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Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2013

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 This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Please judge E11 hiking trail

It appears to me that I have now completed the description of itinerary E11 hiking trail. Could somebody please check if this is what WikiVoyage understands as a good article about an itinerary? Please read the Discussion page of the article first. DrMennoWolters (talk) 13:30, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This sort of request can go to Wikivoyage:Requests for comment. I will add it there. At some point, it can be deleted here. Pashley (talk) 14:23, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Specific suggestions for the article which cannot edited directly, should go to the Discussion page of the article. General ideas about how itineraries should be written, may come to the pub or the Project page or perhaps elsewhere. DrMennoWolters (talk) 17:00, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Site notice

We need to get something together for the launch. Currently I have proposed "This week we are launching Wikivoyage. Join us in creating a free travel guide that anyone can edit." Feel free to adjust . Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:43, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Try to keep it under 140 characters so it will fit on twitter, and lets decide on a hashtag too, maybe #Wikivoyage --  S.Bryan  04:49, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Be a Wikimedia fundraising "User Experience" volunteer!

Thank you to everyone who volunteered last year on the Wikimedia fundraising 'User Experience' project. We have talked to many different people in different countries and their feedback has helped us immensely in restructuring our pages. If you haven't heard of it yet, the 'User Experience' project has the goal of understanding the donation experience in different countries (outside the USA) and enhancing the localization of our donation pages.

I am (still) searching for volunteers to spend some time on a Skype chat with me, reviewing their own country's donation pages. It will be done on a 'usability' format (I will ask you to read the text and go through the donation flow) and will be asking your feedback in the meanwhile.

The only pre-requisite is for the volunteer to actually live in the country and to have access to at least one donation method that we offer for that country (mainly credit/debit card, but also real time banking like IDEAL, E-wallets, etc...) so we can do a live test and see if the donation goes through. **All volunteers will be reimbursed of the donations that eventually succeed (and they will be very low amounts, like 1-2 dollars)**

By helping us you are actually helping thousands of people to support our mission of free knowledge across the world. If you are interested (or know of anyone who could be) please email ppena@wikimedia.org. All countries needed (excepting USA)!!

Thanks!

Pats Pena
Global Fundraising Operations Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Sent using Global message delivery, 20:48, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Images redirecting?

Does anyone know why these urls are redirecting to other images? Wikilink example: File:Pantheon.jpg. --Peter Talk 22:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The image is a redirect on Commons: . -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:26, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We have an image page by that name, though—a template is transcluded there that I want to get rid of. Is there any way to edit, delete, and/or view the page? --Peter Talk 22:47, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Try replacing the file name as appropriate in the following URL: http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=File:Pantheon.jpg&redirect=no . Since the image is on Commons you can probably just delete the local page rather than editing it. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:50, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Launch Preparation

We're scheduled to leave beta next Tuesday, so I'm wondering if there is a single place where we are enumerating tasks to complete for launch? I've seen discussions in a few places, but it might be useful to have a master list with pointers to relevant discussions. The list below contains some of the things I'm aware of, but if others could append (or move this discussion to a more appropriate place) it would be greatly appreciated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:14, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The breadcrumb navigation has a bug with district articles that could be fixed. --Globe-trotter (talk) 13:56, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Launch tasks

High priority:

Other:

We should probably have a policy in place and fully explained for how to handle the import of new templates. This will likely be an issue with new users from Wikipedia & other WMF wikis which use template a bit more liberally than we do. There has been some discussion at Wikivoyage_talk:Using_Mediawiki_templates on changes, specifically in the last section.
Another item to consider (maybe not high priority, but very nice to do at launch) would be to use a bot to add the Wikivoyage template to the relevant Wikipedia article. Matching the correct WV/WP articles should be easy (use whatever page is in the WP template & shows up in the sidebar), but the bot would have to recognize other sister project templates and, if present, add w:Template:Sister project links instead. Doing this around the launch would call a little more attention to WV if WP editors see not only the banner, but also the addition of the WV template as a way of WV joining as a sister project. AHeneen (talk) 07:00, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was thinking the same. Good suggestion. --Saqib (talk) 07:05, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
w:Template:Wikivoyage is on a lot of pages already; it's just hidden until launch. Some uses will need to be converted to use w:Template:Sister project links instead, but that can be done piecemeal or by a bot. LtPowers (talk) 15:45, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A page for info for press might also be useful. It would include contact info (at WMF), an overview of the site (history, move, language versions, how it works), stats (# of pages, daily edits, users, etc), examples of quality pages (list a few big cities, off-the-beaten path locations, travel topics, & itineraries that are at guide/star level and can demonstrate the breadth of quality content we have at Wikivoyage). While most of the topics that were listed have their own page, it would be very useful to write a couple sentences about each topic and have a link to the relevant page than leave some journalist unfamiliar with wikis and (of course) our site to hunt around for info. AHeneen (talk) 04:23, 14 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Learning Vacations

Swept in from the pub

From what I've been seeing on the web and from talking to people is that 'Learning Vacations' are getting more popular. The website, Road Scholar, has some great examples of this. Definately something to consider as a topic for the new wikivoyage site. —The preceding comment was added by 216.171.198.40 (talk • contribs)

Travel is often, among other things, a learning experience, we have Gap year travel & a suggestion that we should have studying abroad has been made; I do not recall where. Checking their web site, though, I do not see that Road Scholar offer anything special. They appear to be just another tour agency. Pashley (talk) 03:09, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Checkuser nominations

I've nominated myself and User:Inas for local CheckUser rights, with an eye to the upcoming public launch on the 15th. We need at least 25 statements of support per Wikimedia policy, so please weigh in! --Peter Talk 07:48, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It must be noted that you two must identify to the foundation with confirmation of being at least 18 + age of majority in your country before you can receive access.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:56, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, not a problem. --Peter Talk 20:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
same. --Inas (talk) 10:24, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an archiving bot?

This talk page is getting rather long. I wonder whether there's already a bot on this project for managing the archiving of threads. Tony (talk) 12:57, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please see #Archiving above. We avoid automatic archiving on this page, because most discussions should be swept to appropriate talk pages, rather than consigned to the cellar. LtPowers (talk) 14:33, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WMF blog post

The Wikimedia Foundation have published the Wikivoyage announcement on the Foundation blog.

Two Wikimedia chapter blogs also have announcements: Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Ukraine. —Tom Morris (talk) 18:36, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And the Foundation have a press release. —Tom Morris (talk) 18:46, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And we, the big slippery never to be owned "we", have the collaboratively written m:Wikivoyage/Launch press release (on Meta, complete with talk page!) :-) Rogerhc (talk) 23:16, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Travellers forum

Swept in from the pub

Congratulations on this new page. We do need more travel forums with travellers input. We also need more forums for travel partners search, especially for countries like Tibet- where there are restrictive policies for solo travel.

Please explain what you have in mind that can't be dealt with, for example, at Talk:Tibet. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:41, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Talk:Tibet is for discussions relevant to the Tibet article.
What are you proposing? I do not see any obvious need for forums here, but considerable danger of touting. Pashley (talk) 09:45, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Read-only mode expected.

Swept in from the pub

(Apologies if this message isn't in your language.) Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including this wiki. There will be some times when the site will be in read-only mode, and there may be full outages; the current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other timezones on timeanddate.com). More information is available in the full announcement.

If you would like to stay informed of future technical upgrades, consider becoming a Tech ambassador and joining the ambassadors mailing list. You will be able to help your fellow Wikimedians have a voice in technical discussions and be notified of important decisions.

Thank you for your help and your understanding.

Guillaume Paumier, via the Global message delivery system (wrong page? You can fix it.). 15:12, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Skin Synagonism

A year ago I created the mediawiki skin "synagonism-mw" at SourceForge which improves READING of big files like the wikivoyage's articles. I don't know if it works with current version!! and the code needs improvements. I created to show its functionality and wikivoyage I think needs it. -- Synagonism (talk) 14:59, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Swept in from the pub

Just a quick heads up that the http://en.wikivoyage.org/ link doesn't appear to be working at the moment. This address is currently used by the link on Wikipedia's main page and in other locations too. Is it as a result of today's server changes? --Nicholasjf21 (talk) 23:13, 22 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It works for me. Perhaps it was a temporary issue. I've had several temporary issues today with the server move happening but they have all resolved quickly. Are you still having that link problem? --Rogerhc (talk) 02:44, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nope, all's well now! Sorry for any alarm caused!--Nicholasjf21 (talk) 16:02, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Article feedback tool

Wonder what people think about using the article feedback tool to allow our readers to provide advice on articles? Details here . If we like it it might be possible for use to get it in April of 2013. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:01, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a good idea. As I said at the other discussion, a lot of travellers who use our guides will notice out-of-date info and errors while away but not bother to update it when they return. Having a space where they can make a comment is so much simpler for them, and will mean our guides can stay more up-to-date and organised. It is also more inclusive of the community and encourages new editors. No harm in running it for a few weeks as a trial. JamesA >talk 15:10, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
English has applied it to 10% of articles as a trial. We could look at doing the same. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:34, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a good compromise. Would we need to wait until April to start that sort of trial? However, we would need to make it very, very clear that users are providing feedback on the article itself, not the destination or listings. I foresee a lot of misinformed responses. JamesA >talk 15:44, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes as that is the earliest the tech side would be able to get it to us. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:24, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The earliest version 5 (the link) could be implemented because that is the latest version currently under development and is scheduled (subject to change) for a full release on March 26.AHeneen (talk) 05:04, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would not like this to be a substitute for people plunging forward and eliminating inaccuracies in articles, and that's what I fear would happen. It's counter-intuitive to quite a few new users that they can edit articles, as shown by the number of complaints I've read on talk pages of problems the complainer is best able to fix, him-/herself. There could be a positive aspect, though: There's a degree of arbitrariness to which restaurants (e.g.) are listed, and perhaps a spate of bad reviews could get a mediocre restaurant like Gandhi on 6th St. de-listed (which I'd love to do but won't take individual responsibility for). Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:14, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We have the issue of people not plunging forwards on Wikipedia which is why they have started this initiative. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:24, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Can't we get the [add listing] button back? I think that would lower the bar significantly for newcomers to add their favorite listings. Globe-trotter (talk) 20:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would echo G-t's plea for the return of the [add listing] button, but perhaps this time with the filip that the new listing is automatically placed in the correct alphabetical order rather than at the bottom of the listings. -- Alice✉ 03:18, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

This could be a potentially useful feature, but this may be something worth shelving for a while. We still haven't put together all the documentation for creating books, which should be fixed before moving on to another extension. For article feedback, I think there are a few issues that, while possible to work out, will take time to fix because we will need a customized version.

Current version (v4) of Article Feedback on Wikipedia. I think we'd need to change the metrics & questions...relevant for an encyclopedia, less so for a travel guide.
  1. The four metrics—trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness and writing quality—are great for an encyclopedia, but less useful for a travel guide. We need metrics like: completeness, writing quality (easy to understand), quality of listings (number/variety of eat/sleep/buy/etc listings), quality of attractions (see/do), Quality of background information (understand/stay safe/cope), Up to date? (is content up to date), and there are probably some more good ones that I can't think of right this second. Of course, we would not use all of those...only 2-5 (reasonable?)...but the list is to give an idea of the direction we should be heading in when it comes to metrics for our travel guides. Also, would we need...or rather, would we want...to have separate metrics or questions (more on that below) for travel topics, phrasebooks, & itineraries than we do for destinations?
  2. The questions/statements would need to be changed to reflect our needs...like "How knowledgeable are you about this locations?", "Have you lived in this city/country/region?", "Have you visited this destination? If so, how long have you spent here?", "Do you travel often?", "Do you travel often to destinations such as this one?", "Have you used this Wikivoyage guide while traveling to this destination? If so, did you use any other guides concurrently with the Wikivoyage guide?" and so forth. We should probably have more detailed feedback options for individual sections, like questions for eat/sleep regarding number/quality of listings (quality meaning not closed locations or franchise locations of major hotel chains with just name/address/phone, but price and description...the question would have to include a note that it's not just a rating of hotels themselves, but our content) and whether stay safe is comprehensive/accurate, whether get in/around is comprehensive/accurate, and (once again) there are many more questions that I haven't thought of/included.
  3. Another important aspect to look at is the collective data gathered from these ratings! Questions/metrics can be worded/chosen to gather quantitative feedback from editors & readers about the quality of our guides & project. Sure there are some big issues with this, we don't know people's expectations, whether they're telling truth, if people are giving inaccurate feedback (misread something, missed a section or important sentence, etc), but when you take a holistic view, soliciting user feedback can be immensely useful for improving our site. We can learn where our sites weaknesses are (even analyze data per country/region) and use this feedback to track progress/improvement to the quality of our site over time (compare user confidence in quality of listings over 2 years' time). See Article feedback/Data and metrics on Meta to get an idea of how focused use of questions is used to gather data that is interpreted in many ways to—ultimately—encourage users to contribute & improve the site and its pages.

Having said all that, adding article feedback will be a BIG project for our site and sorting out the above issues (because, above all, we will need a customized version) will take a lot of discussion and also a lot of work on the software/development side. Given all the work needed in the past week surrounding the launch, working with/guiding new contributors, and fixing unresolved issues (as mentioned...working to improve create documentation for the Book extension should be a high priority before moving on to a project like this) this is something that should be set aside to work out later (6 months? A year?). (Note:I wrote the OP of "Peer Review" at the same time as this...just splitting one long remark in two to keep relevant replies in order.) AHeneen (talk) 05:04, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You'll probably need a way to hide feedback that isn't useful or that needs to be removed. For example, someone writing "pen1s" or something inappropriate, etc. --Rschen7754 07:43, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You are looking at the old version (version 4) please look at version 5. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:39, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Version 5 is what is used on enwp. Perhaps I should clarify that I mean a policy on removing feedback. --Rschen7754 20:57, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I find this system ridiculous. Everyone can tick the box "I am highly knowledgeable", and we have absolutely no way to check this. In my opinion, the present feedback style is highly offensive to editors, because unknown people put some grades based on unknown criteria. Moreover, they do this strange stuff instead of editing and improving the article, which is contrary to the main idea of a wiki. I would like to have the feedback feature, but it should be unobtrusive: no grades, no alleged "experts"... just comments. --Alexander (talk) 20:53, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
On Wikipedia, how is decided which articles get the tool? Or is it a random 10% test now? For Wikivoyage, it would be most useful for guide articles, in order to identify what's missing and get an idea of how readers react to articles we think are pretty good. For the enormous number of outlines and usable articles however, I imagine it would create a huge database of information we already have. We know those are incomplete, need more listings, are sometimes poorly written. We also know that some parts of the world are substantially underrepresented in terms of information available. Analyzing thát feedback information will cost energy I would say is better spent on improving those articles. In short: if we test it, I would say let's start with our more or less complete articles. And then, sure, let's talk about the exact how, and wordings. JuliasTravels (talk) 21:32, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We are completely free to ignore the self-proclaimed expert status. However, a tick-box like "I have visited this destination recently", may offer some insight useful when applying corrections. But I agree that comments are the most useful. --Inas (talk) 21:53, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I mostly agree with Inas' ideas. The tick-box should be about visiting the destination, and the Feedback tool should be the comments version, so that viewers can comment on things they find to be incorrect or outdated. Maybe ratings are useful on star-rating guides that we think are worthy of assessment, not improvement. Is there a way only star guides can get the rating version? JamesA >talk 06:57, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes so both version 4 and 5 are used on EN wp. Version 4 has the rating scale while version 5 have written comments. I much prefer the written comments but one could potentially use a combination of the two I suppose. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:38, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would be good to test the feedback tool on some of our guide-status articles. It would be better if readers jumped in and edited the pages directly, but that isn't always the case so if this helps provide more feedback that's cool. I assume if it goes ahead, we'd use version 5 over version 4? (since comments can provide specific points on how to improve the guide) -Shaundd (talk) 18:23, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes version 5. Should we have a RfC here to determine if there is sufficient support for me to put in a request for this being added in April / May so that we can trial it.Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:44, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The feedback gadget is potentially useful, but only if the users know what kind of feedback will be useful to us. How will they know this?
  • Feedback that is not read is a waste of effort for the provider. I recommend that we only deploy the gadget on articles where someone is willing to read the input and do something with it. That said, as long as there is at least one editor who wants feedback for an article, it should be switched on. The person who activates the gadget should automatically get notification of new feedback, and other editors should only get it if they opt in, otherwise if one gets it for every article on one's watchlist we will be inundated with it, and it will mostly be useless. If my experience on WP is anything to go by, less than 10% will be useful, and the amount of extra reading to sift the wheat from the chaff will soon be overwhelming. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 17:07, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another feature that might be useful: If the display for the feedback states who requests the feedback (the person who activates the gadget for the page, it will give the reader the assurance that a specific person will be checking their comments. This may result in better quality feedback.
  • A major downside is that there is unlikely to be any dialogue between the editors and the feedback providers. It is not easy to go back to them and ask what they meant, as IP editors are unlikely to look at their talk pages. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 17:15, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say we should implement this as a trial from the planned date of deployment. If we find after a month that it just isn't working, then we can scrap it (but I do think it will be very useful!). As research has shown, it only increases editing, so even if it is implemented and barely used, there is no real damage done. Is there anyone who would oppose a trial of the new, comment-only version? JamesA >talk 11:46, 13 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review

On a related note, we could relatively easily add a Peer Review feature (a modified version of Wikipedia:Peer review). While this could be handled by just adding a new section to a talk page, we could have a procedure for feedback on articles where editors can visit a page and write a paragraph or two about ways to improve a page. This would be a way of drawing attention to articles where a user wants to solicit feedback. Like WP, this would involve a template added to a page which maintains an automated list of requests. It would also only be used for pages with a good level of content (star, guide, & maybe some usable pages, as suggestions for improvement would be quite long/unnecessary for outline pages). There could also be a checklist when doing a review (not intended for every one to be answered, but to give the reviewer an idea of what to look for). AHeneen (talk) 05:04, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Version 5 of the feedback tool dose this but without people needing to figure out how to use templates or learn media wiki markup. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:42, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WMF comment

Hey all; thanks for your comments here (and sorry for my failure to respond so far - I only became aware of this thread last night). Obviously we're really happy to see talk of deploying/considering deploying AFT5, since we've put a lot of effort into it: I'm just making myself known so you can ask any questions you may have :).

A couple of points that have been brought up so far involve the old version, AFT4. For reference: we totally agree that meaningless star-ratings is not the way to go (readers think our page is only 60 percent readable? That's great, but how do we up that percentage? It doesn't say): for that reason we're no longer deploying AFT4 anywhere - it's simply not a useful way to spend time. Any deployment would have to be of version 5, with the comments field. I note one concern from Ikan Kekek that it might 'cannibalise' users; people who would otherwise edit instead go through and leave feedback. This worried us too, so we did some research on enwiki when we first deployed; not only did cannibalisation not happen, edits do the articles went up, because as soon as someone has left feedback they are prompted to edit.

Other than that: if you guys have any other questions, I am available to answer them whenever. Just drop a note here or on my talkpage :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comment! One question from my side: where can I see an example of AFT5 deployed on a real wiki-page? --Alexander (talk) 15:12, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
At the moment you can see a (slightly outdated) version on enwiki. We are preparing our latest release, however, which while buggy is a better representation of what would be deployed here. That can be viewed here, and if you create an account this page has the feedback evaluation/monitoring page (you need some permissions to use most of the functions, but if you let me know your account name I am happy to give you the relevant userrights). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No, thank you. I think that this page at wmflabs, together with the very good Wikipedia manual, address all my questions. The feedback tool looks really good! I look forward to having it here at Wikivoyage. I wonder how much extra janitorial work it will require, but we should try and see. --Alexander (talk) 16:36, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps we could try a test deployment? Put it on N number of pages, or N percent of pages, and see what happens? If people are interested I'd love to see a formal vote open on a test or on a full deployment: we try to make sure projects want software before deploying it. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki messages

Swept in from the pub

Could an admin please change MediaWiki:Talkpagelinktext from "Talk" to "talk" to match "contribs"? Also, could MediaWiki:Histlast and MediaWiki:Histfirst be changed to lowercase as well? All the other links on the history page are lowercase. Thanks, David1217 (talk) 03:46, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Done. We use "latest" and "earliest", Wikipedia uses "newest" and "oldest". Maybe that could be changed as well? Globe-trotter (talk) 12:06, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ghost Languages

Will language versions that were previously offered be offered here soon? (Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) They all show up on the sidebar for destinations that had articles in those languages but if you click them now, they take you nowhere. Also, articles like Osaka have the "Better in Japanese, please translate" tag. If the languages are expected to be added soon, I won't delete it, but if not, these should probably be dealt away with. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 16:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian and Chinese will be added, the others will be placed in the Incubator. Globe-trotter (talk) 18:40, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've noticed that many WP.ja user pages have links to WT user pages and that wiki did appear viable; no idea why this wasn't moved initially. There were a few language projects which appeared to be inactive, dead or mostly empty but it looks like viable languages (es and pt being the most recently created) are being imported piecemeal right now. K7L (talk) 19:07, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've noticed links to some languages that are still in the Incubator being added. I think one was Latin ("la") and when clicked led to the page on the WM Incubator. AHeneen (talk) 22:40, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The Japanese Wikitravel was highly developed with an active community. I supported its migration at the time, but am unsure why it wasn't moved. I do remember that some of the notable members of the Japanese community such as Shoestring were not interested in moving and liked things just the way they were. JamesA >talk 05:16, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's a shame. To me, Shoestring was the pillar of the Japanese version (I mean that as a compliment to him, no disrespect to the other contributors), but the other language versions and their members seemed less affected and certainly less active in the discussions about the rift, so I'm not surprised. Good to know more languages are on the way. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 09:00, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In any event, if things at the old site under IB continue as they are, eventually the hands of the Japanese community will be forced. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:43, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Current status according to m:Requests for new languages#Wikivoyage: Spanish, Portuguese were created; Romanian and Polish are awaiting creation (per bugzilla); there has been some discussion of Finnish and Chinese (mostly around how to translate the name/logo). WMF is willing to create Hungarian and Japanese but so far no one has opened discussion for either language.

There are many Japanese user pages (not WP articles, just WP userpages) which mention WT; hopefully this doesn't become an obstacle to getting the WT interwiki prefix removed from the table. In any case, it would be best if they were to move sooner rather than later as IB will try to break functionality (such as api.php) used to export any new edits to the old wiki. If there are no new edits on WT, there's nothing left for them to break. K7L (talk) 17:18, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Can't the user pages just be changed to real links instead of interwiki links, if you're trying to orphan the interwiki prefix? I don't think that you can change links on user pages in any other way.
As far as I can tell, the functionality for importing old edits is already broken. Those who backed up Wikitravel had to stop doing this back in August last year because api.php and Special:Export were disabled. Thus, any edits made to Wikitravel since August can be considered as lost. It's probably possible to get a backup by screenscraping, but that's going to take an awful lot of time to get all revisions of all pages, and it would take considerable time to write a script which would download everything. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:14, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Latin

Why in the world would we be interested in creating up-to-date printable travel guides in Latin?? Texugo (talk) 13:12, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We cannot exclude the avid travellers of the Latin-speaking Vatican City now, can we? </joke> JamesA >talk 13:26, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
==See== will be replaced with ==Veni==, ==Vedi==, ==Vici== K7L (talk) 16:36, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It may be the polyglot in me talking, but I was excited when I read on this page that there would be a Latin version. I'm actually looking forward to its launch. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:14, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Retry, wait or forget it?

I've encountered a weird problem in a Wikivoyage edit I've never experienced in all the edits I've made in Wikipedia. (This may be more appropriate for Bugzilla, but I don't have a Bugzilla account and fortunately the help area says if you're not sure where the problem belongs, post it here first.)

Yesterday morning I booted up my laptop, launched Opera and went into the Wikivoyage entry on West Jefferson (North Carolina) to list the places to stay there under "Sleep." One thing led to another, and it was late afternoon before I signed out of Wikivoyage, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing it had been a Saturday well spent. That is, until about an hour later when I launched Safari on the iPad to review my work.

When I went to the West Jefferson Wikivoyage page in Safari, none of the three entries I'd made in the "Sleep" section showed up. According to "View History," I hadn't made any edits in that entry for over a week. Luckily, all the other work I did yesterday showed up in Safari - the new entry on Mountain City (Tennessee), information in an almost blank existing entry on Damascus (Virginia), adding a restaurant and the Best Western to Jefferson (North Carolina), adding the two hotels I stay at in Boone and some restaurant information.

I know Wikimedia is migrating from servers in Tampa to a server farm outside Washington, so I thought it might be a replication problem. Perhaps the server I used to do the edits on the West Jefferson page hadn't yet replicated the new data to other Wiki servers. Yet, since all the other edits I made yesterday were showing up in Safari, I feared it was more likely a mysterious glitch and I'd need to retrace my steps to find the phone numbers, addresses, etc., for the three lodging establishments in West Jefferson.

Late last night I launched IE 10 on the laptop to listen to ZRadio, and when I checked Wikivoyage in Internet Explorer it was the same experience as Safari - nothing under "Sleep" on the WJ page, but all my other edits showed up.

Today I opened Opera, went back to the West Jefferson page in Wikivoyage, and the info I added under "Sleep" showed up. I hurriedly copied and saved it to WordPad so I wouldn't have to recompose the text if it should be necessary. I refreshed the page in Opera to make sure it wasn't pulling from the cache, and the updated "Sleep" section was still there. Then I launched Safari on the iPad, and ... no entries under "Sleep" on the West Jefferson page.

So I don't know whether the lodging entries I made are in Wikivoyage or aren't in Wikivoyage. Should I use the "old version" of the page in Internet Explorer to re-add the info I entered yesterday? Or would that cause a bigger problem if the edited version is floating around the Wiki servers? Dlewis77 (talk) 20:43, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm seeing Hampton Inn, Nations Inn, and Buffalo Tavern B&B under "Sleep". For the record, I've never accessed the West Jefferson, NC article before in my life, so it's not an issue with my file cache.
I experienced the same problem from time to time when we were migrating content onto the WMF servers for the first time. In my decidedly non-expert opinion, I'd say there's a good chance it has to do with the server migration from Tampa to Washington.
-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:41, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have the same issues on Wikimedia Commons. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the migration. Globe-trotter (talk) 01:27, 28 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Like everyone suggests, it probably has something to do with the migration. A couple days ago, I added a couple "Other destinations" to the Sudan page and uploaded a new version of the Sudan map to Commons. Even when I refreshed the page in my browser, the "Other destinations" page remained blank and the old version of the map was displayed. However, when I clicked edit, the ODs were displayed in the edit box. AHeneen (talk) 02:47, 28 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We had (have?) problems with purging image caches after the data center migration. This is currently being handled in bugzilla:41130; bugzilla:44391 might be related and got fixed a few hours ago after the operations team spent the weekend investigating the (very low-level) server problem. I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused by this. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 28 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimania in Hong Kong, August

Swept in from the pub

Two things to be aware of, Call for participation and scholarships to fund travel. Pashley (talk) 19:19, 30 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've put it at Wikivoyage:Get-together if any wikivoyagers are interested in meeting up there. --Inas (talk) 11:23, 19 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution at the bottom of the page

Swept in from the pub

I would like to know how the Wikitravel attribution message at the bottom of imported pages was set up. Over at pt:, import seems to have been done incorrectly, and we don´t have enough knowledgable users to know what to do. First of all, it seems pt: was imported not directly from Wikitravel, but from JAMGuides, though in the history of the pages imported, the only indication of this is an entry from "JAMBot" with the summary of "Imported by JAMBot", which to my knowledge is insufficient attribution. So, a few questions:

  • Does our attribution message for such pages need to mention users of both JAMGuides and Wikitravel in our case, or is attribution to the last place imported from sufficient?
  • Does the history need to contain a link to the specific page from which it was imported (as it does here), or is a message specifying "users of" sufficient?
  • How is the attribution message at the bottom of imported pages here displayed only for those specific imported pages? It does not appear to be from inside the work itself.
  • How were the WT prefixes added to user names in the history of such pages?
  • Will it be possible to use a bot/script to retroactively add the page footer message and history username prefixes to only the relevant imported pages on pt:

Sorry to bring up such a pt-specific topic here, but I´d like to use en:'s solution if possible, and there are plenty of knowledgable folk here. If there is a better place for us to get answers, please point me there. Thanks! Texugo (talk) 10:09, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have an example of a page with a "JAMBot" entry in its history? When data was imported on the original Wikivoyage I gave Hans raw XML exports from Wikitravel, so I'm not sure how any mention of "JAMGuides" would have appeared unless I screwed something up. As to any credit to "JAMGuides", that site was just a read-only mirror of Wikitravel, so there is no need to mention it for attribution purposes. Regarding your other questions, someone else will need to address those for reasons outlined at the top of my user page. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:02, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The Portuguese and Spanish versions were taken from JAMguides, because Wikivoyage e.V. never bothered to hand over the pure exports from Wikitravel to the Wikimedia Foundation. Globe-trotter (talk) 16:08, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Have a look here for instance. That´s all the extent of the attribution we have on most of our pages there at this time. Texugo (talk) 16:32, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
They imported it without any attribution? Wow that's totally against the spirit of the license. Someone should contact the legal department of Wikimedia I think. Globe-trotter (talk) 18:17, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Full history XML dumps of all Wikitravel content (through August 2012) are available and should be used where possible since they show every contribution and the individual who made it - Hans should be able to provide access. Hopefully that is enough info to help resolve any issues as I need to bow out of this discussion for reasons already mentioned. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:27, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry, who is Hans? How do I get in touch?Texugo (talk) 18:45, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I presume this is (from whois) Hans Musil, Wikivoyage e.V.. Taunusstr. 39 Boeblingen DE 71032. DE +49.7031281729 hans.musil (at) gmx.de? K7L (talk) 18:55, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
User:Hansm here, and at the German Wikivoyage. However, the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't been able to get the dumps from him yet (and supposedly has tried to get them for some months). Globe-trotter (talk) 18:57, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
ArchiveTeam has 2011 dumps in a dozen languages but newer data would be preferable. We also still need Japan? K7L (talk) 19:06, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Also see Incubator:Incubator:Wikivoyage import. Globe-trotter (talk) 15:49, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
/me stands up, waves. Hi. Legal now knows.  :) I'll see if we can't nudge Hans. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:23, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bizarre import problem

Swept in from the pub

Sit back, I've got to give some background on this. Follow me back to the WT days.

In 2005, an article was created at the title "Eden". This article was about the fishing town in New South Wales. In 2008, an article was created called "Eden (New York)", and it was about the suburb of Buffalo. In 2011, Globe-trotter moved the NSW Eden's article to "Eden (New South Wales)", and moved the disambiguation page (which I had created back in 2008) to the base name "Eden". This all works fine to this day on WT.

But here on Wikivoyage, something went wrong. The move of Eden (disambiguation) to Eden is still recorded in the edit history of the former title... but Eden is the NSW article, not the disambiguation page! Even more bizarrely, Eden (New South Wales) is also a (different) copy of the NSW article, with its own edit history, and it does record the move. On the other hand, I can't find the history of the disambiguation page anywhere.

Now, this is reparable (not without some effort, but any admin can do it... though I don't think there's any way to retrieve the disambiguation page as I created it in 2008). But it points to a potential problem with the import, and so I wanted to bring it to light, in case a similar problem exists elsewhere in the wiki. Alternatively, I may be missing something here, in which case it'd be nice to have that pointed out. =)

-- LtPowers (talk) 20:59, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's bizarre indeed, the Dutch Wikivoyage had at least 100 of such cases. I had to redirect all of them to the newly created page. I hadn't encountered it yet on this wiki though. Globe-trotter (talk) 21:14, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The scripts I used to create XML backups had some issues with page moves - it wasn't feasible to repeatedly run a full backup of all pages (doing so took weeks or months given the 30 second limit applied to spiders), so my scripts instead tried to track recently changed articles. Unfortunately, page moves proved problematic as the change wasn't recorded as a normal "change", so if the articles weren't subsequently edited then the page was sometimes not updated. I had thought this issue was resolved by forcing a re-spider of most of the articles in the page move logs, but apparently there were still issues. I apologize for the problem, but at this point I think the only solution will be to manually correct problem articles as they are found. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:23, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A little help?

Swept in from the pub

There's a strange bug - I am guessing it's got something to do with the new URL icon we placed in the listings, but I'm not 100% sure - that is messing up the formatting of the first listing in User:AndreCarrotflower/Elmwood Village#Jewelry. I know it's not anything I myself typed in there, because I haven't edited the listing since I wrote it, and it was fine at that time. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to fix it. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:43, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It should be OK now - it looks like the code was confused by the apostrophes around ''Artvoice'''s (two open, three closed, even though the close was supposed to appear in the text). -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect word for "search" in Romanian on page at www.wikivoyage.org ?

Swept in from the pub

Looking at http://www.wikivoyage.org/, I noticed that the word for "search" in Romanian directly above the search textbox appears to be incorrect. Assuming that the words for "search" in the different languages that Wikivoyage supports are given in the same order as the links to the respective language Wikivoyages, Romanian would be last. The word given is "Salt", which a quick Google translate shows as meaning "jump" in Romanian. Checking http://ro.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Pagina_principal%C4%83, I see that the "Search" textbox in the upper right of the page is labeled "Căutare", which another Google translate seems to confirm as the correct word for "search" in Romanian. Is this indeed a bug? If so, where should it be filed? 64.252.206.116 01:25, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've reported the problem, thanks for letting us know. –sumone10154(talk) 01:37, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

News from the German WV guys

Hi everybody. I have some news from de:

  • The guy with the POI maps has created a world wide map feature with all WV articles. here.... Nice. Isn't it? We considering to have it run on our own association's server. I am going to ask him how to adapt it to the other language versions. Are you interested?
  • We started a project with a town government in Lower Saxony to create a kind of template article. A perfect article that we can show to our new contributors. "Look! This is how a perfect article can look like" Our manual of style can benefit from these experiences. During this process we want to improve our VCard. It should provide different styles (inline and block style as well as a print style and a style for small screen resolutions). We picked your old layout suggestions from Texugo as well. We think about creating icons to be placed at the hotels, sight's descriptions. Icons for WiFi, Bed&Bike, offers for disabled people, pets allowed, gay friendly..... Do you have a discussion about it running already? Do you want to participate? Then we move this part to Meta.
  • We just established a Paypal account. If you want to support the association and/or becoming a member, just take a look at our associations wiki. It's renewed and some parts have to be translated. Everybody is invited to participate. here... Please tell me, if there are some errors or missing information. I've just moved it from the old server. But I did not find out how to make the wiki interface multilingual and what settings are to be changed. If anybody knows, just give me a hint. -- DerFussi (talk) 17:27, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We were working on an hCard as {{listing}} which was to handle all data from the <listing> tags once the bugzilla:43220 fix is deployed in mid-February. There was a long discussion at Project talk:Listings but no clear consensus for or against using icons in listings, on linking to Wikipedia or on how to display geographic co-ordinates for individual listings. A locator map showing each listing in a city would be valuable but currently WikiSherpa, a third-party mobile application, is the only one doing this as we have almost no co-ordinates on our individual listings within a city. Many listings here are not tagged or templated at all. K7L (talk) 18:55, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That world-wide map is really cool. I can think of a lot of uses for it beyond the basic navigation it offers right now too. We could filter by article status, for one. We recently have added geocoordinates to almost all of our destination guides, so we're ready for it. Adding lat long info to our city district articles might be a good thing to get working on... --Peter Talk 19:25, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I love the world wide map. Ours is going to get really crowded, though, as en has a lot of articles! Could we possibly link to this from the Main Page under a Interactive map header? I also like what you've done with the town council. I've always thought that collaborating with local governments and tourism boards is a great way to improve our articles, as they will certainly provide resources to those who wish to boost tourism for free! JamesA >talk 02:15, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think Mey2008 can change the feature and process the guide/star/stub information. Will ask him. The city council of Wennigsen has invited other local tourism boards and the local ADFC team (German cycling association) as well. So we can improve the affected town, region and cycling route articles and provide a set of featured articles and improve our manual of style as well. Besides we want to create a guide for tourism bords as well to avoid advertising style in our articles. Our articles are for travellers and not a competition about what town the most beautiful sky has. -- DerFussi (talk) 08:53, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
bplaced says: "Sorry, access forbidden, error 403" Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:00, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here are the English articles -- DerFussi (talk) 15:14, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is really, really cool! How will it be updated? For instance, I added geo tags to Washington, D.C.'s district articles, but those are not appearing. --Peter Talk 15:40, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to add this to the Destinations page, with a BETA notice. Can we put it in the article directly, like this? Or can we only link to it for now? --Peter Talk 17:00, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For reasons regarding publicity, I'd really like to put this directly in the article today, if it's possible. --Peter Talk 17:01, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any means to make corrections to http://maps.wikivoyage-ev.org/w/artmap.php?lang=en — it appears to have moved Brockville southward into foreign territory, even though the co-ordinates look valid on the article. K7L (talk) 00:11, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The coordinate in the article was inaccurate. I have corrected it. The map will be updated in the next time. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 10:01, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We are going to move this to the Wikivoyage association's server next weekend. Then you can use it. We'll let you know when it's online. -- DerFussi (talk) 10:18, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's great that the association is able to have these sort of innovations. Well done to you both!! Once on WV.eV servers, will it be possible to embed the map into Wikivoyage, keeping its interactivity? JamesA >talk 10:34, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Dutch Wikipedia has pages like w:nl:Thousand Islands with a link (Kaart) at the upper-right which drops down an embedded map with a marker for each WP article with co-ordinates. That's not the same as a city-level locator map (which would need to pull co-ordinates from individual {{listing}}s within the one article being viewed, so likely WV-specific) but still impressive. K7L (talk) 20:52, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like this is live for :en now ! --Peter Talk 01:09, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! Imagine how useful that will be for maintaining routeboxes. =) LtPowers (talk) 02:38, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is just fantastic! How can we promote this wonderful clickable world map? Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:43, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Let me update the url, since it is now on WV-ev servers: . I'm still not sure how to add the map to a wiki page, but I think DerFussi is working on that. We need to get our articles better geocoded now! --Peter Talk 18:50, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This new version of article map works for all eleven language versions (?lang=nn). The map search field also, even with Cyrillic letters and international names (eg. Wien, Vienna, Bécs or Вена for Vienna). Actuality of data is the last dump date. - You only can add the interactive map to a wiki page until now, by click on a thumbnail picture. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:45, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Is it possible to add it to an article using the Slippy Map MediaWiki Extension as it is used on :it? Here is an example of its use. --Peter Talk 07:25, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No, it is not possible to using Slippy Map. The Slippy Map and the Wikipedia map application are not compatible with most mobile devices I know. My solution is compatible with WV mobile mode on most mobile devices. The Map is automatic in full screen mode on those small screens. The button "Show me where I am" (left top) is compatible with modern gps devices. Application will use wlan spot and mobile net triangulation also (for devices without gps eg. your notebook with wlan). So you can find out all WV articles around your location with a single tap the location button and a little zooming out. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 10:43, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think you mean that you think it is not desirable. But is it possible? We have some mobile-specific and desktop-specific pages, so we can use this in the latter. Or have a mobile users link above a slippy map. Having slippy maps in our articles is a clear goal that we have set, and it would be good to use this map as a test case. --Peter Talk 22:46, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Admin request; Double redirect

Swept in from the pub

Please fix the following protected double redirects:
MediaWiki:Country →‎ Template:Country →‎ Template:Country skeleton
MediaWiki:District →‎ Template:District →‎ Template:District skeleton
MediaWiki:Hugecity →‎ Template:Hugecity →‎ Template:Hugecity skeleton
MediaWiki:Region →‎ Template:Region →‎ Template:Region skeleton
MediaWiki:Smallcity →‎ Template:Smallcity →‎ Template:Smallcity skeleton
-- Cheers, Riley 08:24, 20 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Done. --Rschen7754 08:27, 20 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Why are these in mediawiki: space? That's usually for interface messages like mediawiki:edittools. K7L (talk) 19:18, 20 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, this does seem a bit bizarre. --Rschen7754 20:11, 20 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the username of the bot that did the original move back in 2004, it appears that these were originally created before the Template namespace existed. LtPowers (talk) 02:39, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why not orphan and delete the redirects if/when they are unused? --MGA73 (talk) 18:05, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interlingual Portal

Swept in from the pub

As we're currently attempting to overhaul our main pages for both desktop computers and mobile devices, I thought it might also be nice to have a look at what we could do with the Interlingual Portal as it was earmarked for improvement on the Roadmap. I assume it's made in pure HTMl, so is probably harder to edit collaboratively. What sort of things would we like to see? Such a decision would also, presumably, have to take place with the involvement of the other language communities too, so might be more complicated on that fron too. --Nicholasjf21 (talk) 21:34, 24 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The HTML for the portal can be found (and edited by Meta-admins) at meta:Www.wikivoyage.org template. On important thing that still needs to happen is filling out the meta description, which Google will display as the description for www.wikivoyage.org in search results. —Ruud 11:42, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

wikivoyager.de/.org

Swept in from the pub

Hi,

fyi, wikivoyager.de and wikivoyager.org have both been transferred to WMF and we redirect them to wikivoyage.org. Related RT ticket is RT-4333. The Apache config can be found in the (public) operations/apache-config git repository. Mutante (talk) 19:04, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

m:Grants:IEG/GIS and Cartography in Wikimedia

Swept in from the pub

Not sure if this is of interest, but I thought I would mention it here. --Rschen7754 02:24, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiquote

Swept in from the pub

I know this is wikivoyage.ORG, but is anyone else directed to Wikiquote when they type wikivoyage.COM? I am. 183.76.115.214 15:22, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes! I got that this morning. I thought I my iPad had just auto-corrected me or something... Texugo (talk) 15:26, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
google in my neck of the woods directs to wikivoyage.org when i type in wikivoyage.com, however typing in wikivoyage.com inside firefox - yes it directs to wikiquote... sats (talk) 15:32, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd suggest posting this sort of thing to bugzilla: if it's not already open there. K7L (talk) 15:51, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I can confirm this. Filed under bugzilla:46033. And already closed as a duplicate of bugzilla:46018. —Ruud 17:52, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Should be fixed now. —Ruud 20:33, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is totally fixed now. It was done to #redirect the page without getting crashed. But, since WikiVoyage is launched and runs successfully, it is functioning cool. Aminuddinshroff (talk) 21:49, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WV site slow

Swept in from the pub

I'm finding the WV site reeaaalllyy slow. Anyone else? Non-Wikimedia sites are fine. Nurg (talk) 23:18, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is this the price for being on Wikimedia? :-( Nurg (talk) 23:29, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I had it earlier, but it seems to have sped up here now. Just a temporary thing? --Nick (talk) 23:49, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's been happening for a day or so, but was partic bad when I posted. WP has been slow at the same times. Nurg (talk) 00:14, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It seems that "something" happened around 23:15 UTC that didn't affect just WV. (A large part of the new datacentre seems to have gone down for a few minutes , perhaps a broken router or switch?) —Ruud 00:17, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Very slow right now. So is WP. Nurg (talk) 22:56, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Swept in from the pub

Dear colleagues

Some time in the next month, the Signpost may run a special report on the real-life travel experiences of Wikivoyage editors. At the moment, this is a fishing expedition to gauge whether there's a suitable basis for a story.

We're particularly interested in editors' dramatic, colourful, surprising, or otherwise interesting incidents or experiences while travelling. These incidents or experiences need to be related to either the writing/editing of a specific article or to the process of contributing to the site generally. We obviously can't be too ribald in what we report, though.

More recent accounts are preferred to experiences from many years ago, but news-value trumps the age of the story—as long as there's a solid connection with an editor's onwiki contributions, either to the modern version of the site or to its predecessors. Willingness to be identified in the feature by user name is preferred, but not essential.

If you fit these criteria and would like to be interviewed by email for the feature, please let me know by email, providing a couple of lines of information about where, when, type of experience, and the article to which it's related. If you know someone else who hasn't read this post and might be a good source, we'd like to know too. Currently active editors are preferred, but ex-editors could be valuable to us if their experience is newsworthy and they can still be contacted. I'll leave a similar note to this at the German-language Wikivoyage site, and any others that are reasonably active by now.

Thanks Tony (talk) 09:28, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Are you guys planning to publish interview of only one editor or more than one? --Saqib (talk) 10:53, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
More than one, I expect; depends on what we can find (there may not be enough material). Tony (talk) 11:26, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "related to" work on the site? Does the story itself have to be reproduced here in some way, or could it be more along the lines of having a crazy travel experience tangential to work on the site regarding the destination? --Peter Talk 18:06, 16 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

IsPartOf for Categories

Swept in from the pub

Am I hallucinating, or is IsPartOf broken for Categories, making the whole region category hierarchy appear to be non-existent? Texugo (talk) 18:41, 17 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, my fault. Fixing one minor problem I went and broke something else. Have now reset back to previous method until I figure out a better method. Give it a few minutes to rebuild the contents. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:17, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

New Interlingual Portal

Swept in from the pub

Hi! A while ago I saw that one of the goals on the Roadmap was to improve WV's interlingual portal. So, with that in mind, I tried my hand at making a new one. Unfortunately the page is made in HTML; not Wiki-markup, however, you can find the code here and a screenshot of the proposed design below. The background image is only 50kb so shouldn't cause any loading issues. I've also posted this on the Wikivoyage Lounge in Meta. I dare say some of the translations are a bit rubbish too, so please let me know what they should be! The reason the Romanian page is away from the rest is that it would be the first of any others that joined at this time as there's only room for 10 around the logo - I chose it because it had the fewest articles of all the WV language versions. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! --Nick (talk) 02:27, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The proposed portal
I love it! I particularly like the graceful and elegant shading of the colours that provides good contrast for readability and the maritime theme in keeping with the "voyage" part of our name. Great that you've thought about readers with slow connections too! Will you be doing a mobile version, Nick? -- Alice✉ 02:55, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I echo Alice's comments. Excellent work, Nick. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:57, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks very much! I think, as this is based upon the current portal, it should automatically optimise itself for mobiles... but we'll see! --Nick (talk) 09:49, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's a good start, and thanks for putting it out there, but could do with some refining. I think the shaded corners seem a bit odd, and the ocean picture just reminds me of a romantic beach scene. I dunno; it stands out but just doesn't cut it for me. Any other ideas to improve upon Nick's design? JamesA >talk 10:13, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Strictly speaking, I don't think we have a tagline. "The Free Travel Guide" was taken by Wikitravel, and we never came up with an alternative. Could we perhaps put eight languages around the logo instead of ten, so that Romanian doesn't look so lonely below? I'm also afraid the dark gray background at the bottom makes some of the sister project logos look really bad. Still, this is certainly along the lines of what I'd like to see. LtPowers (talk) 14:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Right- I've changed it a little in order to reflect some of the above opinions. You can view it 'live' here. Please ignore the chinese characters at the bottom - they are not part of the design, but something either inflicted upon me by the host or an internal WM script that won't work on that host. Any thoughts? --Nick (talk) 15:53, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For me it looks super-freakin-awesome except for the links to sister projects section, which is enormous. Would it be possible to shrink that section down and lose the white box behind them, overlaying them directly on the sunset? Texugo (talk) 15:58, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Suggestions: (1) I also feel the WMF sister projects are too prominent there. This is the WV portal, not a portal to the MWF family. So I'd make the sisters much less prominent on the page, think footnote at most. (2) Let's not leave any of our WV language versions out of the main hallow display. They will all fit if we squeeze. They are all important players on this WV portal. Think group photo, shoulder to shoulder. Don't leave the baby out. We don't have hundreds as WP does. To make room, leave article count line out except for the top few. No need to show meager numbers anyway. More important to fit everyone in. (3) Our tag line is an even more important clarifier of what we are than in was at our former host. We are a travel guide. We need to keep it, at least that part of it, or newcomers wont know what we are. Cheers! (4) Maybe lighten the sunrise a little so it is a little closer to daytime. In fact, might be good to play with it actually being day time and see what we get. The sunset look is pretty but could has problematic connotations. --Rogerhc (talk) 16:19, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
With regards to sister projects links, I'd strongly suggest that we stay consistent with how other Mediawiki site "portal" pages display them, and I think Nick is doing that. See http://www.wikipedia.org/, http://www.wiktionary.org/, http://www.wikiquote.org/, etc. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The sisters on subdued (gray version) background gave them acceptable prominence. The sisters with a light background when everything else had a subdued background put the spotlight inappropriately onto the sisters. It is probably a matter that lighting could fix. The "spotlight" needs to be on WV on this stage. --Rogerhc (talk) 16:39, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don´t know if it´s because of my small monitor here at work, but what I´m seeing is a super tall white box with two columns of 6 sister sites.Texugo (talk) 16:54, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The sister icons might just look fine against the sky with no box behind them, or maybe just a line between them and the main players on this stage. Maybe put them in a centered div of width 90% or so and let them wrap into a rectangular space against the sky? Probably best not to sink them into the briny deep of course ;-). --Rogerhc (talk♣) 17:10, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Other concerns aside, I daresay we don't want to invite legal issues by using "The Free Travel Guide". LtPowers (talk) 18:12, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A few responses:
  • I'm more than happy to try other ways of displaying the WMF links, but I do agree that they should be kept at the same prominence as on other projects - we don't want a family feud!
  • I would be happy to try and shift the links around the logo a bit, but it's based on a WMF-wide template that would have to be rebuilt. Also, as soon as a new language arrived (there are several in the pipeline) a list would have to be created, so we should probably accept that it is a necessity now.
  • Personally, I think the colours of the photograph suit our logo quite well, but if any one can see a good alternative, please let me know!
  • I too think that a tagline is important here (see below!)
--Nick (talk) 19:38, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Rogerhc has had a play and come up with something rather nice. You can see it here: meta:Www.wikivoyage.org_template/temp sky background just use the drop down arrow to 'preview as html'. --Nick (talk) 11:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Looks quite nice. I have an additional idea: how about changing the background picture every now and then? We used to have a "picture of the moment" back at WT Shared... Ypsilon (talk) 10:40, 19 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure we could do that! We'd just have to be careful with the colours. --Nick (talk) 11:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure we can do pictures well on our portal. The sky picture really only works because it is more a background gradient than a picture. Plain white might actually be even better. Beauty in function. Google.com is a famously user oriented page; plain white and beautifully simple. Bing.com introduced beautiful photos to their Search page and I love beautiful photos. I still like Google better. (I'm biased also and don't use Microsoft product when I have good alternatives, but I believe plain white serves Search users better than a random distracting beautiful photo.) Portal pages really are very annoying. Users want the site, not the portal. I believe WikiMedia community has made a gross mistake with this "portal" thing. Why do we send people to a portal? People want to see our product. Our Main Page shows it. A portal does not. I say the best portal is no portal but instead a Main Page. --Rogerhc (talk♣) 04:17, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's a great idea, but we have eleven Main Pages. Which one do we show? LtPowers (talk) 17:16, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
None, we make www.wikivoyage.org the page to die for. Nick and I are working on it -- feedback please. --Rogerhc (talk♣) 18:37, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You're absolutely right Roger - I love how clean but interesting you've made it look! --Nick (talk) 22:03, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I'm missing something. That still looks like a portal to me. LtPowers (talk) 22:47, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think what Roger meant was that we need to make the portal look less 'portal-like' than other WMF ones: it needs to be engaging on its own merits and not just a page of links. --Nick (talk) 23:06, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please discuss www.wikivoyage.org changes at m:Wikivoyage/Lounge, concerns all WV language versions. I'd like to see if we can build a consensus there on switching to this sky background version. Thx --Rogerhc (talk♣) 00:16, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've posted a (poorly translated) link to that page on each language version's 'pub' equivalent. --Nick (talk) 00:52, 21 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Roger's spent a lot of time and effort perfecting the portal and coming up with alternatives - please take a look at his designs here: m:Wikivoyage/Lounge. Thanks! --Nick (talk) 10:57, 26 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe in the meantime, you might like to make the main page similar to that image (or maybe even better). Curtaintoad (user · talk · contribs) 11:00, 13 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Problem page - Benton

Swept in from the pub

Tried to redirect Benton to Benton (disambiguation) but get error. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:55, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

fixed. --Inas (talk) 09:18, 23 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Huffington Post on overrated destinations

Swept in from the pub

"10 Terribly Overrated Destinations (And Where To Travel Instead) " Pashley (talk) 17:38, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't disagree more about Asheville. It's one of my favorite places in the South.
Also, I find it very interesting that Detroit is on this list as an alternative to Chicago. While my strange fascination with urban prairie, post-industrial decay, and the Rust Belt in general have led me to truly enjoy my visits there, I would be hard-pressed to say the least to recommend the Motor City to the quote-unquote "average" HuffPo reader. It's an incredibly depressing place to those who haven't come with the right mindset or expectations. Even downtown and the New Center have veneers that are easy to penetrate—much of that world-class architecture is vacant, derelict, and crumbling.
-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:48, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Although I agree that the article is pretty lame, I must admit that to all of the places I've traveled Detroit was one of my favorites. Not because of any of the reasons listed in the article (although I did like the art museum) but because of my fascination with the urban decay. I've gone twice on self guided 'urban spelunking' trips with a few friends through abandon buildings and the scale of the decay is beyond anything else I have experienced. Detroit would be on my short list for anyone wanting to get a holistic view of the USA and see its dark-side. Not safe, not recommended but still near the top of my list for adventures. --Lumpytrout (talk) 16:43, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've found such articles to be barely worth the pixels on which they're printed. Mostly it's an attempt by individual travel writers -- who I'm convinced may have actually reached the thought-impossible "travels too much" threshold -- to rationalize their own personal and usually quite irrational responses to individual destinations. Your Chicago/Detroit complaint is spot-on; it's painfully obvious that he chose to ignore certain negative aspects of Detroit that he'd just finished decrying in describing Chicago, while touting Detroit features that Chicago matches or exceeds. It's not worth your time. LtPowers (talk) 19:11, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, this writer really has a chip on their shoulder. So you meet one lousy barista and decide to write off San Francisco as a worthy destination? And while I can believe that Austin is overrated, recommending Houston as a serious alternative is laughable. PerryPlanet (talk) 19:26, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if I'd be quite as harsh as all that, LtPowers. This particular article certainly isn't the gold standard of the genre, but ipso facto all travel writing is subjective and opinion-based to a certain degree. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:05, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Of course it is; that's the point. But these guys have been to these places so many times that they can no longer see the destinations through the eyes of someone who hasn't, and they think their experiences are somehow representative of the majority of travelers. They aren't. LtPowers (talk) 22:33, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm inclined to say that's the wrongest travel article I've ever read! The only comparison that could in any sense be construed as right is favoring the mountains outside Asheville to the (very cool) town, but who goes to Asheville without visiting the mountains anyway? --Peter Talk 23:08, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I back up all the criticism above that this article is truly awful. Only way that this could be worse is if it were a Yahoo! article on "10 Overly Visited Destinations". AHeneen (talk) 03:38, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Swept in from the pub

The default position of the "edit" link in page section headers is going to change soon. The "edit" link will be positioned adjacent to the page header text rather than floating opposite it.

Section edit links will be to the immediate right of section titles, instead of on the far right. If you're an editor of one of the wikis which already implemented this change, nothing will substantially change for you; however, scripts and gadgets depending on the previous implementation of section edit links will have to be adjusted to continue working; however, nothing else should break even if they are not updated in time.

Detailed information and a timeline is available on meta.

Ideas to do this all the way to 2009 at least. It is often difficult to track which of several potential section edit links on the far right is associated with the correct section, and many readers and anonymous or new editors may even be failing to notice section edit links at all, since they read section titles, which are far away from the links.

(Distributed via global message delivery 18:21, 30 April 2013 (UTC). Wrong page? Correct it here.)


Can we make image defaults bigger now?

Swept in from the pub

This was discussed at length but not followed through on. I'd like to submit a bug request to have larger en.WV image defaults implemented. I see lots of support at Wikivoyage_talk:Image_policy#Proposal_to_change_default_thumbnail_size, but no one mentioned submitting a bug request. Any comments before I submit it? (Comment at end of above linked talk page section please; your fresh support there, however redundant, will help get this done.) Thanks, --Rogerhc (talk) 00:13, 15 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think we agreed on 270px, right? If so, go ahead. --Peter Talk 19:33, 15 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bugzilla: 47332 filed April 17, 2013. --Rogerhc (talk) 19:41, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bugzilla: 47332 rejected April 17 for server load and storage reasons:

(Tomasz W. Kozlowski quoting Antoine "hashar" Musso)--

[we don't configure] different thumbnail sizes per wiki for the following reasons:

  • we keep thumbnails forever currently, the more we have the more disk space it takes
  • different sizes lower the cache hit rate which in turns cause...
  • ... a CPU cost on the cluster to generate a thumbnail, varying the sizes cause more and more thumbnails generations
  • whenever a file is updated, we have to purge each thumbnails ever generated.

So I changed my own user preferences from the default, 220, to the maximum, 300, to see how that looks. I think we can have the default upped from 220 to either 250 or 300, because these are already available user preference options, but we would need to decide that as a community. Maybe developing a horizontal Table of Contents (discussion at Wikivoyage:TOC#New TOC) would allow us to use 300 as the default without page crowding. --Rogerhc (talk) 03:05, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Listing: Add Wikipedia article field?

Swept in from the pub

What to do when a listing (museum, theatre, temple, etc) has a Wikipedia page? How about a new optional listing field? For instance, wikipedia="Manneken Pis" would result in a small icon that would lead the reader to the sum of human knowledge about this listing. What do you think about it? Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:22, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This has been debated extensively and so far has been nixed. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:56, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
FYI: Wikivoyage_talk:Links_to_Wikipedia#Wikipedia_parameter_in_special_tags. I think someone just needs to go through that and make a new proposal, with clear rules/guidelines. The opposers don't seem to oppose outright the linking to Wikipedia, but don't want to see a million WP links scattered across articles (nor do I). So we just need a clear, strict, but useful policy. JamesA >talk 09:33, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I was not aware about that! Here is the most recent discussion: Wikivoyage_talk:Listings#Listings_tags_and_links_to_Wikipedia. Looks like the debate has consumed a lot of editor's time already, so I don't think it is worth redebating it that soon, let's concentrate on filling latitude/longitude for all listings, for instance :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:44, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know, there are just as many editors for this as against this. There is plenty of good info on Wikipedia which we actually don't want to duplicate here - individual articles for museums, historic landmarks, roads and airports are a few common examples. We just need to ensure enough info is still here, so a printed copy of a WV city guide is a self-contained reference if printed alone without bothering to print all of the WP articles for the individual museums and landmarks in the town. K7L (talk) 18:29, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From what I can gather, most of the users who "are against this" are just hesitant about the idea until we can make it very clear where WP links are allowed and where they are not. I don't think they are unreservedly opposed to any WP links whatsoever. Someone just needs to gather the ideas and collate them into a draft policy for discussion. JamesA >talk 09:26, 24 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]


"On the trail of ..." itineraries

Some years back, I did On the trail of Marco Polo and I have just finished On the trail of Kipling's Kim. These are great fun to write and, while they are not precisely itineraries in the sense of ready-to-follow routes, they may be useful to someone planning a trip.

Would anyone care to improve those? Or to tackle other similar topics? Or to offer criticism? Pashley (talk) 19:43, 23 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Travelling distances

From my resources of non-online material I have uncovered a 'distance book' produced by the western australian main roads department. I cannot find any earlier discussion (and if it is somewhere - please alert me so that this thread here does not become space or time consuming here) as to whether there ever have been - at a country or large region - any usage or perceived need for charts / tables of distances within a country or region? I can understand for some it might be anathema and run against the general scope of the project - in which case I will probably keep my sub-page and use it for informing the various articles the information is useful in. Thanks to anyone who might feel it is worth discussing. sats (talk) 07:57, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some articles contain a few distances to neighbouring cities in their "Go next" section, but apart from that I don't think complete table are really needed? Someone may know better, though. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:54, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know of a central discussion to point you to, but in practice it has always been considered that this type of information is much better provided by a good map, so lists and tables of distances have generally been discouraged.Texugo (talk) 14:58, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

New Interlingual Portal implemented

I just wanted to take this opportunity to draw the community's attention to all the the great work done by Rogerhc on WV's new interlingual portal - it really does look great. Thanks Roger! :) --Nick (talk) 10:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Where have the links to the other wmf projects gone? I'm just seeing an empty blue rectangle at the bottom. Texugo (talk) 11:34, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
They're at the top in a black bar, which does seem a bit counter-intuitive. And I also see the empty blue rectangle. LtPowers (talk) 13:05, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, they're almost invisible up there - if the links are to be kept there they should be colored red/orange or something. Otherwise the page looks great. I'm using Safari and I don't see any empty blue rectangle. Ypsilon (talk) 16:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A mobile version of the interlingual portal is needed. AHeneen (talk) 11:36, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see. Actually, I like the black bar a lot, but I wish it were at the bottom of the page. Texugo (talk) 14:38, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The html source code contains about 270 errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.wikivoyage.org). The code should be cleaned. --RolandUnger (talk) 07:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Roland. I cleaned up the http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikivoyage.org_template/temp just now. It is up to a Mata admin to push that clean up live. --Rogerhc (talk) 00:40, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Synched with temp. If you ever need something on Meta, feel free to ask. It's not as scary as it looks. ;) PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:20, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The first letter of the Ukrainian translation for "Travel Guide", "туристичний путівник", isn't capitalized like the rest of the translations are. Should be "Туристичний путівник" in both the hovertext and the <em/>. Bigpeteb (talk) 18:06, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Bigpeteb, Done on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikivoyage.org_template/temp just now. It is now up to a Mata admin to push that live. --Rogerhc (talk) 00:40, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This edit should fix all but 3 of the errors in the HTML. Shall I sync the live version? PiRSquared17 (talk) 20:34, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes please - that would be great! :) --Nick (talk) 20:40, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Are you sure? Looks like the hovertext was changed but not the bodytext of the link Bigpeteb (talk) 21:35, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(sorry, can I edit it myself? wasn't sure) Bigpeteb (talk) 21:36, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Synched. See if it fixed the HTML stuff (it might take a while for it to go live). PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:24, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Bigpeteb is right. I had fixed the hover texts but forgot the link texts. I have corrected that now and asked PiRSquared to re-sync. And yes, anyone can edit m:Www.wikivoyage.org_template/temp but only Meta admin can sync it to the live m:Www.wikivoyage.org_template. --Rogerhc (talk) 23:41, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template:FactCheck

I just introduced Template:FactCheck and used it in Ekerö. Comments are welcome. /Yvwv (talk) 20:26, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, too bad. Has the time of sticking templates instead of fixing problems begun at last? If we are to develop such templates, which in my opinion are severely over-used on en-wp, we should try to come up with some kind of policy on how and when to add. You seem to know something about this Birka place, and it's just a couple of lines of text. The layout of the template is fine, in principle. But is there any way we can convince you to fix the problem instead of sticking that template on it? :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 21:51, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with JuliasTravels. Oftentimes, adding a template can serve as an "easy out" in favor of making the required changes oneself. That may fly at a place like Wikipedia, which has a much larger population of committed editors, and where it can therefore be assumed that someone else will come along quickly and make the changes rather than the template staying on the page indefinitely. But for all our recent growth, Wikivoyage is still a small fry compared to Wikipedia. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:59, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Julias and Andre. I think such a banner may itself be cruft. Simply deleting whatever specific details of an entry one finds to be out of date, assuming one finds it impractical to update them, may be better. If one lacks the info or confidence to do that, leaving a note about the matter here in the Pub may be more helpful than a banner template. Thank you Yvwv for bringing this up here. :-) Rogerhc (talk) 23:54, 25 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see a huge box on the page but am still uncertain as to what of the info is presumably outdated or what the original poster wanted done to fix this. Perhaps something small and less obtrusive like (dated info) or (disputed) or (see talk) should link to a section of the article's talk page, where something more descriptive than "fix this" could be provided without displaying as part of the article. And no, (citation needed) shouldn't be one of these unless we ever start using Wikipedia-style cited secondary sources for info. K7L (talk) 01:05, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with K7L. Big boxes claiming generic problems are not very helpful. They are a cmplete pain on WP, as they often leave you in nearly complete ignorance of what to do about the problem. I accept that it is not always possible to fix the information oneself, but the inline markers are far more useful as they more accurately identify the problem text. Such notices should always be dated. On WP that is usually done by a bot. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:03, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would suggest that the problem text should be exactly identified, possibly by highlighting the text in some way, so it is clear where it starts and where it stops. Maybe underlining?
Suggestions for policy for inline templates. (formalising K7L suggestions)
  • If information is wrong, correct it if you can, delete it if you can't correct it
  • If information is contentious, tag as (disputed|date)
  • If information is out of date tag as (dated|date)
  • If there is another problem tag as (see talk page|date) and discuss on talk page. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:20, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A much better solution indeed! I would say such inline remarks, exactly identified, have all the advantages (making people aware that the information is flawed and can't be relied on blindly) without the dreaded boxes. It's probably the next best thing to fixing. Is there a way to list those inline-tags on a separate page, somewhere? I wouldn't mind digging into information, when it is available on other sites, to update a spotted problem now and then. On other wiki's there are always people who prefer fixing small problems over writing content. It might help to keep the number of such tags somewhat in check? JuliasTravels (talk) 09:30, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Agree most templates on EN wiki are silly and should be deleted. I deleted certain types (like the expert needed one) on sight. The last thing we want to promote is a mentally of people tagging rather than fixing. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:33, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know a template can add a category to a page which will allow all pages with that template to be listed as a category. The category can be hidden if you don't want it to show on the page. Removing the template after the problem has been fixed should automatically remove the category.
I agree with Doc James that we only want a small number of useful templates. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:19, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So what is the status on this one? It is still tagged as experimental and used in only one article. Personally, I am not a fan of this idea at all, for the reasons initially stated by JuliusTravels, Andrecarrotflower, and Rogerhc above. If every potentially outdated bit of info we have were tagged like this, we would have many thousands of instances of this tag. If somebody knows that something is wrong but doesn't have time to find and add the right info, it is better to just remove the info than to just leave it there with a tag that a traveller may miss when reading the actual text.Texugo (talk) 14:45, 14 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Invalid interwiki

There are a lot of invalid interwiki from incubator in articles (like here). They link to pages that don't exist. Maybe it'll be better to remove them. The same operation was carried out on uk, ru and it wikivoyages. My bot can remove ar, ca, eo, fi, hi, hu, ja, ko, zh interwiki, but I'd like to ask for permission to make these changes. What do you think about it? --SteveR (talk) 16:30, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think that languages which were never imported (or never imported properly) should be imported to either incubator or a new wiki instead of merely removing the links. No idea if anything is being done, or on what expected timeframe, but unless the target page was originally spam (or voted out of existence for some reason) I'd hesitate to pull the links. We do need to do something about importing fi hu ro and zh as there are many templated links from WP in those languages which currently still point to WT and need to be pointed to us once we import the content. K7L (talk) 02:44, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help test the new account creation and login

Hi all,

After many weeks of testing, We (the editor engagement experiments team) are is getting close to enabling redesigns of the account creation and login pages. (There's more background about how we got here and why ‎our blog post.)

Right now are trying to identify any final bugs before we enable new defaults. This is where we really need your help: for now, we don't want to disrupt these critical functions if there are outstanding bugs or mistranslated interface messages. So for about a week, the new designs are opt-in only for testing purposes, and it would be wonderful if you could give them a try. Here's how:

If you have questions about how to test this or why something might be the way it is, I'd definitely check out our step-by-step testing guide and the general documentation.

Many thanks, Steven (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Which is the most appropriate place for feedback? I think "contributors this month" is misleading in an ugly Internet-Brands sort of way, since it sounds like it's trying to imply there were that many unique editors during this month... Texugo (talk) 20:14, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here works for feedback. :) On this: it's supposed to use the {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} magic word, which shows all users who took an action in the last 30 days. Right now it mistakenly includes just {{NUMBEROFUSERS}}. If folks still think that's unacceptable, let's talk about alternatives. (You can of course customize the local MediaWiki message for the statistic and its description.) Steven (WMF) (talk) 20:33, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If it will show number of active users, it would be fine with me... Texugo (talk) 20:44, 26 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Help:Logging in doesn't exist; in fact, we don't have a Help namespace. Is that customizable? LtPowers (talk) 02:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Customizable in MediaWiki:Helplogin-url. Let's remove that link, maybe for now by placing something else, maybe even just "&nbsp;" in MediaWiki:Helplogin-url (blanking it would not work as that just reverts to the default link). Putting a "help" link there is an unnecessary invitation to excess. The corresponding Wikipedia page w:Help:Logging_in is an example of excess that does not help the traveler nor probably anyone else. Could an admin do this please? The MediaWiki:Helplogin-url page is protected. --Rogerhc (talk) 00:10, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think a simple help link is not an invitation to excess. It's pretty standard user interface design to not dump help content on to the login page, but put it somewhere else so that it doesn't distract or annoy people who don't need help. I would highly encourage Wikivoyage to have a basic help page about login. Since Wikivoyage doesn't have a help namespace, which is slightly unusual, where do you keep help guides? In the project namespace? Perhaps Wikivoyage:How to create a user account is the appropriate interim link. Let me know and I can help customize any MediaWiki namespace messages if an admin hasn't beat me to it. :) Steven (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Taking someone to a page that is not the "create an account" page makes it quiet a bit harder, not easier, for him to complete that "create an account" page. A more helpful way to offer help where it might be needed there on that very simple page is to put it in hove boxes that pop up when a user lingers over or clicks a "help" link there, so that the user is still on the "create an account" page while he is reading that brief, to the point at hand, help. Paragraphs of explanatory text on an entirely different page simply are not helpful nor relevant to the simple process of filling out the "create an account" form. Certainly lets not take someone away from the "create an account" page while he is trying to fill it out. Rogerhc (talk) 06:00, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You wouldn't be "taking" anyone anywhere. The person would be looking for help, since they'd have to click the link. I redirected it to the help page for now, but if people really want it blank, any admin can just turn it in to an empty comment. Steven (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 29 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

As a quick update: it's been quite some time and localizations are mostly complete, so we're enabling the new forms for most of the major wikis. Let me know if there's anything I can do going forward. There are a few remaining enhancements we want to make but they're relatively minor. Steven (WMF) (talk) 23:03, 29 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]


Consulates and Embassies

After a list of consulates was added to Pacific Northwest, User:Lumpytrout pointed to Florida as an example of consulates being listed in Region articles. I thought we only put consulates and embassies in City articles. Which is correct? LtPowers (talk) 20:33, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I thought we only put them in city articles too. Wouldn't it be rather redundant to put them in a city and a state article? PerryPlanet (talk) 20:46, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, redundant I think. Usually an area will only have one city with any consulates or embassies at all anyway. I wouldn't mind a note in the region article saying "Various consulates/embassies can be found in City X" or something short to that effect, but I don't see any need to reproduce the whole list. Texugo (talk) 20:55, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
specifically I was thinking of a time I stepped off a train in Japan to stretch my legs (I was young and dumb) only to have the train leave without me. My backpack, passport, money etc was all on the train (did I mention I was young and dumb at the time?) anyway, long story short I really needed an English speaker and fast and obviously I was not familiar with the area. If I had a resource like wikivoyage available to me at the time, where would I look for a consulate? I wouldn't want to spend my time looking through individual city listings trying to find the right one. Lumpytrout (talk) 21:04, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Well, in that kind of situation you'd be stuck in one city. So I would imagine you'd start by looking at the article for the city you're in, right? PerryPlanet (talk) 21:38, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's also nothing for which my suggested one-liner wouldn't point you in the right direction. Texugo (talk) 22:03, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I will work out a better one-liner strategy for that section, some of the local consulates are off the beaten track for some reason so I do think that some direction at a higher level would be helpful. Florida was probably a bad example to be tracking as it is both a state and its own United States region. Lumpytrout (talk) 01:58, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

[en] Change to wiki account system and account renaming

Some accounts will soon be renamed due to a technical change that the developer team at Wikimedia are making. More details on Meta.

(Distributed via global message delivery 03:31, 30 April 2013 (UTC). Wrong page? Correct it here.)

The notice says that bureaucrat's rights to rename users will be removed. Will that affect our little system we've got going here of renaming and merging old WT users? If so, maybe it's not such an issue, as users have had plenty of time to be renamed and merged if that's what they wanted. JamesA >talk 03:44, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is a good question. But in the meantime, if you have not merged your en.wikivoyage account with your other WMF accounts using Special:MergeAccount you probably should before May 27, or otherwise things might become a huge mess after that. --Rschen7754 04:25, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Response from Jdforrester: --Rschen7754 05:52, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for following up. Hopefully there is a way to maintain that functionality since we still get a trickle of users wanting their contributions imported here from the other site merged into their Wikivoyage account contribution history. -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:22, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Not a problem. Might be helpful to have a crat or two say something at m:Rename practices besides my generic comment. --Rschen7754 06:41, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]


For the record, this has now been delayed until August, due to the WMF Board Elections. --Rschen7754 19:25, 27 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help with an article

Anyone who is so inclined could help with Routes to Santiago de Compostela from France, which was a travel topic until I just turned it into an itinerary and inserted a (slightly modified) itinerary template. On Talk:Routes to Santiago de Compostela from France, I outline some of the most urgent tasks. This could be a really good article, but it will take a lot of work. I'd love it if someday it could be a feature. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:35, 30 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't this the same subject as French Way? It might be best to turn Way of St.James into a travel topic, discussing the pilgrimage and branching out detailed routes into separate articles as itineraries. AHeneen (talk) 00:58, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Same subject? Kind of, given that these are all routes of pilgrimage to Santiago. But it's not the same route. Three of the routes covered in Routes to Santiago de Compostela from France connect to the French Way, while the other connects to the Aragonese Way, but if you look at the French Way article, you'll see that that route begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port near the border with Spain, whereas the routes covered in Routes to Santiago de Compostela from France start in Paris/Tours, Vézelay, Le Puy-en-Velay and Arles - considerable distances into France. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:14, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Image migration

Is there a Dummy's Guide to migrating files? I've had a look and can't find one. I never really understood the procedure, but I've found a file that looks adequately licensed and should be moved to Commons:

Actually, it seems that there are several files that still need to be moved.Travelpleb (talk) 08:10, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In theory, if you tag it with the Move template (as I've just done), a bot will take care of the move. But I don't know if the bots are still running or not. LtPowers (talk) 14:59, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like User:MGA73 last performed some migrations on April 7. That said, many of the remaining images, including the one you've referenced, are images that may or may not have been properly licensed. There is no explicit indication on (for example) that the uploader is actually the photographer, aside from a license tag that was automatically added based on a droplist selection, so in such cases I'm not sure that we should risk putting the file into Commons. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If the image isn't available elsewhere on the web (aside from WT of course), given the resolution of the image and the presence of full EXIF data (which is the same for all three of the user's uploads), I think we're safe assuming own work. Whether certain parties at Commons would agree or not, I don't know. LtPowers (talk) 15:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but since the uploader will be legally liable for any copyright violations, I think User:MGA73 was only migrating files that were very explicit in their sourcing and licensing, and the bot used was ignoring images tagged "move" without an explicit source. As a result, I'm not sure that a "move" tag will be sufficient if the bot is re-enabled. Also, as you've pointed out, parties at Commons may be similarly cautious if the file is moved there. I'm probably more gun-shy than most given recent experience, but personally I don't think the reward of moving remaining images to Commons outweighs the risk of accidentally pulling in copyvios given the incomplete info for most remaining images. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:47, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the input. The same user's other shots have already been transferred to Commons, so it seems strange that this one was left behind. The photographs were all taken on the same day, in the same place, with the same camera model; but perhaps there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll.Travelpleb (talk) 08:08, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The process for moving images that you have already checked and tagged is to poke one of the filemovers who participated in the process. See example. --Peter Talk 16:17, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. I copied the file mentioned above and some of the other files to Commons. Unless someone find a huge load of good files I think we are down to moving the files one by one as we find some good files to move.
There is an old post on http://wts.wikivoyage-old.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Pub_%28temporary_refuge%29#What_to_do_with_files_not_yet_om_Commons about what to do with the rest of the files. Perhaps someone knows if all non-free files are copied to the relevant wikivoyage projects?
And right above the post mentioned above there is a request from Magog if some admins could help check and delete the files Copied to Commons. You do not have to delete 100 files. Any help is welcome. --MGA73 (talk) 19:01, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks MGA73. That's a great help.Travelpleb (talk) 09:25, 4 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What to do about contributions with extremely bad grammar

Lately, we've had a bunch of content contributed on pages about China (such as Fuyang‎‎, Hangzhou, and previously, Wenzhou, but I did a lot of editing in that article and it's now better). That's the good news, and don't get me wrong: I'm glad the content is being added.

However, the bad news is that the new content is written in extremely poor ESL English and often also poorly formatted. I've edited some entries, "Understand" sections and the like to make them acceptable, but I can't keep pace with the volume of the edits. I feel like we really need more contributors who are fully bilingual in Chinese and English (and more contributors who are reasonably proficient in English, period), who will be able to easily make sense of Chinese English contributions and "translate" them into good English. Meanwhile, whoever would like to join me in trying to fix a lot of poorly-phrased listings and the like would be doing a good job for the reader. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:49, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

comment re this - an example The base of volplane in Yongan mountain: There have a big base of glide, you can rental the glider in here. There is a best place to glide because there have best weather, landing area, slope of hill, terrain, wind direction, and condition of traffic and vegetation. Few years ago, there have the international glide competition, the sportsman from Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, and 20 cities from China, and the international sportsman from France and Germany. Whatever, there is the best place to glide!!!!! = Yongan mountain is a gliding location.

One very big problem is for the non-bilingual - how are we to know it is not copyvio? sats (talk) 07:37, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Are paraphrases considered copyvio here? If not, is a translation a form of paraphrasing? In a way, it is, almost necessarily. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:49, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I am sure in the end translation and or paraphrasing is not really a copyvio issue - on thinking the issue through my question is redundant. sats (talk) 12:22, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For paraphrasing, isn't part of the point of paraphrasing because it avoids copyvios? In terms of translations, I don't know the legalities of copyvios from translations however, because we try to be concise and avoid lengthy explanations, I think it forces us to paraphrase after translating.
In the case above, though, the 'translation' is from English that is difficult to understand/incomprehensible to English that is natural. That's not a copyvio. If the added info seems both touty and difficult to read, it can just be reverted. In this case, it may be a hassle, but a little research on gliding in that city might be enough to smooth it out, but I think the above example is understandable enough to be fleshed out without research (at least enough to make it acceptable until someone with more knowledge edits). ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:58, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are at least two principles in copyright law that appear to apply here:

  • Copyright does cover "derivative works", so a paraphrase can be a copyvio and a translation almost certainly is.
  • Copyright does not cover ideas, only the expression of them, so taking information but not text from anywhere is OK.

For how these apply in a particular case, and what other complications come into it, only a lawyer can give a plausible answer and only a judge can give one that is definitive for a particular jurisdiction. I'm not certain a full answer is even possible on the Net; probably the WMF legal dep't could give a fine approximation. Pashley (talk) 14:42, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Both translating and paraphrasing someone else's writing without permission is a copyright violation. If the "paraphrasing" is sufficiently different, then it would be fine, but then it wouldn't really be paraphrasing. Spotting such copyvios is can be pretty hard, though. With paraphrasing, some original bits usually get thrown in that you can catch and then match the original to the derivative. With translations, you can occasionally guess where the info is coming from and check (if you can understand the language with or without a translator).
If you find a good source of information, don't rewrite it using the same structure. Instead, read it, copy some facts, and then write something fresh without looking at what you read while you write it. --Peter Talk 19:02, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate the responses - even after I disqualified my own comment - it is very useful to have such information regularly explained and put up - I think all wiki project users need to be reminded of the issues. sats (talk) 08:43, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia en 'Travel and Tourism Project'

I do not know if there are any editors who would be in any way enthusiastic/interested about wikipedia en editing in the almost dormant Travel and Tourism project ( a very different approach to issues, but potenatially useful nonetheless )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Travel_and_Tourism

I could see that there are some potentially extraordinarily useful synergies between the almost inactive project - and the project here.

However I do not wish to over-burden this initial query here apart from seeing if there is any interest first. I will wait for a while as I realise that some editors here might need a close look first... sats (talk) 08:19, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As there has been zilch response to this - I will pursue the points of common interest/ points of disjuncture quietly and resurface the idea later when I have more of a handle on some of the ideas. If anyone is interested in the idea at this stage please contact. sats (talk) 02:56, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd love to see more cross-project collaboration, but at the moment I don't have time available to commit to any additional endeavors. Others may be similarly time-constrained given all that is going on here, but it would be great if you or someone else could continue to investigate and spearhead options for further collaboration, perhaps as a expedition that might slowly attract more attention here. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:04, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Time is indeed a serious issue for me as well. The interesting thing about the fate of the Travel and Tourism project (and probably the hotels project as well) on wp en - is that although the articles and content of the project inside wp en may be at odds to the general aim of this project - I feel that where there have been 'exclusions' here - due to the keeping to the scope and aims of this project - there maybe points where a clearer understanding of what the wp en Travel and Tourism project was going - there might just be material/crossovers of benefit to both... I will endevour to make a sub page of the category tree of the wp en project sometime soon and see what might come from that - at the same time being very aware of the boundaries limited by scope and policy... sats (talk) 03:43, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tokyo/Roppongi for star?

I proposed for star nomination the article Tokyo/Roppongi. Could someone please check my English grammar there? Of course, any other kind of feedback (or even help!) is much welcome :-) In particular, don't hesitate to make it sound more humourous/fun. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:24, 8 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]


Android: wikivoyage.org redirects to www.m.wikivoyage.org which does not exist

On Android 2.2, I searched "wikivoyage austria" on Google, click the first result, and got an error "Web page not available" at http://www.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Austria. Is there currently a known problem? Apparently on my device www.wikivoyage.org redirects to www.m.wikivoyage.org which does not exist. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:18, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It needs the language version instead of "www". Try: http://EN.m.wikivoyage.org/Austria . When I tried this with the desktop website http://www.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Austria, it is a redirect to en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Austria. On a related note there is no inter-lingual homepage for mobile. Neither http://www.m.wikivoyage.org nor http://m.wikivoyage.org exist and the page looks odd on mobile with the new sunrise-photo portal. These are bugs that should be reported. AHeneen (talk) 09:41, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ewww, that's ugly, I'll open up a bug and post the link here for anyone who has more info. It looks like the old wikivoyage.org redirects did not take the mobile redirects into account. It's likely relatively easy for them to fix just that no one realized it. Thank you!! Jalexander (talk) 23:47, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Added as bugzilla:48394 not sure how prevalent it is (a couple random wikivoyage searches did not come up with it) but it's clearly consistent on "Wikivoyage austria" and If it happens there I'm SURE it happens elsewhere and that's not acceptable. Jalexander (talk) 00:10, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Test wiki

I created a test wiki—http://voy-en.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org in Wikimedia Foundation Labs Wikivoyage project—but it's anemic, doesn't even have parcer functions. To be useful as a test wiki it needs to be a clone of en.Wikivoyage, database and extensions and all, but I don't know how to set that up. If anyone with server administration clue wants to help me make that test wiki into a clone of en.Wikivoyage I'd be extatic, please let me know. :-) Rogerhc (talk) 05:40, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Try asking around in #wikimedia-labs? (Maybe during the day in the US?) --Rschen7754 05:55, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikivoyage has a fair bit of health info. Some of it is of questionable correctness. Wondering about providing links to Wikipedia / adding references to some of it? Wikipedia as I am sure most are aware is now linking to Wikivoyage in many places. Also with respect to some of the medications. Should we link to Wikipedia for those? Use something like a sister site template maybe? Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:50, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have created an example of such linking here http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Travellers%27_diarrhea#Medicate Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:53, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That would violate our external links policy. But the allowed sister link (which is already there) that links to w:Traveler's diarrhea certainly makes sense. --Peter Talk 00:50, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Travel Doc, if you see any health info that's incorrect or questionable, please edit it.
Allowing other-subject links to Wikipedia is a controversial subject, and opinion has divided about 50/50 on whether to allow more links or not. I'm having trouble locating the latest long discussion thread on whether to allow more links to Wikipedia. It's not in the intuitive places, like Wikivoyage talk:Cooperating with Wikipedia or Wikivoyage talk:External links. I'd like for someone to provide the link for you, in case you have more suggestions for ways to go forward that might achieve a consensus, however unlikely that is. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:08, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's at Wikivoyage talk:Listings#Listings tags and links to Wikipedia, but yes, it really should be at Wikivoyage talk:External links or Wikivoyage talk:Links to Wikipedia. --Peter Talk 01:54, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I believe that the most exhaustive discussion on the subject is the enormous thread that precedes (and is summarized at) Wikivoyage talk:Listings#Ongoing feedback. That discussion applied specifically to Wikipedia links in listing tags, but that usage was opposed primarily due to a general opposition to adding more Wikipedia links to articles. Wikivoyage talk:Links to Wikipedia#Secondary sources is a related discussion. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:57, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

'Not yet' page

Hi! Having looked at the vfd page recently, I was wondering whether it might be worth creating a 'Not yet' page for all the articles that don't at present fit with our remit, but may one day find a use. As we continue to sort our house out we're going to keep finding long, interesting articles that don't quite fit our needs, but we're also going to perhaps look at expanding the topics we cover. Is it therefore worth creating a central archive where we can store these articles until they're wanted and perhaps even improve them in the meantime? Any thoughts welcome! --Nick (talk) 21:04, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nick, if I'm getting you, do you mean we should create "Not yet" page for all the localities that don't have an article yet? --Saqib (talk) 21:27, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No - as an example, take some of the airline articles that were recently up for deletion. We didn't really want to keep them, but didn't want to delete them either as we could see a use for them in future. I'm not suggesting creating hundreds of stub articles by any means; on the contrary, I'm thinking of articles with lots of content that don't quite fit within the WV remit. If people would be interested in creating some sort of 'incubator' as you describe then maybe that's another, different avenue that could be explored. --Nick (talk) 21:33, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Userspace is often used for this purpose. LtPowers (talk) 02:11, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nick, your idea reminds me of the exact same idea we produced in this discussion, but forgot about ;) I'm all for creating a Wikivoyage:Limbo, where things could be slushed for the time being. Moving things to userspace is pretty effective, but a little too confusing for some of the types of new editors that create articles that wind up on the vfd page. --Peter Talk 04:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
'Limbo' sounds like a good name for such a page! Userspaces are useful (I'm the proud adoptive father of M5 motorway), but once there, articles are out of the public domain. It would be nice to have somewhere between deletion and the mainspace. :) --Nick (talk) 16:16, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Remove unneeded features from the edit toolbar

I understand that we can somehow edit the toolbar above the edit window. Since we don't use <ref> and we don't encourage <gallery>, could we remove the reference button from the main bar, the reference section from the help tab, and the insert gallery button from the advanced tab? (Could someone please show me where admins can edit the toolbar?)

And incidentally, if anyone know hows to get that far, maybe we could take care of this while we're at it? Texugo (talk) 20:21, 14 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See this. --Saqib (talk) 00:28, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Actually much progress has been made since I posted that, and I found that page you mentioned. We now have working listing buttons, but the remove script given in that documentation only seems to work for encapsulation buttons on the main bar, and we haven't got it working for the three things I mentioned above. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Details here. Texugo (talk) 01:03, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Portal pages

Hi! I'm still trying to give Flying (and associated articles) a bit of an overhaul, but that page really serves only as a portal - it's not an article. Despite this, it is classified as such, but fits none of the criteria. Is there any way to put 'portal' as a page category or is it better just to leave it as it is? --Nick (talk) 23:15, 15 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I personally don't like to see portals on Wikivoyage. Lets keep things simple here Nick. --Saqib (talk) 00:15, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No, I know that it isn't usual on here and I'm certainly not trying to create some Wikipedian multi-tiered article structure, but I think Flying needs a page of this sort (the name 'portal' is purely academic). There is no other way to really sort this information (as it's been split into 4), so in the interests of the traveller, I fear a portal here is necessary. --Nick (talk) 00:27, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's an attractive and helpful page the way you have it organised now, Nick. Is this query just about the appropriate (hidden) classification of this unique page? -- Alice✉ 09:04, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Alice; yeah that's basically it. I wasn't planning on changing that page at all, I was just concerned about its classification. --Nick (talk) 19:24, 17 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

List of bus routes in (Kalamazoo)

A batch of pages which consisted of lists of bus routes in cities were recently deleted from English Wikipedia. Are those appropriate for adding to articles here? The list of routes might be significantly longer than the current article on the city, depending. Are they appropriate for creating a new article with if it doesn't exist?  :) Sj (talk) 13:11, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One was moved here and, after considerable discussion, the resulting article was deleted.
We have also deleted transit maps on occasion. e.g. Talk:Shanghai#Metro_pic Pashley (talk) 13:43, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This was discussed here back in January, but I can't find it in the archive. For somewhere like Kalamazoo, the information is readily available online from the bus operator or local authority, so a separate article is not appropriate. If the information is not online in English, then there might be a case for an article, but this would have to be written to be useful to a traveller, not a bus spotter. AlasdairW (talk) 22:57, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Previous discussion archived at Wikivoyage_talk:What_is_an_article?#Lists_of_Bus_Routes. Nurg (talk) 10:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist Change Emails

I am not receiving mail when changes are made to watchlist articles. I have tried, but can't seem to fix this. Has this affected others? Seligne (talk) 07:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You will only receive ONE email alert when the watched page has changed (if you have set this in your user preferences) subsequent changes are not alert e-mailed but will still appear on your watchlist in bold, Seligne. Keep cool! -- Alice✉ 16:38, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

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You can also become a tech ambassador, help us write the next newsletter and tell us what to improve. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. guillom 20:28, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like the :voy:el: wikilink is not working, not sure if it is a problem or not. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:03, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Since we're already :voy it doesn't like that, I would assume. By the way, the Greek Wikivoyage is open! --Rschen7754 19:38, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Huh. You're right; the voy: prefix doesn't work here. That seems like a bug. LtPowers (talk) 21:07, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Clicking map problem

you cant click in the map on central america -it gets either to north or south americaOlmav (talk)

As the color coding on the map at the bottom of the main page suggests, Central America is, for the purposes of navigating this site, lumped together with North America. The map shows the seven color-coded continents divided the same way that map at the top is; in most English-speakers' conception of the continents, there are seven, of which Central America does not constitute its own continent. Texugo (talk) 11:39, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From a geographical perspective, our current method is acceptable. But from a traveller's perspective, we really should be separating the Middle East and Central America as major regions/continents in their own right. That's how Lonely Planet does it, except they further separate Central America and the Caribbean, and I don't think that is necessary. Have we had a discussion about this before? JamesA >talk 03:03, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From what I remember, I think we did have a version of the new Main Page which divided the continents like that, though I can't remember why we changed it back; perhaps to keep in line with our Destinations page? --Nick talk 10:39, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I can't think of any reason to not at least include them on the click map. Texugo (talk) 11:09, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If that's what we want it should be fairly easy to do - it's just a question of changing the co-ordinates. --Nick talk 11:11, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If we are going to do it, we should go the whole way. So not just changing the map, but the Destinations page, the breadcrumbs (making Middle East/Central America top level continents), and many of the underlying region maps (so Middle East will be pulled out of Asia and the map reconfigured. Any less is inconsistent and somewhat confusing. I do think the other Wikivoyages also make the division I'm proposing. JamesA >talk 11:55, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Without responding directly to that proposal for a sitewide change, I don't think adding it to the map would actually be inconsistent. It's not as if the map screams "here are our seven top hierarchy levels". Texugo (talk) 12:38, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Central America, Caribbean, and Middle East are most certainly not separate continents, and we shouldn't treat them as such. I also don't see why we should treat them any differently than we treat other Continental Sections like Russia, Central Europe, Southern Africa, or Canada. LtPowers (talk) 13:39, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Destinations doesn't list continents; it lists destinations. The traveller comes first, and if it makes more sense to separate the Middle East and Central America from a travel perspective, it should be done. Moreover, continents refer to large landmasses; so technically, the continents are North and South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. But a continent like Eurasia is not helpful, so we divide it as per common practice. JamesA >talk 14:09, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
But that's just it; it doesn't make sense to promote those two or three tiny regions to Continent status. They're considerably smaller than Oceania and are historically and contemporarily considered parts of the seven traditional continents, not separate continents. LtPowers (talk) 14:50, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Twitter (and some other things)

Hi! I was just thinking that it would be a nice idea to contact the tourist board of destinations that we were about to feature on our Main Page, so they could capitalise on it and direct some people here (A win-win situation!). To my mind, Twitter would be a good method to use for this (it's quick, informal and public), but, of course, we don't yet a WV account. I'd be more than happy to set this up myself, but from what I gather, we might have to talk to the WMF first. The other issue is that there are already 2 Wikivoyage-ish accounts in existence: this one, seemingly in use by the German project and this one, the particulars of which are somewhat mysterious. Either way, I think such an account would be a good to way to get people interested in the project, as well as interacting positively with it. --Nick talk 16:13, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikivoyage talk:Social media. There's no separate discussion for Twitter. We'd need to find out who owns the accounts (German Wikivoyage?) and if there is trouble handing over the account, contact WMF to contact Twitter and usurp the account. AHeneen (talk) 04:31, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The idea of tweeting tourist boards sounds interesting. Obviously, we can only contact those who have official Twitter accounts, so you could start building a database of them on your user page. One question though: If we send the same unsollicitated tweet to many users, won't it be considered spam? Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:05, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Is it worth me getting in contact with the German project and seeing if they'd be prepared to hand it over? In terms of sending messages to Tourist Boards, we'd do it sparingly and only when their destination came up. We could always email those who don't yet have Twitter. I just think it's a nice medium to use to interact with people and inspire interest. --Nick talk 09:17, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Page views

What happened? PiRSquared17 (talk) 04:04, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that myself the other day, though I've no idea what could be to blame. --Nick talk 09:42, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just double checking that I'm not crazy—why "blame?" Isn't this a good thing? --Peter Talk 14:24, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's a good thing that the page views recovered. But of course, why did that temporary drop even happen in the first place? And it's unfortunate that our page views are hardly increasing, while that of WT appears to be constant or even remaining the same. I do think we need to be more hardliner with the Search Expedition and create a private forum to discuss issues instead. JamesA >talk 14:30, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry if my wording was a little off. I really meant what James has said: we had a big drop, have recovered, but haven't really grown. I think you're right about pushing the Search Expedition harder - how could we set that up as a private forum? I'm going to push for Twitter (as above) which will hopefully encourage a few more people to take a look. --Nick talk 14:45, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We should install mw:Extension:AddHTML, which will permit me to add code to the Main Page, allowing us to get the Google/Bing/Yahoo webmaster tools, something we sorely need. JamesA >talk 15:08, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That extension does look like a good idea. Having looked at the stats for a few other pages over the same period, it looks like it was only the Main Page's views that fell with that pattern - why might that be? --Nick talk 15:13, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The giant drop in Main Page views coincided with the introduction of the new main page. I have no idea why that would be, but it's a relief that it has now recovered. --Peter Talk 15:20, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Also, a good private forum would probably be an invite only mailing list (Google Groups?), and invite only Expedition members who have a spotless and substantial wiki record, to weed out the untrustworthy. --Peter Talk 15:22, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps some sort of link problem caused the issue - has Google only just re-cached us? As you say though, it's a relief that it's sorted itself out now. Those sound like fair criteria for the Project: World Domination (:D) forum and Google Groups seems a good way to do it. --Nick talk 15:26, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Is there actually anything to be discussed about SEO that can't be discussed on the search expedition? I don't see anything in the discussions thus far that would require additional privacy, so is there something more that people have refrained from discussing? For example, is the fear that if we reveal any keywords we are trying to optimize around that someone else might do the same? Unless there's a good reason to do so I'd be hesitant about moving discussions off wiki. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:33, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there is, and I believe other users are also withholding ideas because they may be jeopardized. We know that IB is tracking our every move seeing as they have nothing better to do with their time. Let's just trial a private Google Group and see how it goes. There's no real harm in it. JamesA >talk 10:52, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was told on #mediawiki IRC that the Extension above is dysfunctional. To get the Google Webmaster tools, we need to add the following to our LocalSettings.php:

$wgHooks['BeforePageDisplay'][] = function( OutputPage &$out, Skin &$skin ) {
	$out->addMeta( 'google-site-verification', 'sNZwxRsBwHw-lx18A7jp8qmQ3eGF6DGzEBlkS8dLdeM' );
	return true;
}

That can only be done through a tech request, which can hopefully be fulfilled swiftly. Does someone want to make that, as I haven't made a tech request before? JamesA >talk 13:38, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sitting a room with most of the WMF's tech staff at the moment, so I'll ask around. I think there will be some legal/privacy with this request, though. —Ruud 14:12, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The operations team have never really given any though about this yet, but think it would probably be idea to have access to Google Webmaster, Alexa, etc. for WV (Google Analytics and other services that require you to install a web bug are definitely out of the question, though, because of privacy reasons.) There doesn't exists of process for this yet, but they would prefer the ownership of this to be tied to Wikimedia('s site operations team) instead of to "someone with a gmail address."
Their advised course of action was to file a "shell bug" in Bugzilla with very specific instructions on what you want done (e.g. "change the Alexa description for wikivoyage.org to such and such.") The person in particular to bug about this is Rob Lanphier (RobLa). —Ruud 14:54, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for asking, Ruud! There are a variety of things we would like access to, including Google/Bing/Yahoo Webmaster, Alexa and some other SEO sites listed on the Expedition page. I can understand their preference for the WMF to be the ones with access and control, but the issue is the WMF having to be a middle-man, and unfortunately often a slow one at that. If we had access to the Webmaster tools, we would want to be periodically and regularly checking it to determine changes in how we are displayed in search results and what keywords trigger Wikivoyage to pop up in results. It's not just a matter of adding a sitemap and we can put the issue aside.
It would be good if it were possible for the WMF to have the ability to edit settings and change access, but admins were simply able to view the statistical info and data when they pleased. Is that possible? I may send a message off to Rob later. JamesA >talk 03:36, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Are we going to go ahead with the aforementioned Google Group then? I can't see that it could do any harm. --Nick talk 15:27, 27 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, I don't really understand the rest of this thread. Why did the views on the Main Page drop so quickly and in such an abnormal way? PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:48, 31 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Racist establishments

Heya! I was wondering if anyone could tell me if there is a particular policy on WV to not include a listing (in this case accommodation) if they do not accept all travellers regardless of their race. I do know of a few places that have this policy and I personally find it quite disturbing, and have seen a couple of them on here.

In such a case should I delete the listing or state in the description that, for example 'This hostel does not accept bookings from citizens of India or Middle eastern countries'. I prefer the former personally. Winter.daniel92 (talk) 04:08, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that considering the policy laid out at Wikivoyage:Avoid negative reviews, it's probably best not to list racist establishments. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:07, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, please delete such establishments, stating the reason in the edit comment. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:00, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent! I will get around to hunting them down then. Cheers. Winter.daniel92 (talk) 07:44, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
On the surface, any establishment which actively discriminates based on race should not be listed on WV (on ethical grounds, but Avoid Negative Reviews seems to be the only appropriate WV criteria). However, I'm a bit concerned about deleting entirely, rather than just the mention of racism. There are a couple reasons which make this problematic:
  1. We don't know who wrote the review. For all we know the person who added the comment is a competitor out to slight their competition. It could also come from a misunderstanding...a person of said race having issues dealing with one particular employee at that hotel has come here to leave a remark. In the latter, the issue may lie with a racist employee who has long been released, an overly grumpy patron who took a conflict to equal racism, or an employee who made a prejudiced remark to someone during a conflict (eg. "These Asians always giving me trouble.")
  2. If the establishment is located in a small town, it could very well be the only or one of 2-3 hotels in town. Even if they have a prejudice towards one group, (and as much as racism irritates me and I don't really want to say this) on Wikivoyage The traveller comes first and an establishment should still be listed so that the (let's say) 90% of other travelers still benefit from that knowledge.
I STRONGLY believe #1 is behind in 99% of claims that an establishment is "racist" and there are very few establishments where concrete evidence can be given that they are truly "racist" in their practices. By going through and deleting all purportedly "racist" establishments, you would really be doing a disservice to WV by removing appropriate listings (again, almost guaranteed to be either a misunderstanding or even libel). But by all means, go ahead and delete the negative reviews claiming racism. AHeneen (talk) 08:24, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
However, if you personally know a hotel discriminates, and it is not in a place where there are only a couple of hotels, you should delete the listing; wouldn't you agree? Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:34, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is a fair point, no establishments should be deleted by just a review alone. I do know a few examples where they acutally say on their website that bookings are not accepted from certain countries. An example is Reggage Mansion , they operate at a few locations in Malaysia: We do not accept online bookings from Malaysia, India and middle east countries. Bookings made and paid online by these countries shall not be refundable. We accept walk in check in only for these countries and it is subjected to the room availability. I think establishments like this should be deleted. Winter.daniel92 (talk) 09:41, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's repugnant. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:03, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Japan definitely has establishments that single out Russians, Brazilians, Filipinos, etc., or simply close their doors to all foreigners. I'd say that if you have personal knowledge of such a place, just delete it entirely. Texugo (talk) 12:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not certain of the current situation in China. At one point it was illegal for a hotel to accept foreigners without approval from the local cops. I've been told that is no longer the case, but some hotels still reject foreigners. Pashley (talk) 12:56, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
At the risk of sounding like a freak, I think that experiencing racism while traveling is important. Personally it is a reminder that I have my own transparent and unsubstantiated beliefs and seeing open racism in other counties has been a huge educational eye opener for me if for no other reason than to see how completely freakish and regional it is. I think that we should be giving travelers as much info as possible and let them make their own decisions. I live in a country that still has segregated high school dances and many racial laws are still on the books that I would want to know about as a traveler before visiting. Lumpytrout (talk) 13:58, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is hard to decide what is racist, though. The Mansions example above has "We do not accept online bookings from Malaysia, India and middle east countries." Is that racism? Or caution against countries with problems in online payment, like some ebay sellers who do not accept orders from China or India? Or something we might call "culturalism", trying to avoid clients from Moslem countries?
If it is either racism or culturalism, why not list Indonesia which is ethnically, linguistically and religiously very similar to Malaysia? Pashley (talk) 14:16, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we should go about imposing our morality. This is a tricky issue and a self-righteous, knee-jerk "this is terrible, ban it" response may not be the best. If a place definitely discriminates, just say so and leave it to the traveler to decide. "Ban it" logic should leads to the deletion of articles for entire countries: Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan etc. (Israelis not allowed); USA (Cubans not allowed); both Koreas (mutual hatred); Armenia and Azerbaijan (mutual hatred) etc. Travelpleb (talk) 14:27, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, but if the owners of a place are douchebags, because they are racist or for some other reason, then it probably goes without saying that we wouldn't recommend it. And if we don't recommend a business, we avoid listing it. That is not true for destinations, only for businesses, at least in part because we don't want to get into litigation with owners. --Peter Talk 17:36, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we should try to impose our ideals on other cultures. We should just try and compile a fair travel guide. I believe that may involve listing things that we may not personally agree with.
I agree with Lumpytrout, encountering ways of living and thinking that are radically different from our own (and probably a little unnerving) is an important part of the educational aspect of travel.
Obnoxious proprietors per se should not necessarily cause a place not to be listed. Russia and its former colonies would lose far too many listings if we were not to list places run by grumpy, service-with-a-frown types, and purging racist proprietors from the listings of South Africa—where racism is so prevalent that listings don't bother to mention it*—would not achieve anything useful.
* I just checked: a place in Jo'burg, which I know is run by a nice, white racist couple, is listed without any note of the proprietors' prejudices. As for the Soviet hotel misery stereotype, I've stayed in loads. Also, to be fair, there's many places in Russia, Ukraine, etc. with nice owners, but the ones with miserable, belligerent owners still form a significant part of the accommodation market.Travelpleb (talk) 08:48, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be practical about this. Where there's a choice of other accommodations that we do not know to be invidiously discriminatory, we should avoid listing the ones that we know are, including the place in Jo'burg that you know about. If there's no choice, list, in the interest of those travelers who will not be turned away. And I don't see it in the least as "imposing our ideals on other cultures." First of all, this is an international site, so I'm not sure who "our" is. But that aside, people everywhere do what they do and certainly won't change their behavior because of attitudes on this website. So it has nothing to do with imposition, just that when we have a choice, we should avoid listing establishments that deserve negative reviews for any reason, including discrimination. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:29, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, a practical response is what's needed. The early posts on this thread seemed worryingly like the beginnings of a witch hunt.
While the whole site is international, we the pub are a largely globally unrepresentative group of well educated (according to the Alexa profiling posted here some time ago), well meaning (we're all volunteers), well traveled (presumably?) English speakers that will definitely have many common cultural traits. Wikivoyage helps people see the world, imposing certain ideals on the site could potentially filter how people see the world, so we are then imposing our ideals, not on proprietors, but on travelers.
As for South Africa, I got the impression it has a delicate and near incomprehensible set of inter-race issues, and I'm not going to meddle in them in the slightest.Travelpleb (talk) 13:14, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maps!

After basically not being able to create maps for a long time of an SVG exporting problem on OpenStreetMap, I've figured out how to import the data through Maperitive , which is awesome software, making this easier than ever before. Having been cartographically deprived, I've been on a tear since .

I've drawn up (hopefully) clear and easy-to-follow instructions at Wikivoyage:How to draw a map#SVG imports from OSM, and invite any dormant would-be cartographers to join in the fun ;) --Peter Talk 17:41, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I recently exported a map successfully with OSM, but for my next one I'll give your new instructions a shot. LtPowers (talk) 18:32, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

SVG's

I just noticed a lot of wrong information about SVG's on two different pages (Wikivoyage:Image policy and Wikivoyage:How to draw a map). They recommend that both an SVG and a PNG version of the same image should be uploaded. This is wrong. In most cases only the SVG version is needed. The MediaWiki software automatically converts SVG's to the appropriate sized PNG when the image is requested. See mw:Manual:Image administration#SVG, or commons:Help:SVG for more.

Bringing it here in case there are other pages making the same mistake. 86.41.185.241 02:15, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, generally, for maps we need both versions too- the svg's contain different layers for different language versions, so a different png must be made for each. Texugo (talk) 02:47, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, no, you don't need the PNG. As I already said "The MediaWiki software automatically converts SVG's to the appropriate sized PNG when the image is requested." If you want different language versions of a map, then you upload different SVG's and let the software handle turning them into PNG's afterwards, like this:

86.41.185.241 03:05, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Texugo's point is that people generally create a map for a large area, with different language layers, display size layers, etc, and then generate different PNGs from that single source. Having multiple copies of the SVG, albeit with different language or zoom layers "active", would mean that there will be multiple files to update each time you want to make a modification to the map, rather than a single file that can be tweaked, with the appropriate PNG then generated if needed. For example, File:Yellowstone-area-map.png and File:Yellowstone-map.png use the same SVG source: File:Yellowstone-area-map.svg. If I add a feature to the SVG I only need to update the SVG and any PNG that uses that feature, rather than having two copies of the same SVG that would then need to be updated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:27, 24 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, browsers often render text in SVGs incorrectly. The solution on Commons has been to convert all text to path before uploading, but that makes the files much, much harder to edit and update. Which goes against the collaborative updating aspect of our wiki, and creates tons more effort for people trying to create derivative works from the maps in question. --