats

Are there up-to-date stats? I've looked at https://stats.wikimedia.org/ but they seem to go only to May 2017, not only for WV, but also WP. Nurg (talk) 10:10, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikitongues

Swept in from the pub

I have talked with a guy from Wikitongues. Maybe it is a useful feature to add their videos to phrasebooks or country articles. This is an example for Texas German -- DerFussi

Is there any content on that site? If so, how does a user find it? There's no obvious way to do so from that page. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:39, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

It sounds from their blurb like their main goal is to help preserve languages that are dying out. For all I know there might be exceptions, but in general such languages will not be of much use to a traveller & will not be for the languages we create phrasebooks for. I do not think we should "add their videos" in the sense of putting copies here. Nor should we add them at Commons; they have a procedure for that & it does not apply to all their material.

But, yes, linking where appropriate would be a good idea. Pashley (talk) 13:53, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Although it is not related to this thread, I have looking around their website and I think that they are hypocrites, because they pretend to "save" the endangered languages of the world, but their website and processes are all in English only. Long live Sheakespeare our Lord. --Zerabat (talk) 22:31, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

@Zerabat: They offer content in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish as well. Don't know what you're talking about. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:47, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Removing redlinks

Swept in from the pub

So I pulled some redlinks from Oita (prefecture) to the talk page and was accused of "trolling behavior" for doing so and it was alleged that there is policy and or consensus to never remove any redlink ever for any reason whatsoever. Is that so? And if so should it be changed? Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:15, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I did not say "for any reason whatsoever", but your reason as you've stated before is that you find them to be ugly/aesthetically unappealing. You've admitted that this is a "pet peeve" of yours before and you have continually been told to leave redlinks or create articles. I don't personally see any need to delete redlinks for legitimate places that should/could have articles. But let's have the discussion again and see what people say this time. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 15:40, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

In many cases a solution would be to create redirects from the names of hamlets or other tiny places to the article that has the redlinks. In that article, leave those names in & bold them, so someone who searches for a village & lands there can see why. This gets rid of the red links, avoids creating silly articles, and handles the case of someone who searches for some obscure place because grandad immigrated from there or fought in some battle nearby or whatever. Pashley (talk) 16:20, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree that could be a good idea for some places that are so small they don't merit an article. For places that actually should have an article, though, I'm not so sure—I think the presence of the redirect discourages editors from creating the article. —Granger (talk · contribs) 16:25, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it is sometimes a good solution (For one example, see Talk:Carpiquet.) but not always.

Sometimes it is better to just leave the red link or to create an article even if it is only a stub. If the place is significant, you can find it on WP, & at least put in geo co-ords, IsPartOf & a WP link. Pashley (talk) 16:35, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this is getting off-topic, but when it comes to redirects and articles for multiple towns vs redlinks, I believe redlinks are better left alone until someone with real knowledge about the place and surrounding area can sort it out. Merging towns or creating redirects in order to get rid of redlinks is bad practice in my opinion. There isn't much reason to "meddle" in such a way and it can create a mess if the sorting is found to be nonsensical (and they can require admin intervention to change them depending on how it is done). I've said this in other discussions, but redirects definitely can discourage article creation, so if you don't know an area, it's probably best just to leave it as is rather than forcing action just because there is a redlink. I'll also point out though that those in the Oita (prefecture) article are quite large and well-known cities that can definitely hold their own as articles. It can't be assumed that redlinks are a sign of anything about the location; it only means we don't have an article. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 17:09, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

To me: It doesn't look like redlinks, and how we should handle them, are the real issue here. This looks like a conduct issue, and not a content issue. I don't know who's right and who's wrong; I don't really care to investigate it enough to figure out the rights and wrongs. But like I said: This looks like a conduct issue. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 17:19, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I too am of the opinion that the redlinks should be kept, if the potential article they point to would pass the wiaa test and especially if they have one liners, which would give the reader an idea of what the place is about even if there is no receiving article. Vidimian (talk) 18:32, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

If the place would make a valid article, that is there is something worthwhile seeing and somewhere to sleep, then it should be kept a redlink until someone creates an article with some content. That does not mean create a stub because that is just annoying browsing through links to empty pages. If it is a small hamlet with no place to stay then delete the redlink or if it is a place you may expect someone to search on then create a redirect to the next settlement. A redlink is saying an article is needed. --Traveler100 (talk) 18:43, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

There have been several region articles or the likes with dozens of redlinks that may cause the perception of a need to subdivide the region, yet the region article is not developed at all and only contains a scarce number of actual articles. What then is the harm there in removing the redlinks? Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:00, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

In some cases, such as Åland, transportation is a big issue, so going to a redlinked island for a local attraction and sleeping in the nearest city (i.e. the capital) is not an option. In such cases listing the attractions (or accommodations) in the region article is little use, unless grouped in a way better done by actually creating outlines for any place for which you want to add a listing.

For other places listings are better created in the existing articles, or in new articles covering more than one of those places. In those cases one should create a sensible subdivision, be it of subregions or "cities". State what places intended to be covered in a (red)link if you remove the redlinks to close by destinations. It is clearly stated in our guidelines that we should not create holes in our hierarchies.

In some cases there is a clear need of subdivision on the long term (cf Burundi). You might not need the redlinks yet, but it is much easier to create a new article if the intended subdivision is clear. And I see little difference between just mentioning provinces (or any other subdivision) and redlinking them. The former is a little more visually appealing, the latter a little easier for newcomers intending to create articles.

--LPfi (talk) 12:21, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Two confidentiality and privacy items that recently came up

Swept in from the pub

I am not really active at Wikivoyage. I am an administrator on Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and the Wikimedia Incubator, and am most active on those projects and some other Wikipedias. As I was doing some new page patrol on Incubator recently, I came across a user who was active here, among other places. As it happened, this user was distinctly a minor, and gave his/her age along with other identifying information on his/her userpage here. I removed the age information, then ran into two distinct confidentiality/privacy issues here on Wikivoyage.

No confidential way to reach an administrator here

I had hoped to reach an administrator here to ask him/her to Revision Delete the information that I had deleted from that user's userpage. On many, if not most, Wikimedia projects, requests of that nature are supposed to be made by email or IRC channel, so as not to leave a trail of bread crumbs on-wiki for potential predators to follow. However, I could find no such off-wiki contact point available for Wikivoyage.

It seems to me that something like this should be available. The best way, I imagine, would be for someone to create an email account, whether on a free service or at wikimedia.org, that could be monitored by administrators. Another way would be to make sure that all administrators here are reachable by email. Now, I can appreciate how a sysop may not feel s/he ought to need to open his/her email address to just anyone who feels like using it. I don't disagree; the email address I use for this purpose is one I use for almost nothing else. But contributors who want to reach me privately from the wikis where I am sysop (and some others) can do so.

I also understand the point of view that wiki business should be conducted on-wiki. Under most circumstances, that's true. But anyone here who has worked on some other Wikimedia projects knows that there are certain circumstances in which more confidential communications are appropriate.

No particular policy on handling "privacy-breaching, non-public information", especially where minors are involved

When I reached an administrator on-wiki on the subject, the administrator was reluctant to agree to my revision deletion request, on the grounds that there is no policy here, and apparently no specific overarching policy from Wikimedia in general.

Policies and guidelines do exist on some projects. See, for example:

• w:Wikipedia:User pages#Personal and privacy-breaching material
• w:WP:CHILD
• w:simple:WP:CHILD

On those projects, at least, there is wide latitude available to administrators, oversighters and others to remove "privacy-breaching non-public material", especially that of minors. To be sure, in no case is the removal of such information required. At the same time, at least on English Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia, removal of such information is strongly encouraged.

In the particular case at hand, the user in question provided a sufficient amount of information so as to make himself/herself an easy potential target for a predator. I would not like to see that happen. So I would simply ask this community to give its administrators some latitude to remove information in order to protect the privacy of a minor—even against the minor's will—if the administrator sees fit.

Thank you for hearing me out. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:58, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

First, many of the sysops here have e-mail option activated. I am one. There is no problem to reach a sysop off-wiki if you really want to.

Second, nobody would ever notice this particular contributor and their age, but you draw a lot of attention to this case and mediate something that you seemingly intend to prevent.

Third, your actions look like censorship and imposing certain criteria that may not be relevant outside of your country and culture. It would be best to contact the contributor and check whether disclosing the age is their concious decision. Unsolicited corrections to user pages are highly inappropriate. A few previous instances of such censorship are in fact quite memorable, because they immediately preceeded the migration of Wikivoyage to where it currently is. --Alexander (talk) 16:14, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

I suggested StevenJ81 that he gets in touch with the user and asks their opinion. It will be most natural if the user decides about the content of their userpage and revision deletions. --Alexander (talk) 19:15, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

I have done that.

I would still like to hear what others may have to say about this question, though. I think we should be more protective of our youngest contributors. At very least, I think that we should have the freedom to act promptly, even if we ask the user at the same time what his or her preference is. StevenJ81 (talk) 19:36, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

It appears meaningful to me to adopt such policies of WP, especially since apparently they have more comprehensively reflected on that issue. It feels irrational to me that such reluctance is shown here. And this reluctance is clearly visible in the above answer of Alexander, the latter two arguments are kind of thin – no hard feelings. Hence, I am in favour of a more pro-active approach and support StevenJ81's view. Ceever (talk) 21:52, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

The links to en-wp did not convince me there is any thought-out policy over there. I think they hint about some feeling there is a problem with young editors, or young editors known to be young, but I did not see what these problems are thought to be or that any real solution to such problems was offered. And nothing says we have the same problems en-wp might have. An adult praying on children would get much more out of his time on fora directed to youngsters than here, so I suppose the problem is mostly theoretical. --LPfi (talk) 07:51, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

These seem to be the relevant portions of the links that are working (please be aware that the link you are giving for Simple Wikipedia does not work): (now fixed)

Privacy-breaching non-public material, whether added by yourself or others, may be removed from any page upon request, either by administrators or (unless impractical) by purging from the page history and any logs by oversighters (see requests for oversight).

Users who appear to be children editing in good faith who disclose identifying personal information should be informed of the potential dangers of such disclosure. They should be advised that disclosing personal information is a bad idea and is potentially dangerous. Deletion and oversight may be used in appropriate cases to remove the information.

"May be removed upon request"; "may be used in appropriate cases". Hardly definitive. A better case could be made for someone who posts an exact address or telephone number. Name, age and place of residence can be a matter of pride. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:14, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I think that it is worth considering that the needs of users of this site are different from that of Wikipedia. For instance WP has articles about secondary schools, which may raise particular issues with younger editors. It also is much more likely that knowing age in addition to username and edit history would lead a reader to guess at the real world identity of an editor on WP than here. I think that protecting editors from unintended disclosure of contact details is an important issue (maybe Wikivoyage:User page help could be expanded), but I don't think that knowing the age of another editor is a problem. AlasdairW (talk) 14:49, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm all for protecting children, but this is not the case for us to hang our hat on. For instance, four times a year my hometown newspaper publishes the full names and grade levels of all the students in my town's elementary, middle and high schools who made Honor Roll for the quarter. That's already far more information for a predator to potentially exploit than what the user at issue revealed about him- or herself. Simply by virtue of Wikimedia values, I think it's imperative that any policy we institute for the protection of children or other vulnerable editors has to be informed by respect for the free exchange of information and the freedom of speech that all our editors, including children, have. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:08, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Should we revert any edits to "protect" children from revealing their names on their own user pages? One could argue that hiding this information is disrespectful to the children in question. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:37, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

I am not sure. If they want to, they can do it themselves. The one child who actualized the issue has been contacted on his/her talk page, which I think is enough. Generally such edits could be reverted at once, if deemed to be obviously unnecessary, but there might be cases where letting personal info remain deleted (and get it revision deleted) is appropriate – phone numbers and other unnecessary detailed contact information might qualify. Until the info is revision deleted one should avoid messages revealing that private info is available. --LPfi (talk) 13:11, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Conclusion and proposal

In the event, the other user involved was happy to have that information removed, and an administrator has hidden the history (at that user's request) for privacy purposes. All well and good, all within the rules.

It is clear to me after reading the above discussion that on this wiki, as a rule, the users at very least feel that the right to free expression outweighs privacy concerns of this type. So be it. Still, I continue to have concerns as to whether or not we shouldn't, at very least, strongly encourage such users to think again before adding such information. Freedom of expression and privacy are both important overarching issues to keep in mind, but there is also the strong possibility that younger, less mature users may act more on whim or instinct than on principle, at least at first. (So can the rest of us, but we're adults.) So to that end, I would still suggest the following:

• If the user involved states that s/he is below age 16 (or there is a clear presumption of that, like "I'm in middle school"), then other users may immediately remove that information from the user page.

  If that happens, the user should immediately be asked—by email, if available, or on-wiki otherwise—if s/he wishes the information to be restored. If so, fine: restore it. If not, it can stay removed. (And I think that if the user is that young, and agrees to keep the information removed, then it can be presumed that it should be revdeleted also.)

• If the user involved is 16 years old and up to majority, it is probably good practice to ask that user the same question. But the information should not be deleted until/unless the person agrees to it.
• For any user who is a minor, really specific information (phone number, street address) should be handled under "remove first, then ask". Even for users who are adults, it's good practice to encourage them not to put information like that on-wiki, usually.

Personally, I have no problem with people revealing their names on-wiki if they wish to. StevenJ81 (talk) 21:05, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Related WMF policies: wmf:Terms_of_Use/en: "[Prohibited activities include]: Soliciting personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18 for an illegal purpose or violating any applicable law regarding the health or well-being of minors." and wmf:Guidelines_for_modifying_CheckUser_logs: "A Wikimedia Foundation employee may modify or delete the logs of CheckUser activity only if there is a legitimate privacy concern. A legitimate privacy concern includes... when information identifying a user as a minor (under 18 years old) is revealed in the CU log." —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:39, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

I think the above sounds fine; in fact, I think "really specific information (phone number, street address)" should probably simply be removed and revision-deleted without further ado (a practice which does have precedent on this site). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:32, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia sites are not bound by w:Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, but enwiki oversighters generally do remove and oversight any statements that an editor is below 13, on sight. Highly identifying information of a minor (phone number, address) is generally oversighted too. And there are certain things that are oversighted regardless of age (credit card number, passport number... sadly, some people have done it before). --Rschen7754 01:40, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm not going to indicate my age; let's just say I'm old enough that my credit card number is "IV". K7L (talk) 02:39, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Columns for references

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Please help translate to your language • Read this in another language

Hello,

At the request of Wikipedia editors, a new feature has been added to MediaWiki. Long lists of references (also called citations or footnotes) will automatically be displayed in columns. This will make it easier for most people to read the references, especially on narrow screens. Short lists of references will not be affected.

I plan to enable this new feature at this wiki on Monday, 11 September 2017. After that date, use the normal <references /> tag on any page with many references to see this feature. If you do not want columns used on that page, then use this wikitext code instead: <references responsive="0" />

If you believe that this new feature is not appropriate for this wiki, or if you need help adjusting templates, then please contact me at mw:Contributors/Projects/Columns for references. --User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

18:15, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

This function is totally irrelevant for this wiki as en-WV does not use references and never plans to use them. Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:53, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

@Hobbitschuster: Did you realize that this is a mass message across WMF projects? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I gathered as much, but there is something in there about "notifying if it's not good for our wiki" or something... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:11, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Sure. Just checking. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:22, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

It has long been my assumption that this change was largely irrelevant to the English Wikivoyage. However, I've re-checked and found that in the mainspace, this will affect the appearance of the experimental article, Motorcycling#cite_note-1.

It will not affect several other articles that use cite.php's ref tags: Berne#cite_note-1, Dutch_phrasebook#cite_note-.2Fi.e.2F-1, Quetta#cite_note-1, Providencia#cite_note-1, Sagay#cite_note-1, Ratnapura#cite_note-1, La_Redota#cite_note-1.

Outside of the mainspace, ref tags are mostly used sparingly on talk pages, but there are a couple of sandboxes and userpages that will be affected, e.g., User:Vidimian/Hotels in Istanbul and User:Rubyyadav. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Technical question

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At the Hebrew Wikivoyage the EDIT button next to each listing has never opened the visual interface that lets the users edit all the listings' fields. This hasn't been a big issue until earlier this year when I started to import+translate a massive amount listings from Envoy. Whom would be able to help fix this technical issue on Hebvoy? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:17, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I would really like to know this as well and how this feature was ever implemented at Wikivoyage. I would like to reproduce it elsewhere. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Understanding of the word "millennial"

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The world millennial has been used to describe something that has existed for at least a thousand years; millennial city, millennial heritage, etc. Today, it is however more frequently used for people born in the 1980s or '90s. Should Wikivoyage still use the word in its original context, or would that be confusing? /Yvwv (talk) 13:19, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe we need a dictionary of travel-terms. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 13:49, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

There are lots of words in English that have two or more meanings. I don't think we need to have our own dictionary. Besides, the obvious name, Wikidictionary, is already taken be a sister project. And Wikivoyagedictionary is too long. People can also look up words at Merriam-Webster's m-w.com or the Free Dictionary or Oxford Dictionary. We should focus on being a travel guide. Ground Zero (talk) 15:41, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Or just put a word into a search-engine, that will usually give you a dictionary definition. In most browses: You can double-click a word (to highlight it), right-click it, and the drop-down menu will give you an option to look up the word in a search-engine. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 16:01, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Any time anyone reads a word they find ambiguous or confusing in a particular context, they can change it. I'm not sure we need a general site-wide guideline for this. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:48, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

We need fewer, not more, restrictions on what words we are and aren't "allowed" to use at Wikivoyage. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:36, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

What kind of restrictions are there on what words we're allowed to use? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 18:03, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

AndreCarrotflower, if you think we have too many words to avoid, you might want to address that at Wikivoyage talk:Words to avoid. I don't think we have too many of those. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:05, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

I think ti should always be clear from context which is meant. However, that said, we have to keep in mind that - at the very least - a significant minority of our readers are non-native speakers. Perhaps more than at Wikipedia. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:03, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe we need a Simple English Wikivoyage (if there isn't one already) for non-native speakers, like the Simple English Wikipedia. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 20:42, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Millennial is only used in 27 articles including here, with different meanings. Personally I would prefer not to use millennial city, but instead say "1000 year old city", or city "granted city status in 2000" as appropriate. AlasdairW (talk) 20:46, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘I think we are stretched thin enough as is. Who would be writing the articles there to begin with? And who would enforce the rules of simple English as opposed to plain old English? Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:36, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Speaking of spreading ourselves too thin, we're now thirteen comments deep in a discussion about when it is and isn't appropriate to use the word "millennial". Do we really not have any bigger fish to fry than to vocabulary-police a word that is used a grand total of 27 times on this site? If you're reading an article and you come across a phrasing that sounds awkward or ambiguous, for heaven's sake just plunge forward, edit it to your taste, and get on with your life. We don't need to build a new policy around every minor copyedit. And we certainly don't need to make it the subject of yet another insufferable longwinded debate. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:07, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

True. That said, the question about different language versions might merit debate at some other time and place. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:17, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Okay. I must say it's confusing to me why having a Simple English Wikivoyage (or a Simple English Wikipedia, for that matter) for non-native speakers would be preferable to simply having them contribute to the Wikivoyage in their native language, many of which are in pretty dire need of improvement. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:30, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

The problem is, that a small wiki is less likely to attract contributors which is kind of a vicious cycle. And there are other reasons besides that to mostly contribute to the English language version and not that of another language. That said, I never quite got the point of simple WP and would not at this point in time advocate a simple English WV. Some users seem also to wish to edit here because there are more people who read the articles here than in their native language. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:41, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

The Other Site's community collapsed around March; and since then, our Alexa ranking has been closing in on theirs. This community is growing, and the site looks better for every day. Still, we should not hurry to launch a Simple English Wikivoyage. /Yvwv (talk) 02:13, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

A problem with a simple WV is that you need to master a language quite well to write simply and to correct awkward wordings. Thus it cannot rely on non-native speakers. With a decent fluency it is easier to contribute here, and to read one version and contribute to another is complicated. The simple version is viable only if there is a big group of volunteers writing for a group other than themselves (mostly teachers, I'd suppose). You need a really large editor base on the whole for such a subgroup to be big enough. Perhaps you could have a simple sv-wp if you really wanted to, but anything smaller than that has little hope.

That said, I think we can have our lively tone and still be usable for much of those having English as a second language. Just remember that you are writing also for them, and avoid jargon and restrict references to Shakespeare and contemporary lyrics to contexts where they do not hinder understanding the important points.

--LPfi (talk) 11:04, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

(indent) Wikivoyage is already very simple. Places names, opening hours, price, phone number, directions, website... Can't really make them any simpler. Basically the site descriptions and things like "Understand" are where we could get "wordy" but all the most pertinent information is available and easy to navigate even for most people who don't know English at all. I would not recommend giving any consideration to ESL learners/speakers when writing. Most of them can figure out the meaning of something if they're interested, and if they can't, they're more "English students" than "English speakers" and that's not our problem. Avoiding obscure references or location-specific jargon to me isn't for ESL speakers but just common sense practice. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:36, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Indeed. Frankly, I think the more we at the English Wikivoyage go down the road of making concessions to readers of limited English proficiency, the more we enable the continued neglect of the other language versions of Wikivoyage. If we had a Simple English Wikivoyage, that would contribute to the phenomenon even further. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:10, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

I also oppose the idea of a "Simple English" Wikivoyage and consider it a poor use of time. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:53, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

I also oppose having a "Simple English" Wikivoyage. There are only two simple English projects: wikipedia and wiktionary. Both of these can much more usefully cater for children and English learners. However two projects have Simple English main pages: commons and wikispecies. It could be useful for us to have a Simple English main page (and if people want a few (less than ten) travel topics) - this might give us some more traffic from simple WP. AlasdairW (talk) 21:21, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

I do not think we need a Simple English version, or our own dictionary. However, I think we do need to consider second language readers in our writing style. All of it is judgement calls of course, but there are places where, for example, avoiding phrasal verbs & other idioms is possible and would be a good idea. Pashley (talk) 23:13, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

A relevant Humble Bundle

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https://www.humblebundle.com/books/adventure-travel-books

Note that proceeds can go to the WMF if you choose them as a charity. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:52, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Page banner discussions

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Several page banner discussions are going on. Share your opinions in Talk:Central Asia, Talk:Bangladesh, Talk:Plains (India), Talk:Japan, Talk:Rome, and Talk:Kashrut. /Yvwv (talk) 01:55, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

As well as Talk:South Asia. /Yvwv (talk) 03:48, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

See Talk:North Africa, Talk:Mumbai and Talk:Samarkand for some subsequent banner discussions. /Yvwv (talk) 19:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Monuments banner contest

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Dear Colleagues,

similarly to what we have done for Wiki Loves Earth earlier this year, we are now running a banner contest for Wiki Loves Monuments. The banners should depict a recognized cultural monument (which can be a part of a panorama) from a country participating in the contest this year. This blog entry is a good starting point, and the contest rules are summarized here. Banners related to pages where they do not currently exist or are not of a high quality are particularly welcome.--Ymblanter (talk) 22:07, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Huge metro systems

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Some years back we had a policy that airports did not get articles. Then we revised it so really big complex ones could & started Wikivoyage:Airport Expedition, devised a template, and so on. There have been problems, but overall that seems to have worked fairly well.

What about large complex metro systems? The one that provokes me to ask is w:Shanghai Metro with 14 lines, 364 stations & around 10 million riders a day. Our current coverage is at Shanghai#Metro_cards and Shanghai#By_metro, both moderately long sections. I'm thinking a separate article might be a good idea. WP has articles on most of the lines, e.g. w:Line 2, Shanghai Metro, and most of the stations. Some are stubs, but most OK. I do not think we need go into massive detail; our article might consist mostly of links to WP.

Getting a good map might be hard. We had one but deleted it when it became horribly out of date some years back & now we just link to the map on the official site. WP has a nice one but it looks out of date to me. Pashley (talk) 23:01, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

London Underground used to have an article. /Yvwv (talk) 23:24, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Bay Area public transit has an article. And I don't think either should limit ourselves to just the "metro" component. In cities like Berlin, the S-Bahn is just as important as the U-Bahn. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:32, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

There is Trams in Melbourne, although that is more for tram spotters than those wanting to get around. AlasdairW (talk) 23:34, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Public transit in the Bay Area is really complex—more than 20 different transit systems with different policies and structures that link up to and compete with each other in various ways. With so much information to cover, I guess I can see why it might need its own article. In contrast, the Shanghai metro, while large, is pretty simple to use. My memory from travelling there in 2015 is that once you get the hang of how the cards work, it's pretty much like any other metro system. At first glance, I think the current information in the article plus a good map looks like enough. What other traveller-relevant information would be included in a separate article? —Granger (talk · contribs) 01:45, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I have argued, unsuccessfully, for splitting out some "getting around" information from articles like London, where it seems to make the article unwieldy. Having separate articles on metro systems, however, seems to be duplicating the detailed articles at Wikipedia. Can we not just link to those articles, which will be updated more frequently than can be expected here? And why would we have articles on metro systems, but not light rail and bus systems, which, for some cities are far more important? Ground Zero (talk) 02:16, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

No matter the size and complexity, there's a fundamental difference between airports and transit systems. wiaa describes the type of airports that get their own articles here as being "the size of small cities", and I think that's key. Like cities unto themselves, airports are places where travellers might stay for lengthy periods of time; where they might be required to provision themselves with food or drink, where they can shop, where they might even find a bed for the night. None of that is true of transit systems. I'm tolerant (though not particularly enthusiastically so) of Bay Area public transit as an exception to this rule for the reasons Granger mentioned above, but in general this is a Pandora's box I'd prefer not to open. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:23, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I suppose most metro systems are integrated with other public transport, so these articles might be more useful as Public transit in ... Then again, in most cities with complex metro systems visitors should avoid trying to get around by car, so separate public transit articles should still be read by most visitors. The separation would thus not be very useful, except in cases where the transit system covers an area that does not follow boundaries of our geographic hierarchy. --LPfi (talk) 09:31, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

You can buy plenty of stuff (including food) in public transit systems like the Mexico City Metro... And public transit systems not aligning with "our" geographical boundaries is "all of them" in Germany. There is not a single Verkehrsverbund that aligns with our geographic boundaries. The one that comes closest covers all of Brandenburg and Berlin together under one umbrella. Have a look here for what I mean. Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:03, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Draft strategy direction. Version #2

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• 
• 

In 2017, we initiated a broad discussion to form a strategic direction that will unite and inspire Wikimedians. This direction will be the foundation on which we will build clear plans and set priorities. More than 80 communities and groups discussed and gave feedback. We researched readers and consulted more than 150 experts. We looked at future trends that will affect our mission, and gathered feedback from partners and donors.

A group of community volunteers and representatives from the strategy team synthesized this feedback into an early version of the strategic direction that the broader movement can review and discuss.

The second version of the direction is ready. Again, please read, share, and discuss on the talk page on Meta. Based on your feedback, the drafting group will refine and finalize the direction.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

PDFs, OCG and Electron

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Hey, since Wikivoyages care about PDFs, an update: You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems, and we're not happy about it. You can use Electron instead, which is how most PDFs are created. Electron will get some missing features prior to 1 October. You can create books but the create books functionality will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more at read more on mediawiki.org. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 00:00, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we’ve discovered we were wrong. In a couple of weeks – October 1 – the function to create PDFs from articles you have added to a book will stop working temporarily because of the technical problems we're having. We’ll work on getting it back up again. We aim to have it up within the next few months, but honestly, this has been forced upon us and it could take longer. We apologise.

Creating PDFs from single articles will work as previously stated. You can follow the work in Phabricator: phab:T150871 and phab:T175853. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Pondering on adding Fashion as a requested travel topic ...

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Thoughts on adding Fashion as a Travel Topic?

Major destinations would be London, Paris and Milan in Europe I think, but I have a feeling someone would need to go into more depth about what's around and price ranges? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:21, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

It is not a subject that I know much about, but a quick search shows 3 fashion museums in England, and w:Fashion week and w:List of fashion events shows that thee are plenty of events. Have you been to any of these events? Is it possible for a traveller to visit without receiving an invitation? AlasdairW (talk) 21:11, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, certainly can be a travel topic. Assuming the purpose is to travel to experience and/or buy fashion. Have a look at Purchasing a kimono --Andrewssi2 (talk) 22:25, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Depends, there are some events that are "open", compared to the private shows intended for fashion industry and press.

Yes, it would be a valid topic. Anyone inclined to do the work should plunge forward.

There are lots of possibilities outside Europe, too. I think Shanghai, Mumbai and New York City are the main fashion centers for their respective countries; I'm not sure to what extent that should be covered in city articles & linked from Fashion vs. covered in Fashion, or what the center(s?) would be for other places.

Shanghai#Clothing covers some shopping options. Hong Kong and Singapore are famous for good cheap tailors. Montreal and Russia have furs, Inner Mongolia has cashmere/pashmina and down products, etc. I'm not sure where to find good leather. Pashley (talk) 22:52, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

For a starter, write a new section of the clothes article. /Yvwv (talk) 02:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

My only experience with fashion week was having to pay €500 a night for a hotel room in Milan. So a guess date a useful even for those not interested in the topic. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:17, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Well there would be a split between Clothes for practicality, and Fashion for fashions state.

Museum wise, two locations I can think of right away would be the Costume gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum (South Kensington, London), and the costume musuem in Bath, which may already be mentioned in their respective articles. I am not the person to write a stub as I don't know enough, hence I was going to add it to requested travel topics. I will do so in the next few days. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 07:14, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

The Metropolitan Museum has a big, excellent fashion wing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:57, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Paris has la Cité de la Mode et du Design. Seems to be event-based, rather than permanent exhibitions, but still lots going on at all times. There is of course also the new incarnation of the Design Museum in London, which has fashion as one of its focuses. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:33, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris - no permanent collection, but regular exhibitions.

Musée des Arts Décoratifs - looks like the V&A in that it has a mixture of art, interior design and wearable fashion. One of the current exhibitions celebrates 50 years of Christian Dior. The same Google search "musée de la Mode" returned dozens of results in various cities. Apparently fashion is a big deal in the Francophone world, who knew? --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:40, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Toronto has the Bata Shoe Museum. Pashley (talk) 13:45, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Düsseldorf is also known for fashion. Or something about Königsallee or something... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:53, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Press for the WV app

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In the Irish Times :-) Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:12, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Nice to be in the press, but it's a pity they make "Wiki Voyage" out to only be a public transport advice app. On the other hand, transport is clearly something we're doing right and that is getting noticed. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 15:04, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Dorint Hotels

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So there is a user who freely admits to working for the hotel chain mentioned in the headline and who has created or edited a lot of listings for them in recent times. He's not spamming or touting as such, but he's still a bit too eager about mentioning the location and whatnot of the hotels. WHat say ye? Hobbitschuster (talk) 11:50, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Could you provide a link to the edits? I don't think we can fairly discuss him without seeing the edit history. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:20, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Contributions/Discotizer. Is I think fine but as Hobbitschuster points out some of the descriptions are close to the limit and occasionally require editing. Have pointed the user to the appropriate policies. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:25, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Traveler. The guy seems co-operative so far and willing to take your advice on board. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 17:21, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

We have a sorta-kinda policy for chain restaurants (WV:Boring) do we have or should we have one for chain hotels? Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:46, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

On another note, I think the hotel listed in Bitburg is quite somewhere else if the geo coordinates are right. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:47, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

The Bitburg hotel is 11km from the town centre, which I have added to the listing, but we don't have any nearer destinations. In general I don't think that we should have a policy against chain hotels. If there are several chain places to eat, it is enough to know that there are several, and I can easily find one when I arrive. However hotels are normally booked in advance, so I want to know before I arrive. If there are too many hotels (much more than 10) listed then the chains can be the first to go. AlasdairW (talk) 21:54, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Unlike with restaurants, contact information and price ranges are essential data for accommodations. And even within a chain, quality and amenities can vary widely. Powers ^(talk) 19:16, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia Movement Strategy phase 2, and a goodbye

Swept in from the pub

Hello,

As phase one of the Wikimedia movement strategy process nears its close with the strategic direction being finalized, my contractor role as a coordinator is ending too. I am returning to my normal role as a volunteer (Tar Lócesilion) and wanted to thank you all for your participation in the process.

The strategic direction should be finalized on Meta late this weekend. The planning and designing of phase 2 of the strategy process will start in November. The next phase will again offer many opportunities to participate and discuss the future of our movement, and will focus on roles, resources, and responsibilities.

Thank you, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Advanced search tools for editors

Swept in from the pub

Hi! I am wondering whether there is, or whether someone could create, a multivariable search function on wikivoyage. In essence, what I want to do is to generate a list of articles by status, breadcrumbed within a certain region, listed by number of page view hits. For example I would like a list of outline articles in Sweden by number of hits. This would make it much easier to see which pages travellers actually use, and to concentrate editing to these pages which are both frequently visited and have potential for easy improvement. Thanks in advance! MartinJacobson (talk) 12:28, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

w:project:PetScan might be worth a look. K7L (talk) 12:35, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

MartinJacobson - which of these options interests you most...
1. The most popular tourist locations within Sweden according to the English Wikivoyage readers ?

OR

2. The most popular locations within Sweden according to the Swedish Wikipedia readers ?

OR

3. The most popular locations worldwide according to the Swedish Wikipedia readers ?

Another question... Do you plan to use this information to decide which articles on the English Wikivoyage you plan on significantly expanding/improving ... or to decide which articles on the Swedish Wikivoyage you plan on significantly expanding/improving?

ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:12, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I would add that if you are most interested in seeing which articles about Swedish tourist destinations are of most interest to international+domestic travelers for the purpose of expanding articles on the Swedish Wikivoyage, my best recommendation would be the second choice ("The most popular locations within Sweden according to the Swedish Wikipedia readers") since the Swedish travelers are more likely to actually know which locations are the most interesting ones. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:20, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Let me know if you need any help with that. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:23, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

First, thank you K7L! w:project:PetScan gave me article status and region (and page size), but I couldn't find any pageview statistics in PetScan. I was however able to manually cross PetScan with pageview counter. Secondly ויקיג'אנקי, I am interested in improving the English Wikivoyage. (As most Swedes read English domestic travellers are served just as well by an English guide, while few international travellers will be able to use a Swedish guide).MartinJacobson (talk) 14:48, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

MartinJacobson - Okay... just to double check - you are only interested in seeing what the most popular tourist destinations within Sweden are according to the English Wikivoyage readers, right? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 15:11, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

ויקיג'אנקי This far I have mainly edited Swedish destinations, but that not out of principle but rather out of convenience and comparative language skill (most editors can research in English while fewer can do so in Swedish). I would be just as glad to update and improve the most frequently visited (outline) articles world-wide if I could find relevant information about those destinations. MartinJacobson (talk) 18:12, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

I ended up creating three different lists for Martin. Anyone interested in seeing them (You might find the outline articles list especially useful/interesting) can find them here. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 05:09, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much ויקיג'אנקי! This will be very helpful! MartinJacobson (talk) 09:35, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

The Hindi edition of Wikivoyage was launched a couple of days ago!

Swept in from the pub

Just wanted to mention, since it hasn't been mentioned here so far, that the Hindi edition of Wikivoyage was launched on September 25th. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:30, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

My understanding is that Hindi & Urdu are pretty much the same as spoken languages but written utterly differently, with a Sanskrit-derived alphabet for Hindi & Arabic/Persian for Urdu. Is there any reasonable, preferably automatic, way to translate between the written forms?

Really good translation software might give us an Urdu edition of WV free. Anything reasonable might be helpful to anyone wanting to start an Urdu edition, & by allowing Urdu speakers to contribute might improve the Hindi edition as well. Pashley (talk) 19:19, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Congratulations on the start of the Hindi site, and Godspeed to all who are editing there! Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:29, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Pashley, translating or transliterating the content across Hindi and Urdu might not be feasible. In addition to script, the technical words of Hindi and Urdu are different, coming from Sanskrit and Arabic/Persian respectively. While it shouldn't in principle affect a travel guide that much compared to say, an encyclopedia, I've noticed the technical words have started to creep in. The name of the site is "Wiki Yatra" while the word used in Urdu (or in informal spoken Hindi) for "journey" or "travel" would be Wiki Safar. To an extent, yatra sounds a bit like "voyage", not as natural to say as travel. Anyway, hope these words are kept to a minimum so moving content makes more sense (in the real word in the cities at least, English technical words are becoming increasingly common). Gizza ^(roam) 02:50, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Book reference for the whole country

Swept in from the pub

Since it is possible to create books from WV articles, should we maybe properly create and have one full book for each country available, listing it right at the beginning of each country, so that users do not have to go through all the relevant articles, but simply download the book?

This could be a template linking to the book, whose pages are defined by us, a link to all relevant GPX files (or even a summary GPX), and potential sites left out from the book. The latter I think is necessary, because there could still be stubs lying around which I would not necessarily add to such a book.

What do you think? Ceever (talk) 19:30, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I think this is in principle a very useful idea but 1.) it would introduce overhead and 2.) I'm not sure how frequently it would actually be used. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:08, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

WMF refuses to spend resources on Wikivoyage

Swept in from the pub

Today it became known that WMF defined Wikivoyage (as well as a few other sister projects) as the "lower impact project" that "does not merit proactive investment". After some noise from our side (talk page), the "lower impact" definition was removed, but the rest did not change. This definition distinguishes Wikivoyage from so-called "emerging communities" with which WMF "should spend more attention and resources".

It remains unclear what this definition exactly means, because different WMF staff members communicate fairly different information (see the talk page) on what "proactive investment" is, and how far-reaching the consequences can be. In the worst case, no technical features dedicated to Wikivoyage will be introduced, and no financial support will be given (e.g., one won't get a scholarship, grant, or Wikimania talk if it is related to Wikivoyage). Let me emphasize that this does not mean WMF wants to get rid of Wikivoyage, but the Foundation makes a clear assessment of Wikivoyage as a project that "does not merit support". This can also be the first step of expelling Wikivoyage as a burden for the Foundation, although statements of the contrary were, of course, made by the WMF staff.

I don't know what we can do about this, other than express our strong dissent about such a decision. The strangest part is that transparent and measureable criteria have been used in the assesment of countries and languages (more than 10 active contributors, a criterion that several language versions of Wikivoyage will surely pass). In contrast, among the projects only Wikisource and Wiktionary were chosen as "effective" and "successful", and all the rest is clearly identified as useless, but no criteria were provided. --Alexander (talk) 20:07, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate your advocacy with WMF Alexander. I would agree from that discussion you linked to that there is a lack of enthusiasm from the WMF team as well as indeed conflicting statements around their support for Wikivoyage.

That said it does seem to be mostly disinterest in investing in Wikivoyage, rather than any obvious desire to stop supporting and hosting us. As far as I know (and I may be wrong) there are no missing functional requirements that are impeding our mission here that require investment to fix.

Additionally Wikidata is getting investment and that benefits us as well.

It may be more productive to work on our relations with WMF. I'm not sure where to start on that? Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:40, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Even if there is a plan to stop hosting Wikivoyage, nobody will say it openly until this decision is finalized and implemented. I believe there is no such plan (so far), but the response of Asaf Bartov is dismaying, because it openly says "we don't care about you", which is the first step to further decisions of this kind.

Regarding the work with the WMF, there are no urgent requests from our side indeed, but we have several pending map issues, and many other things, especially the outreach, could be done together should there be interest from their side. --Alexander (talk) 20:53, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Frankly, I think this is much ado about nothing, and if the WMF does indeed have plans to stop hosting us or anything of that nature, badgering and antagonizing them as was done in the thread on Meta certainly won't help our case.

I would also like to know what sort of investment we need that we're not already getting? Perhaps the WMF's stance can be taken as an acknowledgement that we as a community are fairly self-sufficient and low-maintenance. That can't be bad, can it?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

If you write articles and select them for Destination of the month, you do not need any investments indeed. However, broader activity requires resources, and we have listed many of such issues during the strategy discussion. Not all of them are specific to Wikivoyage. For example, offline version is a much broader development, but it should be customized to our needs in order to be useful. --Alexander (talk) 21:36, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Then maybe we should scale down our ambitions to a more realistic level. Look, your argument might be more persuasive to me if the WMF were some huge megacorporation that raked in billions of dollars a year in profits yet refused to reinvest any in its product. But in reality, it's a not-for-profit in charge of a group of hugely popular websites that require vast amounts of resources, and that has only so much money to work with. Obviously the money it does take in has to be triaged where it's needed the most. I love Wikivoyage, but I'm not blind to the fact that we're a drop in the bucket compared to Wikipedia and some of the other Wiki-sites. It's an unfortunate situation, but I don't think there's anything unfair about it, or that we're being singled out. Our importance relative to the other WMF sites simply is what it is. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:09, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Some further thoughts: Our importance relative to the other WMF sites is not a static thing, either. Wikivoyage may be a small community, but it's at least active, which is more than can be said for a lot of the Wiki-sites that the WMF put in the same category as us. Furthermore, as has been reported elsewhere on this site, Alexa rankings over the past year or two indicate that the slow-motion death of Wikitravel continues apace. At the present moment, Wikitravel still gets a good deal more user traffic than us, but that will gradually cease to be the case as their information becomes more and more outdated and overrun with spam and touting. It stands to reason that Wikivoyage will be the new destination of many of those disaffected former Wikitravel users, especially given the superficial similairities between our two sites (use of the same MediaWiki software, etc.) Meanwhile, pageview statistics for Wikipedia and many of the other large Wiki-sites are gradually declining (down about 50% since 2012, in fact!), so perhaps it's only a matter of time before Wikivoyage's profile is raised by comparison and we'll be in a better position for the WMF to justify proactive investment in us. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:49, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Andre, I think you argue with the points that I did not make. I don't say that Wikivoyage should receive more attention than Wikidata or Commons, but in fact Wikidata and Commons should receive more attention than they currently have, and we will benefit from this too, see our contribution to the strategy discussion.

The current discussion is about something different. We put big "developed" projects aside, and compare smaller projects to decide which of them should be prioritized. Then we see that any Wikipedia with more than 10 editors and more than 750,000 speakers gets on board ("emerging projects") and Wikivoyage does not, although we have way more than 10 active editors and a huge language community behind us. Do you think it's fair? --Alexander (talk) 07:52, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

@Atsirlin: You wrote, "e.g., one won't get a scholarship" but the FAQ on the linked page says that (emphasis added) "Also, investment in emerging communities (e.g. grants given, staff visits, mentorship, stakeholder groups) will be tracked and reported on by the Community Resources team. (this has been tracked since early 2016.)" What, in principle would be a thing that Wikivoyage needs in particular? E.g. work on maps continues in MediaWiki. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:04, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: I don't understand your question. Is it about scholarships? I don't know how they are distributed exactly, but it reads quite clearly that the "emerging communities" will get most of it, and we are not treated as an "emerging community". As for the technical features, there are many, see the current discussion on my talk page, as well as our contribution to the strategy discussion. --Alexander (talk) 07:52, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

@Atsirlin: I've obviously stayed up too late. Sorry. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:25, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Scholarships would be nice, but hardly vital to what we are doing here. Also we've been going on WMF since 2013, so in 'internet years' I don't feel we that qualify as an emerging community any more, and possibly WMF is saying that we are running fine as things are.

If we really want to look on the paranoid side of things, I honestly think that it would take WMF much more effort to wind us down than leave things going. It isn't any significant infrastructure and hardware to keep a DVD sized travel wiki running. Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:01, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

I think it is troubling that Wikimedia seems to have adopted a "we don't care about Wikivoyage" approach. I also don't quite understand why some rinky-dink 11 contributor wiki in a made-up language should get more attention than en-WV. I know that de-WV was for quite some time carried by a Verein (an action so stereotypically German, it's almost offensive), and maybe that's something worth looking into "just in case", but I think we as Wikivoyage could benefit from - for example - being able to fetch data for listings automatically from other language editions. Hobbitschuster (talk) 10:06, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

A clarifying point. The article Alexandar links to on Meta is not representative of the Foundation's investment as a whole. It is specifically part of defining a specific team's focus on "emerging communities". The English Wikivoyage in particular is quite healthy. This is good. Myself and other WMF staff continue to work with you all here with product features, bug reports, and updates on what's happening across the projects - things that benefit this project directly or indirectly. Asaf, the gent in charge of helping define the term "emerging communities", is merely reflecting "This reflects status quo", which if you agree or don't, is just stating the current situation for his efforts, not demoting Wikivoyage in any way. Please, I want to keep working with you all. Let's remember we're all on the same team here. Ckoerner (talk) 23:21, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Ckoerner, phrases like "Include as "emerging communities" the moderately successful sister projects that have higher potential impact" clearly demote everything that is excluded from the list of "emergent communities". Wikivoyage has been classified as having lower impact and not even moderately successful. I don't think such phrases make any good, no matter how many times you and your colleagues try to soften them. But the most interesting question for me is how this assessment is done. What makes the project (not the language, not the country, but the sister project) an emerging community? --Alexander (talk) 23:36, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Alexander, you sound upset and I'm not sure there's anything I can say to make you feel better. I'm sorry for that. To your question, please take a look at the page on Meta again. Asaf, and the folks engaging in discussion on the talk page, are trying to figure out the answer to your question. There is presented rationale. Folks might not agree with it, but an attempt is being made to assess the situation - in the open with participation from whoever shows up. I would personally love to see the foundation have resources to proactively support every project, in every language, and beyond. I also know that resources are limited and we have to think about where we spend them for the largest impact across the entire movement. It sucks and I understand why you are frustrated.

If you want to argue with folks, that's not going to get us collectively very far. If you want to argue for Wikivoyage - that it should be considered an emerging community and receive proactive support from the Community Engagement department (rather than the current investment) - then let's do that together. There's a lot of smart people here on Wikivoyage. Organize and make the argument that this project should be included. It doesn't mean it will, but it's far more productive than what's happening now. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

CKoerner (WMF), it's hard for me to make an argument when the very notion of the "emerging community" for sister projects remains undefined. Therefore, I am really curious to see this definition. --Alexander (talk) 18:42, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

On a meta-level it seems very unclear what exactly the WMF is trying to communicate and it would appear that some here may misunderstand what you're saying or not saying. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:02, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

It just seems that the distribution of grants and scholarships from this part of WMF for emerging communities will likely exclude Wikivoyage in future. It may seem unfair to some, and you can read into that what you will, but I don't see it as the first step on the path to removing support and jettisoning Wikivoyage from WMF. Andrewssi2 (talk) 21:32, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm a bit unclear on what this "emerging communities" project is or what it's supposed to do. That said, my concern is that a "deprioritising" of specific, individual projects may be occurring on a broader scale. If it eventually impacts things like MediaWiki extensions and WMF technical development, we're vulnerable. There are quite a few extensions, like the page banners, various sidebar links to "related" content, mw:extension:Kartographer and mw:extension:Geocrumbs, on which we are absolutely reliant – but which aren't in widespread use (or any use) in other WMF projects. Development of these features could easily, silently grind to a halt... and no, this (euphemistically: "‎Projects: rephrased for clarity") doesn't make anything more clear. The original was clear enough, while the revision is deliberately ambiguous and clarifies nothing. We're not a priority? Say so... and give us some idea of what that means in terms of technical support for new project-specific features. We do need transparency in this regard. K7L (talk) 09:05, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, absolutely. See also the discussion here. First,

The Maps team has tried to support Wikivoyage throughout and continues to work with the communities on issues and requests as they are brought up

Two days later,

If and when we get the chance to expand the functionality of maps, we'll be sure to reach out to the Wikivoyage community to get their feedback, concerns and desires for improvements

Of course, all WMF staff members are keen enough to create an impression of their interest in Wikivoyage, but the message behind it emerges clearly. --Alexander (talk) 10:56, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Wow, this seems like a big overreaction, guys. My understanding here is that by "proactive support", the WMF is referring to work to bootstrap an "emerging community" from little activity to robust activity by investing in outreach efforts. It's "proactive" because the smaller communities don't have the volunteers available to research their needs and request help from the WMF grant process. Wikivoyage, on the other hand, is large enough and active enough that we can advocate for ourselves and don't need "proactive support"; our support is "reactive" and outside the scope of this initiative. Powers ^(talk) 18:35, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Is it though? Other than very weird - and not tailored to us - bot dropped messages on here we don't seem to be getting much attention from WMF. Certainly less than some tiny WPs in made up languages. And as for "emerging" communities - well they could try and launch es-WV into relevance. For such a large language, the community is diminutive... But if I don't misread WMF they have totally excluded even the possibility of any WV version being so assessed...Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:33, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I think you do misread. Where do you get the idea they've walled off that possibility? Powers ^(talk) 21:27, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Here one reads Exclude from "emerging communities" all Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikispecies projects, in all languages. Isn't it clear enough? --Alexander (talk) 21:35, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

"When considering a given project in a given language in a given country, all three axes matter, and it is sufficient that one axis is emerging to be eligible for 'emerging communities' support." That means that a Wikivoyage language version could be included if its language or country meets its criteria. And even if one doesn't meet the criteria now, it may in the future.

This "emerging communities" initiative is a replacement for WMF's previous "Global South" campaign. They're looking to outreach to underserved populations and put money where it's going to do the most good to grow those communities. English Wikivoyage doesn't need that. Powers ^(talk) 22:53, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

You are the first person who reads it this way. "Wikivoyage is excluded in all languages" means it is excluded, and at least the responses of Asaf Bartov on the meta talk page leave a clear impression that Wikivoyage will not be included in any form. Moreover, the other axes do not really help us, because most Wikivoyages belong to the developed communities language-wise and country-wise, even if they are dormant as Wikivoyage communities.

Now to your statement that "English Wikivoyage does not need that". First, we don't know what "all that" means. The proactive support is vaguely defined. As you can see from the statements by Maggie Dennis (WMF) on the same meta talk page, they hardly draw a clear line between the proactive and reactive support, especially in terms of the grants. So any support will be reduced. It has to be like that in any grant system, where demands always exceed the resources available.

Finally, you say that English Wikivoyage does not need outreach in less developed countries and in countries with less developed Wikimedia communities. This implies that English Wikivoyage targets travelers from a few developed countries and is not interested in locals' input even from less-developed European countries, let alone remote places in Africa or Asia. I don't agree with that. --Alexander (talk) 23:20, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm fairly confident that my concept of what they're trying to do is closer to their intent than "Wikivoyage sucks, we're not going to provide them any support." I suspect much of the confusion arises due to exceedingly poor word choice on the part of the author, whom I suspect is not a native English speaker. Powers ^(talk) 19:03, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the 'issue' is down to lack of interaction between this community and WMF as a whole. The reason is that we haven't actually needed to talk much (and vice-versa). As I asked before, I'm willing to hear how WV members can enter discussion with the wider WMF community in a productive manner. Andrewssi2 (talk) 21:25, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Andrewssi2, if WV folks would like to talk, about this particular conversation or in general, I am happy to help foster that communication. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Well apparently Hindi WV has just been launched and it might conceivably need the same kind of help that a small WP version might need. Will WMF even consider such support? Hobbitschuster (talk) 17:31, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Cleaning up of "Eat" section in articles

Swept in from the pub

I've started my own version of WikiProjects (well, a smaller version), cleaning up the Eat section of articles, and trying to give more context to the restaurants beyond address, and trying to write them objectively, to NPOV.

Would anyone want to help me on this, perhaps if Wikivoyage had a WikiProject Food (or something similar)?

Currently I'm doing this for:

• Liverpool
• Parts of London
• Restaurants in Fuerteventura
• Restaurants in Tallinn.

I'd appreciate the help so we can make these more informative. I've only just returned to editing after months away (my last edit was June). --Walkden861 (talk) 12:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Please notice that in Wikivoyage we don't use the NPOV principle; rather our guideline is be fair. I'm interested on what you intend to do, and will check out the links. Ibaman (talk) 12:19, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I misunderstood. Anyway, what I am intending to try and do is to clean-up parts where there's no description beyond a name and address of restaurant, or fix grammar on the Eat parts. Thank you for the link on Be fair. --Walkden861 (talk) 12:26, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Welcome back, Walkden861. This is one of my favorite sections. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Community Wishlist update

Swept in from the pub

If you'd like to know more about technical changes and tools, then please watch the presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm02V1ytJ0Y The first presentation, starting around 2:00 minutes, talks about some of the new features in X! tools (like how to find out more about who's editing a page or which admins work in a given area). Other editors will be more interested in Beta Feature for syntax highlighting (around 17:55), and I think that a lot of us will appreciate the Global Preferences (~22:32) project.

Something I learned a while ago: You can speed up the playback for YouTube videos. The gear-shaped settings icon has a "Speed" option. Combining a faster playback speed with the left and right arrow keys (which skip 5 seconds) makes watching these recorded presentations more efficient. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:53, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Group travel

Swept in from the pub

Do we have any pages that describe planning group travel (family reunions, destination weddings, business meetings, etc.)? I saw mw:Team Practices Group/Planning offsites and wondered if we had anything aimed at the person stuck planning small-ish group trips. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:26, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

We have an article on ̺Wedding travel and one for business travel, though it doesn't specifically mention meetings. JakeOregon (talk) 03:46, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes. Planning meetings in a far away location would be in scope at least for the first. In it current state it gives no advice and no hints about pitfalls in the arrangements. The issues are complicated and vary from place to place, so cannot be well covered here, but some advice should be added (if anyone feels competent to do it). --LPfi (talk) 14:11, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

What's with all the new Ottawa-based editors with user pages written entirely in French?

Swept in from the pub

In the past two days, User:Aamdsy, User:Kledg096, and User:Fahad054 have signed up for accounts and, almost immediately, created user pages written entirely in French wherein they describe themselves as university students in Ottawa and proceed to list the different cities and countries they have visited. None of them have any other edits in their contribution histories. This is probably nothing to worry about, but it's very strange. Is there some college professor who's incorporating Wikivoyage editing into his assigned course work, like what happened a few years back with that South Korean school? Either way, someone should inform these people that English is the language of currency on this site; French-language contributions belong on fr:. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:41, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I second your estimation that they're probably completing a school assignment, but I guess as long as they don't start vandalising mainspace, it doesn't matter too much. If you want to tell them to stick to English within their own userspace, allez-y. But I don't see what harm they're causing, to be honest. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 17:50, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

What caught my eye is that two of those names fit the Telstra vandal's username pattern, and one of them was actually preemptively banned on that basis and had to petition (in English) to have their block reversed. I agree that this is probably nothing to worry about, but it's worth keeping tabs on just on the off chance that this represents another twist in the Telstra saga. (Stranger things have happened with that vandal.) -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:54, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I dropped the boilerplate welcome plus a comment on language on all three user talk pages. Pashley (talk) 17:58, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:58, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

If we suddenly get a flood of Ottawa students all making similar edits in French, we'll know there's a problem. If it is Telstra, (s)he's revealing a new talent :) ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 18:06, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

One of the students has actually indicated she's studying French as a Second Language, which begs the question of why not just edit on fr:. The reason why I'm so keen to encourage non-native English speakers to contribute elsewhere is that none of the other language versions of Wikivoyage see anywhere near en:'s volume of editor activity and, in general, they could use the help a whole lot more than we could. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:18, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

User:Bunnikin and User:Tkari‎ just added accounts with user pages following the same pattern, along with User:Cchin058 from yesterday and User:Lmcke028 from the day before yesterday, which I didn't catch till just now. I did what Pashley did earlier, boilerplate text plus reminder about what language is used here. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:35, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Mystery solved?

Most recently on this front, we had another new francophone user create, and then immediately blank, a page entitled Utilisateur:Abrun062. Following a hunch, I checked Recent Contributions over at fr: and sure enough, there has been an only slightly smaller wave of new accounts created by Ottawa-based university students over there - including Abrun062 himself, who recreated the same user page there that he blanked over here.

My educated guess is that this is indeed a case of some professor directing his students to edit Wikivoyage for a school project of some sort. He seems to have intended for his students to register at fr:, but it looks like many of them misunderstood him and ended up here by mistake.

(Apologies for assuming the professor's gender. It's just easier to pick one or the other.)

What should we do about this? Should we attempt to steer these new users in the right direction?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:40, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, let's please continue putting messages on their user talk pages like you've been doing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:21, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Excellent sleuthing, Andre! If you had used French here, then "assuming the professor's gender" wouldn't have been an issue ;-) I agree that we should carry on using these messages to redirect these students to the right place. Let's hope our francophone counterparts don't mind... --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:26, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Do we actually have any prohibition against using non-English languages in one's user space? It is easy for most of us to pick up spam or vandalism in French, but other languages/scripts would be more difficult to judge. Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:23, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

No, I know of no such rule, but when the user in question is also not making any edits in articlespace... Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:08, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

According to Wikivoyage:User page help, the purposes of user pages are 1) to serve as "a brief introduction about the Wikivoyager", 2) as "a personal sandbox for each Wikivoyager to work on projects or ideas outside the 'main' travel guide", and 3) "a communications medium for collaborating with other Wikivoyagers". For the first and third of those items, then, the intended audience of the material is other Wikivoyagers, and therefore common courtesy (at the very least) dictates that the language used should be English. As an example that would fall under the second case, I've seen some users use their user pages as temporary repositories for material from other language versions of Wikivoyage that they're in the process of translating for use on en:, which of course is a completely valid thing to do. In general, though, all the end content on this site should be in English, so the idea of non-English text remaining permanently on one's user page is something I can't really countenance. And if none of this is reflected in official policy, maybe it should be. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:10, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

To be perfectly clear, I'm speaking above in general terms, not in regards to the Ottawa users, who seem only to have made an innocent mistake. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:16, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Other languages can be a way to give info to non-Anglophones likely to be interested in the user. For somebody working a lot on Korean articles, some info in Korean might be useful. And as the English version of Wikivoyage is the biggest, there are people using it, as editors, as editors on other language versions, and as readers, who may benefit from info in other languages (and I see nothing wrong in using other languages for spicing it up). Having only a short paragraph in English and the rest in an other language should be regarded OK, although that short paragraph should probably explain why. --LPfi (talk) 17:28, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm not too fussed about this. Ideally, they would have created their userpages at Meta, in which case the French would be displayed everywhere, including here, and I seriously doubt that anyone would have thought it was a problem in that case. So my thinking is: If we don't care that a global userpage shows up in the 'wrong' language here (and no matter what language you write in, yours is the 'wrong' language from the POV of >99% of the wikis), then why should we really care that the 'wrong' language is showing on these pages? It seems like a waste of energy over something unimportant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey 2017

Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can post technical proposals from now until November 20. The communities will vote on the proposals between November 28 and December 12. You can read more on the 2017 wishlist survey page. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:17, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Mobile and apps/Mobile app for sister projects seems relevant to this group. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

It's Wikivoyage, but not Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary. Digr (talk) 19:50, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Toy Museums or Childhood topic?

It's now Mid-November, and I was wondering if there was anyone that would be able to draft an article on Toy Museums, in time for Mid-Decemeber.

Or perhaps there would need to be a Travel Topic on "Childhood" as opposed to just Toy Musuems, distinct from "Child and Family Friendly" places to see and do things?

Both of the Toy museums I can think of are in London, and I wanted a "Childhood" article to avoid promoting whatever franchise craze was currently the latest thing on the internet.

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:04, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

good idea, another great destination topic would be zoos. --Traveler100 (talk) 20:59, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Indianapolis has the world's largest children's museum (and best). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:30, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

I think that both Toy museums and Zoos would be fairly easy to write. I'm not sure what you would include in Childhood. (My first thought was that it sounded like a candidate for April Fools', as a type of time travel.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:38, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Can't be, because we have (or have had) children among our editors. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:56, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Travelling with children basically covers what I imagine a "childhood" topic to be. What else is there to say that can't be added to that article?

If there are enough toy museums out there to merit an article, I wouldn't argue against it. Surprised we haven't got anything on zoos. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:31, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm really surprised we don't have a dedicated zoo or aquarium article. There should be plenty of content on those topics (i.e. what to expect of zoos in different countries, whether you should expect food and drink places or to bring your own, conservation tie-ins and how some offer classes or shows). I'd start one myself, but I don't know enough about zoos and my life doesn't give me much time for wiki editing at the moment. DethDestroyerOfWords (talk) 15:29, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Re: Zoos: (having worked as a Zoo Keeper for a bit ...) I'm uncertain. I'd expect Zoos in a locality to be included in the guide for the City/Town/Village. On a worldwide basis it could become a very long listing. For more of a discussion of zoos then it could get very difficult and a lot would come down to personal opinion - conservation, captive breeding, return to wild, genetic variation, morals of keeping animals in captivity (e.g. Costa Rica). And what do you include; some zoos are good, others not so good, do you include rescue centres? Do you start discussing things like EEP, Studbooks, species coordinators, inter zoo transfers, TAGs, etc., etc. - in which case you are into quite a lot of background detail that I suspect most visitors to zoos wont be too interested in (and the Zoos themselves are probably better sources for such info as their web sites tend to say quite a lot about there activities in these areas). And despite having worked as a Zookeeper (finished 5'ish years ago) I don't feel I have adequate knowledge to write such an article. PsamatheM (talk) 17:13, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

I think that Zoos would include some information on world-famous zoos (Vienna as the oldest, Hamburg as the start of naturalistic displays...), but perhaps more about types of zoos (e.g., toddlers probably prefer small zoos with a playground, 10 year olds probably prefer big zoos, an ecology student might want to see an endangered species, etc.) and maybe trends, like rotating animals between exhibits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:43, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

You also at least in the UK, have Zoos that are in effect entire parks, like Whipsnade.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 09:23, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

I actually meant "History of Childhood" because there are things that aren't strictly toys that are related... Some overlap with Miniatures, dioramas and scale models which was still largely a stub. :( ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:20, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

That title infers an article which begins "Back in my day, it was ten miles to school, uphill both ways... but you tell the kids that these days?" :) Perhaps toys and childhood amusements would be a suitable title? Dunno. Obviously it's a redlink, but then museums redlinks. K7L (talk) 14:49, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

I was actually thinking Toys, puzzles and other amusements, to cover things like where to buy Rubix cubes and so on.. Anyone want to stub?

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:36, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

2017 Community Wishlist Survey

Today I added a wish for the improving of the Kartographer tool on the meta wiki. Please take part in the discussion. Thanks. --RolandUnger (talk) 17:00, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that. Some editors at w:en:WP:VPT were just lamenting the complete lack of map-related wishes for this year. I think it would be a good idea to have more wishes on subjects such as maps, which are important to so many different kinds and sizes of projects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website.

Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas from the research done by the New Readers team in Mexico, Nigeria, and India. The teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated by user research and community feedback. The prototype evaluation received positive feedback and results, so development continued.

For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome browsers on Android. Support for other mobile browsers to come in the future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print functionality. Users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF. Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal readability for smaller screens.

The feature is available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org.

Thank you!

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

A more visual pleasing look for certain prominent list articles

I just transformed our Communication page, which previously only included a list of articles with no additional information, to include a more visually pleasing look (in my opinion) and some additional information. I tend to prefer we use this type of look for certain prominent list articles which is common place on the German Wikivoyage.

In my opinion this design should also be used in our Transport page as well like this (and maybe in other prominent list articles as well).

Would you support that change to the Transport page? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 20:35, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Does look better. --Traveler100 (talk) 20:40, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I like this, too. Thanks for taking the initiative. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

A separate issue: The Communication page is tagged as a travel topic article. But it is not listed at Travel topics. And it is really an index or directory of articles, rather than a topic article, similar to the Itineraries page. I suggest that {{outlinetopic}} be replaced with {{Title-Index page}}. And I guess {{PartOfTopic|Travel topics}} should be deleted – the Itineraries page doesn't have a {{PartOfTopic|...}}. Nurg (talk) 01:27, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Not sure how that got missed. I have replaced the driving sub-topic with Communication. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:22, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

I just transformed three more prominent 'list articles' to have the same look

Following the support I got above with the changes I did to the Communication page, I decided to do give the following three pages a similar transformation - Transportation, Boat travel and General transportation subjects. I hope you too prefer the more visual pleasing version of these articles as well.

The Transportation article had a quite a lot of text in it which in my opinion should be moved to the sub-articles. Since English isn't my main language, I would be grateful if any of the native English speakers here (or any expert editors for that matter) would help me make sure that all of the text form this version of that page is copied to the relevant sub articles. Anyone interested in helping me with that? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 07:45, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Oh, and I'll be also very happy if anyone with knowledge on this subject would write the article Ride hailing services (about using services like Uber and Lyft) which I noticed was missing in the Transportation page. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 07:47, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Did you check that the articles in the sublists are easily found also after the change? I note for example that Sea kayaking doesn't fit well into any of the links in the current Boat travel. The closest is Boating, where it is mentioned in a subsection two pages down the article and does not fit well with the description in the lead. The kayaking articles are breadcrumbed to water sports, which may be logical, but not necessarily the place people are looking (hiking is in another branch, at Outdoor life). --LPfi (talk) 11:36, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Oops, I note sea kayaking is mentioned as See also. I hope other subarticles not clearly fitting are handled in a similar way. --LPfi (talk) 11:44, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thank you for doing this, ויקיג'אנקי. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 16:47, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Are we sure we want this?

I am personally a bit taken aback by what was done at Transportation where flowing text was converted into this somewhat infantilizing stock-photo-pallooza... I am not sure the old articles are the best we ever did, but the new is also questionable... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:17, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

The same. IMO, we should roll back, and then make a draft of a replacement article. /Yvwv (talk) 22:21, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

And perhaps a simple but broader suggestion: Make all the text at the bottom of the front page substantially larger. Failed to mention them to several people I referred to the site, and they missed them as well. Regards, Hennejohn (talk) 00:16, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I tend to agree. Changing a small list to the new style is a big improvement but I'm not so sure when there is significant text in an article that has to be removed. Gizza ^(roam) 00:27, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

the thing is though... the Transportation article was never meant to be a big mish mash of texts. It is too broad of a subject and therefore it works much better in my opinion when it is not flooded with text and helps the readers to easily navigate to the right sub-articles they are seeking (and I am sure that there are a lot more subjects that might be created in the future as sub articles for this broad topic). As I mentioned above, any content the was previously in the Transportation article, in my opinion, should be moved to the sub articles where it belongs. otherwise, why not just move all content that exists in the sub articles to one big Transportation article (I am hoping you agree that it would be a bad idea since no one would be able to locate the information they need and the article would be too big). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:23, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Hobbitschuster, Yvwv, User:DaGizza and Hennejohn - do all of you oppose moving the content which existed in the Transportation article to the sub articles? Do all of you believe that it would be better to have the same big segments of text appear in both the main Transportation article as well as the sub articles? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:39, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

If a user knows they want to read about rail transportation, they will go to the article on rail transportation. If they go to the article on transportation in general, they want different forms compared, contrasted and the upsides and downsides shown. Hence for that a plucky picture parade is not what most people will be looking for. Hobbitschuster (talk) 03:45, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

This is not a complete new concept to the English Wikivoyage - the prominent 'list article' Travel topics is also a type of "a plucky picture parade"...do you suggest we replace it with a text only version? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:49, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I have always thought the Travel topics picture parade is less than ideal (see the talk page), but that is not the point. Nobody comes to "travel topics" to read about travel topics, they come to find travel topic articles of interest. As Hobbitschuster writes, the Transportation article had worthwhile prose that people might actually suppose to find on that page. We could of course move that to a subarticle (Choosing transport?), but I do not see why it could't be directly there, as long as the articles on individual transport forms are easy to find. --LPfi (talk) 10:21, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

FYI (just an observation and we don't have to follow it at all of course) Wikipedia covers both ways of displaying topics with the Portal namespace, which is pictorial, and the Outline feature which is listy. For example, see w:Portal:Europe and w:Outline of Europe. Gizza ^(roam) 11:12, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

When the options for a top/high level page are either a short, boring list or the same list with icons and brief text descriptions, then I'm in favor of the icon approach.

When the options are either a lot of text or almost no text with icons, then I think we need to carefully consider the options in the context of the specific page. I don't think that there can be a single one-size-fits-all rule. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

With a quick read of "Transportation", it appears primarily/wholly focused on choosing what to use...interesting and useful. The icons tend to let a reader quickly choose a type based on available articles. Thus my preference for making "Choosing a type of transportation" perhaps the first icon in the new set of icons...the contents to be the "Transportation" article. Just a suggestion from someone who's primarily a user. Hennejohn (talk) 19:44, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

An idea I had for the upcoming 5th anniversary of the launch of Wikivoyage on the Wikimedia servers

5th anniversary coming up on January 15, 2018!

We are rapidly approaching the fifth anniversary of the launch of Wikivoyage on the Wikimedia servers (the initial launch for all the language editions on the Wikimedia servers happened on January 15, 2013).

I was thinking it would be a really good way to promote Wikivoyage as we approach this date if we would be able to convince the Wikimedia foundation to sponsor a "Wikivoyage month" which would be a promotion wikiproject aimed at getting volunteers to help expand or improve selected articles on all Wikivoyage editions during the 30 days leading to the official fifth anniversary date (December 15 2017 - January 15 2018).

The general idea is that we'll have a wikiproject for all the Wikivoyage editions, similar to Wikipedia's current "Asia month".... YET... this wikiproject would invite people to write or expand either:

• (1) Selected articles we would choose to be our core articles (we'll need to decide which ones those are, although I'll just mention that on the Hebrew Wikivoyage we choose the following articles to be the 200 core articles of the Hebrew Wikivoyage). Doing this would ensure that this effort would mainly focus on the articles we deem to be the most important articles.
• (2) Or any destination article they are interested in or have a lot of knowledge about (the downside of this option is that we won't have a concentrated effort on selected articles).
• (3) Or maybe only the article about their hometown (this wouldn't be very helpful for Wikivoyage editions where most of the potential contributors whom speak that language are concentrated mostly in one or a couple of countries).

for this to work well, Wikimedia would have to support such an effort and agree to add global banners at the top of ALL the pages on all the Wikimedia websites just like they did with the "Asia month" which was featured on Wikivoyage as well. At this point massive exposure to Wikivoyage would definitely be helpful, especially for the smaller Wikivoyage editions in which usually only a few editors are active trying to keep them afloat, and they (including the Hebrew Wikivoyage) definitely need any web traffic they can get from Wikipedia.

If you like this idea, please help me bring it forward to the Wikimedia foundation. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:40, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Well I think on en-WV there are a bunch of articles that are without a doubt important articles but given the stuff you might see perusing Talk:USA we might not want even more editing on them... However, there are without a shred of a doubt numerous, numerous articles that need edits. But which of them should we put particular focus on? Hobbitschuster (talk) 17:57, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

In my opinion, before we start talking about which articles are the most important articles that would have the highest priority for such a wikiproject, I suggest that we waste no time with this idea and go directly to the biggest challenge standing in the way of making this idea a reality - which is convincing the Wikimedia foundation that this is a good idea worth doing.

I'll just add that I myself have tried last week to convince the Hebrew branch of the Wikimedia foundation to launch such a wikiproject on a much smaller scale (for only the Hebrew sites of the Wikimedia foundation) but they told me that it is either going to be a global wikiproject like Wikipedia's "Asia Month" or nothing (which is because basically they don't have the authority do launch something like that).

Can anyone help me bring this idea forward as soon as possible to the Wikimedia foundation? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:30, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Whom would we have to contact for that? And how concrete would we have to be with our proposal? Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:01, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

We have been through this 5 years ago right after the launch. Such a campaign will have exactly the opposite effect, especially for smaller projects. Lots of new people will come and write something that typically does not fit into the travel guide at all, or at least requires extensive copy-editing. With their limited manpower, smaller projects will not be able to cope with this influx of new editors and will simply stay with lots of unfinished, generally useless articles. All new editors will leave as soon as the banner is down. We have not got any single long-term editor from that campaign.

If anyone still wants to try this, I would recommend to opt for the banner in one or a few Wikipedias, which only needs consent of those Wikipedias where the banner is activated. --Alexander (talk) 20:37, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

"We have not got any single long-term editor from that campaign." Well that's wrong for starters. I only came to Wikivoyage (on 15 January 2013) because there was a banner at the top of Wikipedia advertising it; I can't be the only one. Furthermore, there is no reasonable justification for "All new editors will leave as soon as the banner is down." - I would say it is quite likely that during that month, people will come here, decide they like it, and decide to stay. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 09:53, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

ThunderingTyphoons!, I was talking about Russian Wikivoyage, and I deem it an instructive example for most Wikivoyages, except for a few bigger ones. People may decide to stay if they find useful information, which means a significant number of well-written and properly illustrated articles should already exist. We did not have that back in 2013 (on Russian Wikivoyage), so we did not get anything out of that banner campaign. It may be better now, although I am not sure. On the other hand, I am sure that Hebrew Wikivoyage with its single "very active contributor" (meaning an editor with more than 100 edits per month per the stats definition) has neither such articles nor enough manpower to cope with new people coming. So I do expect the overall negative effect on smaller Wikivoyages, and I have solid evidence to support that statement.

In my opinion, a much better option for smaller projects is organizing contests, which draw a smaller number of more experienced people. Another advantage is that people participating in a contest tend to read the guidelines, while those coming through a banner do not read anything. By the way, Ukrainian Wikivoyage will run such a contest in December. --Alexander (talk) 12:47, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

In my view, it is definitely up to each individual Wikivoyage to decide if they want to be part of this, so that decision should obviously be taken over at Викигид. I would ask you to consider that things may be somewhat different five years later, since your argument is based on inductive evidence; there is nothing about past events that means they will inevitably repeat in the present or future. You may find Викигид has an experience more similar to that of EN Wikivoyage in 2013, with new and constructive editors adding to your team. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 13:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

That's something I have mentioned above. We may be able to gain something out of it, although we will have to work hard. A Wikivoyage with one very active editor has no chance to turn this banner campaign into a useful event, and there is strong evidence behind this statement. --Alexander (talk) 13:35, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

We can have the banner point to a landing page where the most common pitfalls are explained and/or a help center where our most experienced users can answer questions and help with problems. I don't think there are many well-intentioned contributions that we could get that are so bad as to be worse than not getting any contribution at all. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:15, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

In January 2013, two people (me included) spent about 6 hours per day on cleaning up the mess created by these well-intentioned contributors on Russian Wikivoyage. --Alexander (talk) 21:28, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

It make sense such a comment would come from one of the biggest Wikivoyage editions. I myself found Wikivoyage thanks to those banners in January 2013, and mostly thanks to my help the Hebrew Wikivoyage was launched as well on March 28, 2013. I am sure that if you'll ask the admins of any of the medium sized Wikivoyage editions, or the small Wikivoyage editions they'll say the same as me - we need the help of a good promotion on Wikipedia pages to help get many more people to hear about Wikivoyage and consider contributing to it. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:33, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

@Atsirlin: what did the mess look like? And could the users who produced it not be pointed to some sort of explanation? If after being pointed out how stuff works they still carry on doing it wrong, maybe they're not all that well intentioned after all. And if they were not pointed to how to do stuff better, that seems to me like a major omission. I think it should be obvious that before such a thing is done, we should either look at our existing advice for new contributors (especially subsets coming over from WP) and/or write completely new advice. And as I said, we could put a link to a page of advice in the banner. But I can't possibly believe that a dozen well intentioned users can possibly be more work for the regulars than the dozens of touts we currently have. And stuff like our listing editor should help make a lot of stuff pretty self-explanatory... Hobbitschuster (talk) 03:49, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

It looked like 10 new people coming every day and making hundreds of edits and creating 10 new pages on average. Most of these pages would not fit into the geographical hierarchy, others would be about places that do not merit their own article. I can't show you such things, because they were all deleted. What I can show is a city travel guide after the work of a well-intentioned contributor in February 2013, here. Lists of useless objects, unsystematic selection of attractions with no single description, museums are described as merely having "10000 exhibits" or "5000 exhibits" without saying what these exhibits are. You can also see how this article looks now after my editing. I did not use the previously added information, I simply removed it and wrote the article from scratch.

If we tried to talk to people, we typically got no response, or the response was "I just add some information, and you decide how to arrange it". The problem is that banners attract people who have never edited wiki before. They don't know anything about wiki-markup and they usually have no idea what a travel guide is. --Alexander (talk) 08:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

With 4900 articles now (and ~2000 articles back in 2013), isn't Russian Wikivoyage a medium-size Wikivoyage? --Alexander (talk) 08:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the size of a wiki refers to the number of active contributors, rather than number of pages. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 09:58, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

That statistics gives basically the same result. --Alexander (talk) 12:47, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

(unindent) I think this could potentially be a good idea, if it's executed the right way. But I think taking the one-size-fits-all approach ויקיג'אנקי proposes would be a bad way of executing it. The needs of smaller Wikivoyages like he: are very different from those of larger ones like en:. For our purposes here, I agree with Hobbitschuster that the notion of defining certain articles as "more important" than others and shunting new contributors towards them would do more harm than good. Our most important articles (as defined by the metric of the OP; the question of who's to say what makes an article "important" is also a good one) generally don't need any more attention than they're already getting, and in many cases (i.e. USA) cleaning up after the excessive number of dubious-quality edits on high-traffic articles often ends up siphoning time and energy away from articles that are far more in need of attention. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:02, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea, and am all for lending whatever help I can give. I also agree with The Hobbit and Andre that EN's needs are probably different to most if not all other Wikivoyages. It would be far better, for us at least, to just encourage new editors to edit whatever articles they fancy, but perhaps to suggest (on the same "explanation" page mentioned by Hobbitschuster) they start either on their hometown or a favourite holiday destination (options 2 or 3 as proposed by ויקיג'אנקי). Not getting a concerted effort on specific articles should be offset by attracting more editors, which can't ever be a bad thing, despite certain assertions to the contrary here. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:05, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

The other thing that should probably take priority over even contacting Wikimedia, is getting a sense of what the other Wikivoyages think by asking them. This is a good enough idea that if need be it could just be taken forward here and on Hebvoy if the other wikis don't want to join in, but if other languages are going to be involved, they need to be informed of the idea and say whether they want in or not. In this regard, I would be happy to contact French Wikivoyage, if we develop a stronger consensus for this idea among editors here. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:17, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I support some sort of promotional or awareness campaign during the anniversary. Even we did revert and delete 90% of the new contributions and keep 10% (which may be the worst case scenario), if some of the 10% writers stay, Wikivoyage will be better in the long run. And we don't just need editors but readers too. Higher readership will be a boost to SEO and hopefully lead to a chain or viral reaction where some of the new readers spread the word and/or follow us on social media. Gizza ^(roam) 10:58, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Implementation

Some notes on the (possible) implementation:

1. It is of course necessary to contact people from different language versions asking for their opinion and support. It is also necessary to ping Stefan and James, who have good connections in the Wikimedia world, instead of naively asking "Whom would we have to contact for that?"

2. Further discussion largely depends on the scope. One "smaller" language could negotiate this with their home Wikipedia (e.g., Hebrew Wikipedia for he.voy) without going to Meta, but anything that involves English-speaking projects around the globe is more central and thus takes more time to organize.

3. The time frame of 15.12-15.01 is likely unrealistic. First, the recommended discussion period for the central notice is "at least 7 days", but for a non-standard case it may take longer. Second, landing pages explaining what to write and how to write should be prepared. Just posting a link "Please, contribute to Wikivoyage" on top of the Wikipedia pages will make more harm than good, see our 2013 experience (described in the thread above). Third, some banner campaigns are already scheduled. I am sure WMF will be reluctant to advertise Wikivoyage during the ongoing "Big English fundraising campaign" (20.11-31.12). The overlap with the "Wikimedia Annual Report" (7.01-30.01) is also undesirable. Therefore, I would aim for the period 15.01-15.02 arguing that 1 month is better than 2 weeks (which we had back in 2013), because there is still overlap in the second half of January.

--Alexander (talk) 13:03, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Another implementation idea is to turn this into something like the ongoing Asian Month, essentially an edit-a-thon. Potential advantages would be: i) a more clear incentive and a small reward for the most prolific editors; ii) the Wikimedia community is already familiar with this kind of events; there should be no major opposition to having the central banner for such an event, whereas promoting a project because of its 5th anniversary is something that (to my knowledge) never happened before; iii) the event can be made regular. --Alexander (talk) 17:31, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

This is basically what I was suggesting... an edit-a-thon type initiative like "Asian Month" (our 5th anniversary is just the "excuse" for the Wikimedia foundation to support this). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 19:08, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

The Asian month entails a competition component with jury and prizes. The prizes are minor, but someone should still arrange them. A jury is needed, and someone should draft the rules. Any volunteers? --Alexander (talk) 19:41, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

With respect to a centralnotice, the details on how to get one is here. This is partly community determined rather than WMF determined. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:40, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

James, yes, it is community-determined, and I believe it has to be announced in English Wikipedia and/or in the wikimedia-l mailing list. Could we use your help with that? For example, could you post such an announcement (when the time comes)? --Alexander (talk) 01:09, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Timeless skin

Swept in from the pub

Hi there. As you may have noticed we have the new "Timeless" skin available for the wikis. Its a responsive skin working on all devices. It looks quite modern and I have switched to it immediately. Your language versions seems to have some problems with this skin.

1. The page banner is not shown at all. Articles like Chiang Mai start with the map with POIs and no photo of that place
2. The main page does not show the three featured articles at all - just the three numbered buttons. You do not need a mobile phone to check it. Just reduce the browser width to a small mobile phone width.

Maybe it's useful to have an eye on it. People like me could use it or the new skin could be switched to standard for anonymous readers. -- DerFussi 06:30, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

In addition to those issues, I also found the Timeless skin doesn't display the breadcrumb trail and doesn't always line the text up right in the routeboxes. It's too bad, I like the look of the Timeless skin, particularly the font, but I don't think we should recommend it over the normal skin at this point. -Shaundd (talk) 06:40, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Need your help convincing more prominent Wikipedians to help expand Wikivoyage

I am currently thinking of trying to convince some of the most prominent/prolific Wikipedians at the Hebrew Wikipedia to help expand the Hebrew Wikivoyage (there are only so many Hebrew speakers whom actually contribute to Hebrew Wiki websites, and the majority of them are mostly active on the Hebrew Wikipedia, so it makes most sense to me to go there in order to try and recruit potential editors).

Although through the years the Hebrew Wikivoyage was mostly disregarded by Hebrew speaking Wikipedians, probably because initially we had to build the foundation of the website from scratch + I think many Wikipedians never saw the advantages of Wikivoyage and probably prefered to mostly write encyclopedic articles instead... I am hoping that nowadays, that it is much more clear that the Hebrew Wikivoyage supplies a lot of valuable content which does not exist in Wikipedia and that it isn't a Wikipedia clone.... some of them might actually choose to join the effort.

If possible, please write below the main arguments ("pitch") which in your opinion might hopefully convince some of them to help expand Wikivoyage - Why in your opinion is Wikivoyage important/essential? Why should they invest their time and efforts in Wikivoyage in addition to Wikipedia? (any other ideas for arguments that might convince long time prominent Wikipedians to help out would be more than welcome). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 16:52, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

One thing that I would emphasize is how the writing at Wikivoyage is more casual and fun. It's still work but it's not like an encyclopedia so it gives you an opportunity to write in a different style which is more enjoyable. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:05, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I echo Justin's comments. Wikipedia policy strikes me as restrictive and repressively applied. When editing there I feel almost like I'm in a straitjacket, and I suspect I'm not the only one. Wikivoyage is nothing like that. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:29, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

That's a good point, although it's probably not the main argument that would convince a prominent prolific Wikipedian to support Wikivoyage (because most likely, a typical prominent Wikipedia editor... I am talking about the 200-400 people whom made most of what is the Hebrew Wikipedia... has most likely gotten used to writing in the "Wikipedia" writing style by now, and doesn't see an advantage in not writing in a encyclopedic writing style). Also, the argument about the text in Wikivoyage being written in a less formal and more casual and fun style... this point is probably not yet well noticed in most Wikivoyage editions (including the Hebrew Wikivoyage) EXCEPT for the English Wikivoyage or the German Wikivoyage, since most Wikivoyage editions are low on text due to the relative low amounts of active prolific editors/writers. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:53, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I find de-WV at times overly formal an bureaucratic... Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:19, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

That may be your experience, but trashing Wikipedia is probably the worst way to attract Wikipedians here, and the most effective way of making them feel unwelcome. Maybe we could do a bit less of that so that we don't scare people away. Ground Zero (talk) 18:50, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I am not trying to trash anyone... on the contrary (and I'm very sorry if you got that impression from what I wrote so far). I myself am a Wikipedian (one of those 200-400 people whom made most of what is the Hebrew Wikipedia nowadays) and through the last five years ALL the 8-10 prolific editors on the Hebrew Wikivoyage were also Wikipedians whom discovered Wikivoyage after first being active for a while at Wikipedia (and all but me eventually gave up due to various reasons). I tend to believe that most Wikivoyager on the Hebrew Wikivoyage are most likely to have been Wikipedians beforehand simply because people whom edit Wikipedia for a while acquire tools and knowledge about how to collaborative create decent quality content on wiki websites (while most people don't know how to do so or don't have any interest in doing so). Because of that, I tend to believe that the future of the Hebrew Wikivoyage (and maybe of other smaller editions of Wikivoyage) heavily relies on Wikipedians and that it is important to look into how to make the case that Wikivoyage is important, valuable, and that more Wikipedians should consider helping out (and I believe that in order to do so it is very important to listen to the arguments made by the prominent Wikipedians whom refuse to help improve/expand Wikivoyage). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 21:25, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

@ויקיג'אנקי: No, I wasn't referring to your comment. I was referring to comments by other editors, here and in other discussions. Ground Zero (talk) 18:16, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

I stay because it's fun and the people are nice.

Also, it's a good place for information that doesn't belong in Wikipedia. If the overall mission appeals to you, then the idea of sharing your knowledge doesn't need much explaining. This is the place for that part of "the sum of human knowledge" that sounds like "whenever we have visitors, we always take them to..." or "the best value for your hotel money is at...". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I actually also like the more relaxed tone. Another thing which I prefer with Wikivoyage is that I feel like I'm making a larger individual impact here. One additional active editor makes a much larger difference to Wikivoyage than to Wikipedia. I suspect that a good tactic for attracting new editors is to ask for specific help. E.g. if you see that a wikipedian is from X you can ask if the person could help editing the X Wikivoyage article. It is always nice to feel wanted, and I think that many wikipedians wouldn't mind doing a small task like updating one article. Once they try Wikivoyage for themselves they'll hopefully get hooked and stay. MartinJacobson (talk) 18:18, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I tried getting specific editors from the Hebrew Wikipedia that seem to be the experts about specific cities/countries (for example, people whom made most contributions to the articles of prominent cities/countries, but after a while I found out that in the Hebrew Wikivoyage most of those prolific writers actually never been to those cities/countries, but actually write a relative short summarized article based on the information which exists on the parallel articles in the English Wikipedia (this is most likely due to the fact that most Hebrew speakers live in Israel). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:39, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I think wikis can be revolutionary in many areas, not just the world of encyclopedias. I'm a fan of most not-for-profit wikis in existence and all the non-WP ones tend to be undervalued by readers and editors alike. Also I think there are many people interested in actively writing travel context that would never write for Wikipedia. The number of travel bloggers, travellers who post articles and comments on dedicated forums, people who review points of interest on Tripadvisor, Yelp, even Quora etc. is huge, far more than the number of people who edit Wikipedia. That is the much larger untapped pool IMO but the challenge is to get them to join us. Gizza ^(roam) 01:35, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Seeing just latest changes on watchlist

I now see only the latest change of each article on the watchlist, although I have chosen to see all. As the latest change is no more likely to be important than the others (in fact major changes are usually followed by minor edits) the watchlist is now nearly useless. Am I supposed to look at the history of every article listed? A lot of unnecessary clicking. Is it just me or has there been some update causing this? I use the classic Monobook skin, which might affect things. --LPfi (talk) 21:10, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

@LPfi: I also use Monobook and have "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" checked at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist. Are you sure that you saved it as such? I am seeing all changes. 22:17, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I have had it marked for ages and haven't touched it recently. I also twice checked it was checked. I now un- and rechecked it. The problem persists. I did something to disable some new features some time ago, might there be some coupling? At sv-wp the watchlist works as expected. --LPfi (talk) 06:58, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

The watchlist seems to work fine on other computers. I will get back if I find something. --LPfi (talk) 20:37, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

I created an expedition (in userspace)

So, I made this in my userspace. Before I move it to main, I would like someone - was it User:Traveler100 who did them in the past? - to make one of those nifty status update checkbar things we usually have for expeditions which tell us which listings are needed and which status articles have. You can of course weigh in, edit and ask me questions and I will make it a regular live expedition as soon as the aforementioned feature is added. Hobbitschuster (talk) 14:08, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

I will give it a go. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:01, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! Sorry for misspelling your username... Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:07, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Where is it exactly - challenge of the day

Swept in from the pub

• Wli Todzi - have narrowed it down but cannot find it exactly. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:31, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

It's at co-ords 7.07, 0.60, immediately adjacent to the border with Togo. The only access from within Ghana is by walking track. There is road access – the only road access – from Togo, which causes some small political problems. Nurg (talk) 10:07, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

• Baihe - see talk for rough idea where it is. --Traveler100 (talk) 13:21, 25 December 2017 (UTC)
• Bokeo Nature Reserve is in Bokeo Province, but where exactly? Can find the office in Huay Xai. --Traveler100 (talk) 15:07, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Looks to be at about 20.467, 100.773, based on TripAdvisor. It's also labeled 'Gibbon Experience' on the Mapnik layer of GeoMap (visible if you zoom in to level 12+). –StellarD (talk) 16:38, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

• Thulo Sailung, found a hotel with the name but was not in Ramechhap. --Traveler100 (talk) 11:05, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Thulo Sailung apparently means 'Mt. Sailung', and the surrounding hilly region is also referred to as Sailung, or Sailungeshwor. Sailung Peak is shown on the Mapnik layer of GeoMap at 27.5614, 85.9744, and there's a village temple of Shree Sailungeschwor at 27.57519, 86.00453. I went ahead and added the peak's coordinates as a geotemplate – not sure if the village would be better. –StellarD (talk) 13:38, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

• Mount Dalei needing a second opinion on what is suggested on the talk page. --Traveler100 (talk) 15:58, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Sweeping the pub

Swept in from the pub

I've spent a bunch of time clearing out old discussions from the pub today, following the exhortation at the top of this page:

"Keeping the pub clean is a group effort. If we have too many conversations on this page, it gets too noisy and hard to read. If you see an old conversation (i.e. a month dormant) that could be moved to a talk page, please do so...."

I've done my best to move discussions to relevant pages, and failing that, to user talk pages or to the pub archive.

If you think there is a better place for something I've moved, please move it there. I won't be offended. If you'd rather complain about me moving something, please do so at the Pub Sweeping Customer Service Office in person.

You can avoid having your discussions moved somewhere you don't like by starting them on the correct page in the first place. You can add a note here in the pub to direct people to that discussion, which can be removed by a sweeper after a month, and that way we keep the pub tidy. Thank you, and a happy Christmas to those who celebrate it. Ground Zero (talk) 01:37, 25 December 2017 (UTC)