Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2016

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Swept in from the pub

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As many of you know, January 15 is Wikipedia’s 15th Birthday!

People around the world are getting involved in the celebration and have started adding their events on Meta Page. While we are celebrating Wikipedia's birthday, we hope that all projects and affiliates will be able to utilize this celebration to raise awareness of our community's efforts.

Haven’t started planning? Don’t worry, there’s lots of ways to get involved. Here are some ideas:

Everything is linked on the Wikipedia 15 Meta page. You’ll find a set of ten data visualization works that you can show at your events, and a list of all the Wikipedia 15 logos that community members have already designed.

If you have any questions, please contact Zachary McCune or Joe Sutherland.

Thanks and Happy nearly Wikipedia 15!
-The Wikimedia Foundation Communications team

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery, 20:59, 18 December 2015 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Help[reply]

There are lots of ways to get involved. But anyway, Happy Birthday in advance. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:25, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimania 2016: call for proposals is open!

Swept in from the pub

Dear users,
the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 is open! All the members of the Wikimedia projects, researchers and observers are invited to propose a critical issue to be included in the programme of the conference, which will be held in Italy, in Esino Lario, from June 21 to 28.
Through this call we only accept what we call critical issues, i.e. proposals aiming at presenting problems, possible solutions and critical analysis about Wikimedia projects and activities in 18 minutes. These proposals do not need to target newbies, and they can assume attendees to already have a background knowledge on a topic (community, tech, outreach, policies...).
To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. Deadline for submitting proposals is 7th January 2016 and the selection of these proposals will be through a blind peer-reviewed process. Looking forward to your proposals. --Yiyi (talk) 10:21, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The deadline for the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 has been moved on 17th January 2016, so you have 10 days to submit you proposal(s). To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. --Yiyi (talk) 09:32, 7 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Community Wishlist Survey

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Hi everyone,

The 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is over, and now the Community Tech team's work begins on the top 10 features and fixes.

In November and December 2015, we invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for what they would like the Community Tech team to work on for the purpose of improving or producing curation and moderation tools for active contributors.

634 people participated in the survey, where they proposed, discussed and voted on 107 ideas. There was a two-week period in November to submit and endorse proposals, followed by two weeks of voting. The top 10 proposals with the most support votes now become the Community Tech team's backlog of projects to evaluate and address.

You can see the whole list with links to all the proposals and Phabricator tickets on this page: 2015 Community Wishlist Survey.

For everybody who proposed, endorsed, discussed, debated and voted in the survey, as well as everyone who said nice things to us recently: thank you very much for coming out and supporting live feature development. We're excited about the work ahead of us. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 21 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor News #6—2015

Swept in from the pub
The visual editor

Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

Screenshot showing a pop-up dialog for switching from the wikitext editor to the visual editor

If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:

Screenshot showing a drop-down menu in Special:Preferences

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

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

Since the last newsletter, the visual editor team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398, T58337) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

  • Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
    • Remember my last editor,
    • Always give me the visual editor if possible,
    • Always give me the source editor, and
    • Show me both editor tabs. (This is the current state for people already using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
  • Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Elitre (WMF), 00:06, 25 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Page banner and TOC - again

The Table of Content still keeps appearing on random pages, I am even beginning to think it is happening when there is no edit of an article. I would hate to get rid of the drop down functionality we now have in the page banner but beginning to think it may be the price to pay to not have the TOC appearing in articles. Should be go back to the old method or someone have an idea how to fix the problem? --Traveler100 (talk) 10:55, 27 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I was told that this problem is related to page cache. Cache has to be purged globally, on every page, after some changes in the software. I added a small patch to Common.js. It purges cache automatically when the page is loaded, and it seems to solve the problem efficiently. --Alexander (talk) 12:52, 27 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I saw it once or twice yesterday, and I kind of wished I could turn it on all the time. I always have to stop and remember where the TOC is on Wikivoyage. Traveler, if you see it again, I'd be very interested in knowing which article is appeared on (and more specifically, whether that article had recently been edited with the visual editor). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:25, 27 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wait, "It purges cache automatically when the page is loaded" -- does this mean we're bypassing the cache on every page? That's very bad. Powers (talk) 22:15, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm... I imagine the Wikimedia techies will grumble but let it go because Wikivoyage is such a small piece of their traffic, but I'm pretty sure they're not amused by that patch :-) I've seen the issue a bunch of times too. Wouldn't it make sense to not patch it for now but keep track of where and when it happens, in order to find the exact issue? It's not such a huge issue that it needs an instant fix, does it? JuliasTravels (talk) 23:26, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have not seen any issues related to this patch. The only problem with "by-passing the cache" is that loading time increases, but it's not a problem at all.
If you want to track this bug, please go, but don't be surprised when you find out that the same page is fine for those users who have logged in, and makes a problem for those who are logged out. --Alexander (talk) 06:01, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
What the heck's the point of having a cache if we bypass it on every page load? This is a major change to the site architecture, implemented through a seemingly minor adjustment to the site Javascript. I strongly recommend we revert this change until such time as we can check with the developers for advice. Powers (talk) 14:15, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There is nothing to revert. No patch is used on English Wikivoyage at the moment. --Alexander (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Still a problem. Example Neunkirchen (Saarland), note date of edit. --Traveler100 (talk) 19:26, 22 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Paper on Decline of WP; are there lessons for us?

How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline From the abstract: "recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause."

I wonder to what extent that applies here. Certainly we are not entirely innocent when it comes to biting the newbies. Recent discussions on deleting stubs are one example. Pashley (talk) 18:59, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think that we are gentler than the English Wikipedia. There are some ways to encourage more people to click the edit button, which is a big step. Some other things that help are going easy on the undo button (can you keep any of those changes at all?) and personal welcoming messages to promising (non-spammy/non-vandal) registered editors – especially a welcome that says "If you post your questions HERE, then we'll answer them!"
If you wanted to try an experiment, then we could ask User:Jtmorgan and User:EpochFail for their suggestions on what might be most effective. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Suggesting that the discussions on deleting stubbs is an example of 'biting newbies' and thereby responsible to the sites decline is very disingenuous.
Generally speaking most editors on this site are accommodating to most contributions to articles. We do take hard lines in some areas, including touting and changing of regional structure without discussion. Yesterday I reverted quite a few edits on Asia and sub articles because it didn't match one anonymous editor's own view of the world.
Agree with WhatamIdoing in that we should use 'undo' with care, and if we do then explain why we undid as well as a message on the user page to say that we would like to work together. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:00, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am not suggesting it is responsible for a decline; I'm not even certain there is a decline.
However, I do think we sometimes bite newbies. Look at Wikivoyage_talk:Deletion_policy#Completely_empty_skeletons, for example and consider how the new contributors who created Catarman and Danao City would feel about deletion. Both are significant towns, around 100,000, and one is a provincial capital.
We have also banned a number of users — Alice, Frank, Tony, ttcf, 118.whatever, ... — who sometimes made useful contributions. Granted, there were reasons, but it might be worth looking at whether we should be more flexible in such cases. Pashley (talk) 05:41, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A point of correction - Tony is not banned. He was blocked for 3 days. It's been his choice not to contribute since then. Nurg (talk) 06:54, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that we should be welcoming, helpful and kind to new users unless they're obvious spambots, vandals or incorrigible touter/edit warriors; however, if it's really essential to revisit the controversies that cost so much time, ill feeling and the departure or drastically reduced contributions by several extremely valuable editors, I will simply observe that some former editors, though helpful in a variety of ways, have made this site much more peaceful and pleasant through their absence. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:31, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with Ikan. Let's not rewrite history here. The accounts Pashley cites above collectively represent two individual editors whose contributions to the site were partially constructive and partially not. Holding off for as long as we did on banning their accounts caused us to lose three editors whose contributions were wholly constructive. If we had held off longer, it is likely that we would have lost even more editors. Best practice in terms of editor retention would have been to ban the problem accounts far sooner than we in fact did. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:23, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I personally think that my treatment of (some) newbies may have resulted in them leaving. Hobbitschuster (talk) 18:33, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think the key point to extract out of this is not to simply accept or reject a new edit. Except in obviously bad cases edits should be enhanced not deleted and accompanied by some personalized advice on the users page. Traffic is small enough on this site we are not in the same zone as Wikipedia.--Traveler100 (talk) 21:55, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that sounds like a constructive, simple, low-risk suggestion that anyone can do. Let's try it out. It can't hurt. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 7 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

2016 WMF Strategy consultation

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Hello, all.

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has launched a consultation to help create and prioritize WMF strategy beginning July 2016 and for the 12 to 24 months thereafter. This consultation will be open, on Meta, from 18 January to 26 February, after which the Foundation will also use these ideas to help inform its Annual Plan. (More on our timeline can be found on that Meta page.)

Your input is welcome (and greatly desired) at the Meta discussion, 2016 Strategy/Community consultation.

Apologies for English, where this is posted on a non-English project. We thought it was more important to get the consultation translated as much as possible, and good headway has been made there in some languages. There is still much to do, however! We created m:2016 Strategy/Translations to try to help coordinate what needs translation and what progress is being made. :)

If you have questions, please reach out to me on my talk page or on the strategy consultation's talk page or by email to mdennis@wikimedia.org.

I hope you'll join us! Maggie Dennis via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata & GLAM 'down under'

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In February, I'm undertaking a three-week tour of Australia, giving talks about Wikidata, and Wikimedia's GLAM collaborations. Do join us if you can, and please invite your Wikimedia, OpenData, GLAM or OpenStreetMap contacts in Australia to come along. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:33, 22 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What is GLAM? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:19, 22 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Probably the GLAM-Wiki initiative. Peter Chastain (talk) 01:21, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:48, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
OK, Andy is coming to Australia. I dont know how many wikivoyage editors identify as being Australian based, but judging by the standards of most australian voyage articles, I suspect we have very few current active editors. Andy is obviously enthusiastic about his travelling here, and is clearly canvassing any Australian editors who might be able to attend his various talks, with any interest in the various Open-source projects he is interested in.
I dont know if we specifically know how many wikivoyage editors there are in Australias larger cities, but Andy will be in some of the cities in his tour. The hope from such a post as this, would be you never know unless you post...
For those who live mainly in the world of voyage, and dont wander into the sister projects much, the GLAM or Galleries Libraries Art galleries and Museums project for the larger wikimedia movement, is where such institutions collaborate with wikimedia organisations to improve and add materials to commons, and the various wikipedia projects. They do this by having wikipedians-in-residence, and also whole range of specific projects to increase collarborations and raise awarenes of the wikimedia projects.

A good overview of GLAM material is at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies - to give an idea...

The linkages between wikidata and wikivoyage would be something well worth looking at to see at what stage things are at. I edit in both, but havent seen much that suggests that there specific tie ins yet. If someone wants to enlighten us... JarrahTree (talk) 14:15, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Postscript. User:Andrewssi2 Andrews has noticed a posting on wp en regarding my capacity to be involved in GLAM issues here in Australia (which I have removed), and made a correlation with Andy's activities. Please note that GLAM is a label, and under no circumstances does it mean that an individual involved in GLAM in the UK would necessarily be involved with or even be aware of some GLAM activities in Australia. I removed the item, in order to make a more comprehensive explanation of the issues. Andrewssi2 was agrieved of that, I apologise. However I caution ascribing people with connections with things that are posted on one wiki, as being necessarily connected with something else, without checking first. JarrahTree (talk) 04:37, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I now have confirmation that I'll also be visiting Jakarta, Indonesia, after Australia, in late February, for the same reasons. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:48, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Working with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

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I've started Wikivoyage:GLAM as a place to record and discuss Wikivoyage's collaboration with GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). Please help to develop it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:58, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]


VisualEditor News #1—2016

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

The visual editor

Did you know?

Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features.

Screenshot showing a pop-up menu for column operations in a table

If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.

Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.

Recent changes

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.

Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.

The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:

  • Remember my last editor,
  • Always give me the visual editor if possible,
  • Always give me the source editor, and
  • Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)

The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. This will affect the following languages, amongst others: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic.

Let's work together

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Elitre (WMF), 19:21, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimania 2016: call for posters, discussions and trainings

Hi people,
the calls for posters, discussions and trainings for Wikimania 2016 are officially opened, you can find all the relevant links on the conference wiki:

https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions

The calls will be closed on March 20.

Posters will be reviewed just to make sure that there aren't things which are too much out of scope. Since we have a whole village we will surely find places to attach them, even if we they will be a lot!

Discussions will be managed by a guiding committee who will work on the wiki to meld all the proposals and suggestions.

Trainings will be reviewed by the programme committee. Please note that we request that each training has at least 3-5 interested attendees in order to be put in the programme.

By the beginning of April we will have a first list of all the accepted proposals.

If you have questions we suggest you to ask them on the discussion pages on wiki, so that everyone will be able to see them (and their answers, of course).

We are looking forward to read your ideas! --Yiyi (talk) 13:28, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is what the posters looked like at 2014 Wikimania
I think that the posters idea is a good idea (which is based off an idea from the 2014 Wikimania), especially for the Wikivoyage community, what does everyone else think? I personally think that this could really benefit us, to help raise awareness about the project and maybe get some new members, and all we have to do is leave a request and someone else will make the poster for us.  Seagull123  Φ  16:27, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. Powers (talk) 00:40, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A poster would also be useful to have for other publicity. If there was a suitable poster or leaflet, I might print a few copies to take with me when travelling - to hand to other travellers or put on hostel noticeboards. AlasdairW (talk) 22:15, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Looking further down the list at the Posters page on the 2014 Wikimania site, I just saw Wikivoyage's poster from then, here (although it's not on Commons) requested by LtPowers. Do we still need to request another poster for this year's Wikimania or not, and if so, should it be the same as in 2014 or different?  Seagull123  Φ  17:24, 5 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, how about that. I thought that initiative looked familiar. We're up to 17 languages now, so that part of the poster should be updated. And I think I'd like my e-mail off of there; at the time I must have thought it was an e-mail contact for the poster project, not to be printed on the poster itself. Powers (talk) 21:34, 5 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@LtPowers: Should we put a request in then? I'm happy to put in the request if needed, I'll base it on the request Powers put in before (removing his email of course), unless anyone else wants to do it?  Seagull123  Φ  18:48, 9 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I've just made a request for a poster at the Wikimania 2016 site.  Seagull123  Φ  13:06, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Everything is probably going to "break" for 10 or 15 minutes later this month

This is early notice for everyone, and a request to share the news:

The Ops team is planning a major change to the servers, (very) tenatively scheduled for Tuesday, 22 March 2016. One probable result is that when this happens, all wikis will be in read-only mode for a short time, likely less than 15 minutes for all editors. You will be able to read pages, but not edit them. "All wikis" means all of the WMF wikis, including Meta, Commons, the Wikipedias, and all the sister projects, including all of the Wikivoyages. It may affect some related sites, such as mw:Wikimedia Labs (including the Tool Labs). There will also be no non-emergency updates to MediaWiki software around that time.

Many details are still being sorted out. I am asking you to please share the word with your friends and fellow contributors now. This will be mentioned in m:Tech/News (subscribe now! ;-) and through all the other usual channels for Ops, but 99% of contributors don't follow those pages. If you are active in other projects or speak other languages, then please share the news with your fellow contributors at other projects, so that whenever it happens, most people will know that everything should be back online in 10 or 15 minutes.

Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Update

The Wikimedia Technical Operations department is planning an important test of the new "full" data center in Texas. The test will result in about 30 minutes of downtime for all the wikis, including all Wikivoyages, on two days that week. This work was originally scheduled for this coming week, but has been postponed until the week of 18 April 2016. The official schedule is kept on Wikitech; more information is at m:Tech/Server switch 2016. More announcements and notifications for editors are planned.

If you experienced problems with the five-minute read-only test on Tuesday, 15 March around 07:05 UTC, or if you have suggestions for places to announce this, then please contact me directly at w:en:User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF). Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:58, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

IEG proposal: Improve Upload to Commons Android app

Hi folks,

I've been working on the Upload to Commons Android app for the past few months as an Outreachy project (which was recently completed successfully :)). A few changes were made to the app to make categorization of pictures easier, via suggestion of nearby categories and more flexible category search. However, there are lots of improvements (documented on our GitHub page) that we couldn't fit into the scope of the Outreachy project. I would love to be able to continue working on the app to improve it further - hence an IEG proposal.

My IEG proposal for the app involves:

  • Fixing long-standing bugs and looking into old crash reports to try and prevent them from recurring, to provide a smoother user experience
  • Making several enhancements to the app to make it more user-friendly and newbie-friendly, new location-based features (e.g. a list of nearby articles lacking pictures), and further enhancing categorization.
  • Increasing awareness of non-Wikimedians about this app to grow the contributor base

Several of the proposed features are based on previous suggestions by users, and I would very much appreciate more feedback and suggestions! If you are interested, please do take a look at the current proposal, feel free to ask questions and make new suggestions on the Discussion page, and review/endorse it as you see fit. If you would like to be part of the project, volunteers and additional advisors are always welcome.

Thank you so much! Misaochan (talk) 05:28, 4 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Maps!

Map

Hi, shortly we plan to enable the new maps support for several WikiVoyage languages. See documentation, or you can try it here (especially the Visual Editor). This is the alpha version, so it has bugs and missing functionality, and some behavior might change as we get feedback, but it will give you an opportunity to play with the early release and steer our development efforts towards what you really need. If you have any requests, please create them here (use your wiki login by clicking the MediaWiki button at the bottom of the login form).
CC from previous maps discussions: AlasdairW, Andrewssi2, Atsirlin, Ibaman, JamesA, JuliasTravels, Matroc, MaxSem, Mey2008, Pnorman, Shaundd, Sumit.iitp, Syced, TheTrolleyPole, Torty3, WhatamIdoing, Wrh2.
--Yurik (talk) 17:20, 7 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Yurik: Will anything change when this new extension is enabled, or will it merely be an available option that we can test out while still using the existing maps implementation? Is there anything in particular that won't be supported anymore, or any new features that will be available (for example, an easier way to create a map mask for city borders)? -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:03, 7 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Wrh2: nothing will change at this point, just a new feature to play with. The demo should give you a good feel for it. You will be able to:
  • add markers and polygons visually
  • edit geojson and see how it changes the map on each keystroke
  • add auto-numbered markers (either numbers or letters), and have multiple counters
  • have multiple "groups" of markers/polygons and showing them on the same map or on separate maps (e.g. all food and all drink maps and one combined map)
  • markers and polygons can be of any color
  • markers and polygons can be clicked and will show popups with wiki text and images
  • very fast full screen popup map
  • NOT available: multiple map layers

--Yurik (talk) 18:10, 7 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'ts live now. Please play with it and tell us if there's something wrong/missing! Using it in articles right now would be slightly premature though:) MaxSem (talk) 23:16, 7 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Many listings have a image= attribute linking to a file's name on Commons, for instance image=21 21 DESIGN SIGHT - Tokyo, Japan - DSC06710.JPG. This image is shown in the pop-up by the current map system, but not by the demo you linked to. Also, the description should probably be on the same line as the listing's name? (I guess we can fix that by ourselves, together with the other text-type parameters). Cheers! Syced (talk) 10:19, 9 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Syced, in the demo on the right hand side, if you click the marker, it shows an image. The templates you currently use for the links can be changed to use the <maplink> tag, which will add extra data to the marker, so the image=... template parameter would turn into {"description":"[[File:Image.jpeg|250px|Image description]]", ...}. Is that what you are asking? --Yurik (talk) 16:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Video on the new map feature

Tomasz is doing a live demo of the new map feature in the Metrics and Activities meeting – look about 45 minutes into the video. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agree really cool stuff. Very useful for WV. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:53, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Interactive maps. Excellent! How do we make all the dynamic maps on Wikivoyage interactive like that? Are they already? Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:22, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's definitely got potential. To Ikan's question, no, our dynamic maps don't work like that. It's a different tag (<mapframe>) with different functionality. I'm not sure how we'd switch it over, but I don't think we're there yet.
If you're interested, I've been playing with the maps a bit -- User:Shaundd/Maps Demo and User:Shaundd/Dynamic_Region_Map. In addition to the stuff in the video, it can do some things that our current dynamic maps can't, like creating clickable dynamic maps and creating shaded polygons (useful if you want to highlight a particular neighbourhood in a city map). On the downside, I think there are still some Wikivoyage-specific quirks that should be worked out. For example, I haven't figured out how to get our existing listings to show in one of these maps, although I assume that's a fairly easy technical fix for someone who's good with those things. Those points they add in the video don't link with our listings tags so we could end up with two sets of coordinates for the same listing. Maps currently only has one layer, so we'd lose the GPX tracks, cycle maps, hill shading, OSM view (mapnik), MapQuest layer, etc, that our current dynamic maps have. The Visual Editor interface makes it really easy to set up a map and add points of interest and polygons, but to make them useful (e.g., change their colour, size, marker style, create a mapmask, add a name) you need to edit the GeoJSON that underlies the map. My understanding is Yurik and the Maps team would like to go in these directions, it's a work-in-progress.
It'd be great if more people played with/tested the Maps/mapframe feature so there's more diversity in the feedback. There's a discussion at Meta and so far it's mostly Yurik and the developers, me and some folks from Dutch WV. More opinions would be helpful! -Shaundd (talk) 15:38, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I made test implementation of the new maps for Wikivoyage: city article and country article with a fully dynamic(!) map of regions. The map of regions is embedded into the article just like static maps. Other dynamic maps can be opened (unfolded) by clicking on the map icon next to "Открыть карту" on the right side of the page. A few things remain to be polished, but in general the new maps are fully operational, and importing map masks from OSM turned out to be surprisingly easy. Not to mention the cool feature of drawing masks (polygons) using Visual Editor. Many thanks to Yurik and his team! --Alexander (talk) 14:12, 2 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It will be awesome if we can easily utilize city borders and other data from OSM with the new map framework, and I'm excited by the potential applications. Many thanks to those who have been providing feedback and figuring out how to integrate these new maps with the existing templates and listing data. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:57, 2 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Cool. Alexander, could you edit the map mask with the Visual Editor after importing the data from OSM? I imported some data (not from OSM) and it displays OK when reading the page but I can't edit it in the Visual Editor. -Shaundd (talk) 05:11, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
No, I could not. But I also stored all masks on separate page(s) so that they do not clutter the article. --Alexander (talk) 06:44, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Being able to use two maps per article sounds great! (for instance town center + suburbs) Syced (talk) 05:18, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Trans-Canada Highway links to multiple dynamic maps, splitting the 8000+ km route into multiple regional segments. Will the new implementation display these inline? K7L (talk) 15:33, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@K7L: Yes Done. --Yurik (talk) 15:34, 16 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pre-fill templates

Hello, how have you made the pre fill templates ? With an extension ? A script ? Thank you Archi38 (talk) 19:35, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What templates are you looking for? Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:37, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Generally the approach to templates on WV has been to reduce their number if possible and practicable in order to make editing easier. However, I don't know what pre-fill templates are and they may indeed justify addition to the limited list of templates in use on WV Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:39, 17 March 2016 (UTC)s[reply]
@Ikan Kekek: @Hobbitschuster: On this wiki you call it "standart section". I'm talking about "City • City District • Region • National Park • Phrasebook • Huge airport • Dive site • Disambiguation • Redirect" when you create a new page. Archi38 (talk) 06:26, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oh. Yes, we do. Go to Wikivoyage:Article templates and press "quick version" on any of the templates. The other way to do it is by searching for the title you want to create and then choosing the template when you are asked whether you want to create an article on that title. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:47, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Archi38: See MediaWiki:Newarticletext. That is the message displayed when creating new articles, and is how the option to pre-populate the new article window with an existing template is generated. For each template type we have created a template (for example {{Smallcity skeleton}} which you will see used in the calls from that MediaWiki: message (for example //en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?action=edit&title=Wikivoyage:Travellers%27_pub/2016&preload=Template:Smallcity_skeleton). -- Ryan • (talk) • 13:44, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Wrh2: I already did it but how do you remove the little blue icon at right of the template's link ? Archi38 (talk) 16:23, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The following CSS will do it:
.mw-newarticletext a.external {
    background: none !important;
}
-- Ryan • (talk) • 16:30, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you to all ! You helped me a lot ! Archi38 (talk) 17:58, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Question about pageview statistics

Why, in your opinion, have the Hebrew Wikivoyage articles got more views in the recent days than all of the other Wikivoyage editions? This clearly can't be correct. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:54, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Another question: How have edits and active users developed in recent years? Is there a usable statistic on this? Pageview statistics don't seem to be all that accurate... Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:39, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We haven't had many active users beside myself. probably around 5 more semi-active users. I myself though have focused a lot on building up the core foundation of the website (I think I have done the work of circa 10 people so far), so this might have some impact on the readership (see my theory below). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 19:56, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

My suspicion on this matter, is that that once in a while (maybe once a year?), Google would test the relevancy + popularity of the content in specific websites by sending A LOT more people to the pages of specific websites which it suspects might be of higher interest to the general public. For example, I won't be surprised if the Hebvoy articles were higher in Google.co.il for about 24 or 48 hours, and that after this test the page views return to normal again while Google adjusts the amount of people they send to the content on a daily basis based on how they automatically measured the relevancy each page has to the users (maybe, among other things, based on the amount of time each user spent reading the page before returning to Google). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 19:56, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Btw, my question above was also targeted towards this language version. I am not quite sure if we are declining, growing or holding steady... However, I do know that de-WT [sic!] is dead. Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:19, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, what in the world happened at de:? Not even a year ago they were routinely getting twice the number of pageviews as en:, but they cratered last summer and they haven't even cleared the million mark in any month after September 2015. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:27, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am not talking about German Wikivoyage, I was talking about that other site's German edition, which is so dead in the water it is almost funny. As for what happened with de-WV, I cannot quite tell. Call it a cliché, but I have sometimes perceived their style of dealing with things a bit more bureaucratic and cumbersome than here, on the other hand their coverage is quite good for some areas and almost nonexistent elsewhere. But pageview statistics are quite likely not the gospel truth.... Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:31, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Do you think my theory above is the real reason for such a sharp increase in pageviews? or do you have an alternative explanation? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 00:36, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

w:Slashdot effect can cause a short-term spike fairly easily if a usually-quiet wiki gets mentioned at a higher-traffic site or in a media report. K7L (talk) 01:02, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Interview for a WMDE Podcast (in english) about Wikivoyage

Hi all -- I produce a podcast for Wikimedia Deutschland in English about interesting projects, community initiatives, open source, you name it.. and currently we're working on an episode on Wikivoyage. Would any of you experienced members of the community be available to speak, say via skype, and share your interest and explain what excites you about this resource? 5 to 10 minutes? If so please get in touch, we're trying to put these audio bits together in the coming days. Send me a message, here or perhaps best via email mark at citizenreporter dot org. Bicyclemark (talk) 22:06, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

We were in touch earlier about this. I reiterate my interest and have already sent you an email to that effect. Eagerly awaiting further information. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:20, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Server switch 2016

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).

If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped.

Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.

  • There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April.

No non-essential code deployments will take place.

This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is over. If you found any problems, please let me know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 19 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And it's all been switched back to the Virginia servers, somewhat faster and definitely with fewer surprises. Again, if you see any problems, please {{ping}} me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:26, 21 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A podcast about Wikivoyage

For those of you who enjoy listening to podcasts, AndreCarrotflower and I both took part in an episode about Wikivoyage and travel writing for the Source Code Berlin podcast (associated with Wikimedia Deutschland). I invite you guys to listen, maybe leave some feedback, and enjoy! PerryPlanet (talk) 21:08, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! - Matroc (talk) 13:45, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Good podcast. Maybe it will even draw an eyeball or two to our project... Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:21, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Listening to it right now. It's good advertising for WV, so let's hope as many people as possible stumble upon it. Thumbs up to Andre and Perry. :) ϒpsilon (talk) 19:12, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
When listening, please bear in mind that I don't lisp like that in real life. It was a bad Skype connection. :) -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:00, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there, it's so much fun listening to you ;) Thanks! Danapit (talk) 20:04, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I, on the other hand, frequently do sound that hyper and stuttering, especially when I start getting enthusiastic about something. ;) PerryPlanet (talk) 01:25, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to Andre and Perry for contributing, and the producers for a very polished podcast. Nicely done, hopefully it garners some attention for the project. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:35, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cross wiki notifications will be released by default on May 12 at 23:00 UTC.

Hello

Cross wiki notifications will be released by default on all wikis on May 12 at 23:00 UTC

During the beta phase, the cross-wiki notifications feature was enabled by over 18,000 accounts across more than 360 wikis. We receive great feedback from a lot of very happy users. After that 3-months long beta period during which we made adjustments and that feature is now ready for a release by default.

Users who don't want to receive cross-wiki notifications will be able to turn them off on their preferences on each wiki. If you haven't activated Cross-wiki Notifications during the Beta phase, you may receive old unread notifications from other wikis.

More information is available on the documentation. The talk page is still open for any questions or feedback, in any language.

All the best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 12 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics for most read articles?

Are there statistics for how often different articles are read? And which articles are the most read during a period? /Yvwv (talk) 13:36, 13 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I vaguely remember having looked at such statistics somewhere two years ago or so, so I googled "wikivoyage statistics". seems to have statistics for WMF projects including Wikivoyage, however they seem to have some problem there right now. Nothing loads, including the Wikivoyage stats page. ϒpsilon (talk) 14:56, 13 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We used to discuss (official?) statistics in unregular intervals, but they have always produced questionable results if you ask me... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:11, 13 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Pageviews at https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews, eg, https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#project=en.wikivoyage.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=New_Zealand. Nurg (talk) 10:44, 14 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Copy and paste detection

Swept in from the pub

Hey All We have been successfully running a bot to pick up copy and paste issues on En Wikipedia per . Would WV be interested in a bot running here? It is about 60% accurate and we see copyright issues in about 5 to 10% of substantial edits. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:40, 27 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it could do much harm... And it good help getting rid of that google penalty... Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:10, 27 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That bot has already been set up on Wikivoyage, although it hasn't made any edits in a while: Special:Contributions/EranBot. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:36, 27 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ah perfect. Will see about activating it again if people find it useful. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:40, 28 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Please run it. I've been detecting a lot of these manually, but I can't always be here. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:01, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You can switch between wikitext and visual editing

Swept in from the pub

Hello, everyone.

This is just a quick note to point out that editors at this Wikivoyage have access to both the wikitext and visual editors. You can switch between the two systems in the middle of an edit. These images show where to find the button to do this:

So: why am I telling you this? It's because I've asked the devs to turn on an option in Special:Preferences for all of the Wikivoyages. They will probably do this on Monday, 6 June 2016.

For people who use both editing systems, this preference setting will let you choose whether to have two tabs (how it works today) or just one. I like having two tabs, but many editors want just one, to always open their favorite editing system. They can use these buttons to temporarily switch to the other whenever they want. This option works well for most people. However, experience on other wikis shows that a few people who are used to two tabs usually get "stuck" in one and can't figure out how to switch to the other editing system. So please look for these icons the next time you open an article to edit; they're available to you today, and they'll help if anyone gets stuck next week.

Here are the three things that I want you to know about this change:

  • If you haven't enabled the visual editor, then you already have just one "Edit" tab, and this change should not affect you.
  • If you have two editing tabs now ("Edit" and "Edit source"), then on Monday, you will only have one. (Don't worry!) As soon as the second editing tab disappears, the new prefs setting will appear. You can go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, find the drop-down menu named "Editing mode", and choose whatever you want. (You won't see this option if you have the visual editor disabled.)
  • If you get stuck, remember that you can use those two buttons to switch to the other editing system.

There is more information about this feature at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. I'll be around Monday when this happens, so please ping me if you encounter any unexpected problems.

By the way, for those of you who want to try out the visual editor, please remember it will be easier to add templates in the visual editor if you've added TemplateData information to their documentation pages.

Happy editing, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 3 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, this happened on schedule, almost 8 hours ago. If you ran into any problems or weird things, please let me know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:53, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"WV talk" link?

Swept in from the pub

It's often handy when writing to use shorthand, so instead of writing [[Wikivoyage:Name of page]] I sometimes use the abbreviation [[WV:Name of page]], which works the same way. I've just found out, however, that [[WV talk:Name of policy page]] does not link to [[Wikivoyage talk:Name of policy page]]. Could someone familiar with the coding needed please fix this? Saving keystrokes is great for the hands! Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:51, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't remember if such an animal actually exists; however, I think that a shortcut of Wikivoyage design could probably be accomplished through a REDIRECT? - just a thought -- (There is Shortcut template that creates a box - also a Wikivoyage page on shortcuts - maybe something could be garnished from that discussion etc.) --Matroc (talk) 02:41, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that this could be realized using normal redirects. As far as I know it's a matter of the MediaWiki configuration. I'd try to open a phabricator ticket. Could anybody do that? –T.seppelt (talk) 05:52, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that it's a configuration issue and that redirects aren't appropriate. But we should discuss whether it should be "WV Talk", or "WT" like on Wikipedia. Powers (talk) 20:25, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am opposed to WT meaning anything other than that other site - even in wiki syntax. We will at some points in time have to mention them (before that one company shuts them down) and WV talk makes much more sense imho. Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:03, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Hobbitschuster on this. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:33, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't a shortcut, but if you're working on multiple projects or multiple languages, it's handy to know that you can always reach the local equivalent of the "Wikivoyage:" namespace via "Project:". This English label, and its matching "Project talk:", works everywhere. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The visual editor for this wiki

Swept in from the pub

Hello,

I'd like to talk to you about setting up the visual editor for contributors to this wiki.

Side-by-side screenshots, showing the visual appearance of both editing systems

The visual editor allows people to edit Wikivoyage articles as if they were using a typical word processor. If you're not familiar with it, then please try it out. Going to https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/Sandbox?veaction=edit will let you see its current state. (Feel free to edit and save; it's just a sandbox.) Or click on the picture there to enlarge it, if you just want a quick look. If you want to see more, then there are some screencasts on Commons.

If you want to keep using it here, then you will need to enable it for your account. This is quick and easy: Go to "Beta Features" in your preferences. Choose "VisualEditor" and click save. When it is enabled, press the "Edit" button to edit an article. When the visual editor is open, you can switch to the wikitext editor any time you want. Just click the [[ ]] icon in the toolbar, next to the "Save" button. Inside the wikitext editor, click the pencil icon () in the upper right corner to switch to the visual editor. (If you prefer having two tabs, or if you want to change the editing system that opens first, then go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing and choose your favorite option for the "Editing mode".)

On the tech side, this could be done at any time, but we've got a couple of requests in the system to customize this software for Wikivoyage. The first (phab:T133725) is to move the big "Cite" button into a the "Insert" menu, since you probably don't want Wikipedia-style citations. The other (phab:T96710) is to add the popular listings templates into the toolbar. You can access them easily now (Insert > Template and search for See, Do, Eat, etc.), but this would make them even quicker. My suggestion is to wait until the first is done, but not to wait for the second.

There is a short guide at mediawiki.org that has some tips about getting the best value out of the visual editor for your project, but the relevant bits are this:

  • It's much easier to add templates if you've added TemplateData information. This has already been done for the listings templates.
  • For more information about how to use the visual editor, see mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide.
  • Let me know if you find any problems in either editing system. You can report issues in Phabricator or, for the visual editor, on the central feedback page on mediawiki.org. Also, you can always leave a note on my talk page.

Please let me know what you think about the idea of setting up the visual editor here. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a bit confused. I was very sure that this wiki already has the visual editor and I have used it before. However if I check now (and thinking of it, it has been like this for at least 2 weeks) I can't access it any more. Has there been a recent change on this? Drat70 (talk) 09:26, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to use it now, then you have to enable it (and set your prefs so you can find it, if you want), or switch to it after opening the wikitext editor. See #You can switch between wikitext and visual editing for more information (and {{ping}} me if anything's unclear). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Since no one has raised any particular concerns about doing this, I have asked the team to schedule this for next Tuesday, 28 June 2016. Please ping me if you would like me to change this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This will probably happen in about 22 hours. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:26, 27 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Swept in from the pub
Screenshot of Compact Language Links interlanguage list

Compact Language Links has been available as a beta-feature on all Wikimedia wikis since 2014. With compact language links enabled, users are shown a much shorter list of languages on the interlanguage link section of an article (see image). Based on several factors, this shorter list of languages is expected to be more relevant for them and valuable for finding similar content in a language known to them. More information about compact language links can be found in the documentation.

From today onwards, compact language links has been enabled as the default listing of interlanguage links on this wiki. However, using the button at the bottom, you will be able to see a longer list of all the languages the article has been written in. The setting for this compact list can be changed by using the checkbox under User Preferences -> Appearance -> Languages

The compact language links feature has been tested extensively by the Wikimedia Language team, which developed it. However, in case there are any problems or other feedback please let us know on the project talk page. It is to be noted that on some wikis the presence of an existing older gadget that was used for a similar purpose may cause an interference for compact language list. We would like to bring this to the attention of the admins of this wiki. Full details are on this phabricator ticket. Thank you. On behalf of the Wikimedia Language team:--Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 07:45, 22 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I do not like this feature, nor do I understand the need. On Wikivoyage the language list was short anyway (and on Wikipedia, the long lists are fascinating – I sometimes click odd languages just for fun).
For short lists of languages, those are presented exactly as they were before. For pages available in more languages, the tool provides aids such as flexible search or surfacing your usual choices. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy to find their usual languages for users that often switch between the languages they speak. Finding your language in some articles not only takes time from our users but may prevent them to discover that content is available in their language (e.g., speakers of small languages for which content is not usually available and when it is their language is in the middle of a long list since the topics are covered by many other languages). In our tests we've found the proposer selector makes it easier to find the content in your language. You can still click on odd languages, they will be just easier to access the next time. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:58, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Choosing a few languages makes people less likely to click the others – even less likely if the algorithm for choosing languages is good. This makes people miss the would-be-next language, which often could be relevant (I know about five languages well enough to produce simple text, but counting related languages I can probably get some information out of more than a dozen).
This is one of the aspects we focused on when testing the feature with users. For the people we tested with it was clear that there were more languages available than those shown initially, and finding them was easier than scanning a list of potentially hundred of options. Having the option you are looking for in the middle of a long list with mixed scripts is not going to help much with discovery.--Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:12, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
For me personally this makes using iw more difficult. I have to activate a popup just to see what the other languages are, and to choose one I have to "search" by continent (with most languages doubled; scrolling needed). I though it was easy to opt out, but I cannot find where (and the possibility is not mentioned in the posting above).
A specific issue over here is that choice of language very much depends on the article: I will surely check versions in the local language of any destination where I am going, even when I do not understand a word (as in Chinese), and try to find articles in comprehensible regional languages. I think such considerations are not made when choosing what languages to show.
--LPfi (talk) 11:54, 22 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There is a ticket to consider the languages that appear in the content as another criteria for language selection. This could help in the scenario you mention, since an article about China is likely to contain some Chinese word even in the English article giving a hint that Chinese is relevant in this context. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:19, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't like this non-feature. I can't find anywhere to set my preferred set of languages - I could see some value if I could restrict the list to those languages that I know a little of. I just tried it on Warsaw and Polish was not one of the languages shown. If you want to improve the list of languages, adding the article size (or a sort by size feature) would be much more useful.
You can customise the default list of languages. Since previous choices is the highest priority criteria, you just need to navigate to your preferred languages and those will be remembered for future use. That is, just using the feature configures it to better fit your preferences. --Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have just opted out of this - by deselecting the "Use a compact language list, with languages relevant to you." at the bottom of the Appearance tab in Preferences. AlasdairW (talk) 22:15, 22 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This is a step in the wrong direction, maybe makes sense in Wikipedia where there are many small articles with same topic on many languages but for Wikivoyage if the location is on a number of language sites it will in most case be long enough in length to handle the list. Switch off in preference only improves things for those who know about it, can this be switched off for all readers? --Traveler100 (talk) 05:04, 23 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not a fan of this too. I don't see why the list of languages has to be shortened. It ain't broke. Gizza (roam) 12:13, 23 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's certainly more challenging on pages with dozens or even 100+ links, and people especially at non-English sites do complain about having trouble finding the 'obvious' interlanguage links in a sea of mostly irrelevant ones. I've sent an e-mail message to Runa, to make sure that she sees your comments. However, Wikimania's underway, so I'm making no promises about how soon she will be able to read it (much less to reply). If you've not worked with Runa before, then I think you'll be happy; the Language team in general is responsive and easy to talk to. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:57, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you Whatamidoing (WMF). Hello, thanks for the feedback. We did indeed discuss in the team about the already short language list in Wikivoyage and as it has already been mentioned in this thread, compact links are (at the moment) expected to be more effective for projects like Wikipedia than Wikivoyage. Nevertheless, the expectation is that Wikivoyage being a still growing project may soon add more languages and users will be able to use the compact links for easier navigation across languages. I am taking this feedback to the team for discussion. Thanks again for the feedback and please do feel free to contact me directly or on our project talk page.--Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 02:31, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Where is the problem? Proposal for alternative solution: --Traveler100 (talk) 04:18, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  1. If list shorter then length of article do not compact.
  2. Highlight language(s) selected in reader's browser preferences plus language based on IP address of visitor to site.
@Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF): That's a very naive expectation given the fact that 7 out of 17 language versions of Wikivoyage have zero contributors with 100+ edits/month. --Alexander (talk) 05:20, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Apart from being unnecessary on Wikivoyage, I am finding having to scroll down through the oversized pop-up window very annoying. How can we by default switch this feature off? --Traveler100 (talk) 17:29, 10 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am trying to do this for Russian Wikivoyage, but it looks like the developers strongly oppose such requests. I would be grateful if more people write on Phabricator what they think about this useless functionality. --Alexander (talk) 17:39, 10 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This Phabricator site not exactly open and user friendly to non experts is it. Looks like a good way of alienating contributors to wiki sites. --Traveler100 (talk) 17:54, 10 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed I don't really like Compact Language Links myself and I think they discourage interwiki work. (I have to admit that I am slightly ignorant of how they are sorted though--for instance, someone who knows Catalan may well know French and Spanish, so it would make sense to have those always appear but is very unlikely to know Swahili, so it's more okay if that disappears from the list.) In the case of voy, v:, and n: it's not really necessary to compact these because there will be so few interwiki links anyway. I understand with almost 300 editions of w: and over 100 of b: and wikt: (almost 100 for q:) but even then, I don't really like the idea that much. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:07, 10 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The preference
Hello, if it's inconvenient, the feature can be disabled by anyone by using the checkbox under User Preferences -> Appearance -> Languages (see the screenshot). You will find more information about how the languages are being selected in the FAQ page and also how, over time it gets improved to show more relevant suggestions. The project page has more useful information about the tool. Thanks, --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:47, 14 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That is fine for the regular users who are in the know, but not for the causal visitor/reader. Issue is why change the default behaviour to something worse that it was before. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:51, 14 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Current situation

After making some noise (see here) we managed to elicit response from the language team, and eventually they decided to switch this feature off at Russian Wikivoyage until further evaluation (whatever it means). I don't know how general this solution can be, but, apparently, one has to make noise in order to achieve something. --Alexander (talk) 19:41, 20 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Missing voyagers

Swept in from the pub

At Wikipedia they've apparently compiled a list of "missing Wikipedians" with editors who haven't edited in a while. While I don't think it's necessary for us to create such a list of "missing voyagers", there are undoubtedly many voyagers who have been active editors in the past but have now stopped (or almost stopped) editing, for instance Sertmann, Cacahuate and Sapphire (and probably many others). How about a little talk page message campaign asking such users if they're OK and hoping they'd have time and feel interested to come back to editing WV at some point? --ϒpsilon (talk) 17:21, 23 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As long as this sort of thing doesn't turn into an effort to spam or cajole past contributors then I'm all for it. Maybe rather than a "missing contributors" list we could do something similar to a barnstar, but with more of a "we miss you" tone? I'd love to see even a temporary return of some of our past prolific contributors, but everyone has their reasons for leaving so we should be very careful that we aren't doing anything that would even remotely be construed as an attempt to guilt someone into making additional contributions. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:55, 23 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
With attention duly paid to the caveats Ryan outlined above, I couldn't help but that Peter's name was the first that came to my mind. It would certainly be a long shot to convince him to come back, if there's even any way to get in touch with him, but it's perhaps worth noting that we've long since solved the problem that drove him away in the first place. He's sorely missed. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:19, 23 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think its worth to contact the users and inform about our recent developments. I should still have Peter's phone number. I was not involved in any way here because too busy with the German version (still don't know what happened here at all). I could try to get in touch with him. I should still have Sapphire's contact information as well. Always wanted to have a drink with him. I did the same years ago with some German users. I got some answers, but not too many....-- DerFussi 06:10, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, we shouldn't be too intrusive. Something like a barnstar sounds like a good idea. Many users probably get an e-mail when something is written on their talk page, also, if you're active on any other WMF project you nowadays get a message whenever something is written on your talk page in some other WMF project.
I'd be cautious with using "e-mail this user" or calling them, especially users that explicitly have stated they've retired from WV. I was more thinking of people who may have had so much else to do that they've forgotten about WV. ϒpsilon (talk) 08:59, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Editing News #2—2016

Swept in from the pub

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

VisualEditor
Did you know?

It's quick and easy to insert a references list.

Screenshot showing a dropdown menu with many items

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page). Open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

If you are using several groups of references, which is relatively rare, you will have the opportunity to specify the group. If you do that, then only the references that belong to the specified group will be displayed in this list of references. Finally, click "Insert" in the dialog to insert the References list. This list will change as you add more footnotes to the page.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.

Recent changes

The visual editor is now available to all users at most [[Wikivoyage:|Wikivoyages]]. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.

The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.

Future changes

The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.

The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

m:User:Elitre (WMF), 17:20, 3 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Open call for Project Grants

Swept in from the pub

Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from July 1st to August 2nd to fund new tools, research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds, Project Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

Also accepting candidates to join the Project Grants Committee through July 15.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:21, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Would be nice to get a response to the question at m:Wikimedia merchandise/Design ideas#Wikivoyage Sticker. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:17, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How to solve the problem wikivoyage cannot login?

Swept in from the pub

When a Chinese users (zh:User:Hiokdat) login to wikivoyage , but there show " Fatal exception of type "Exception" ", And even the whole global account has a problem , who someone can help the fixes? Thank--Yuriy kosygin (talk) 07:11, 9 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing we can do about login issues from here. I suggest asking on Meta-Wiki or filing a bug report on Phabricator. Powers (talk) 17:22, 9 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! Has been repaired successfully, sorry to bother everyone... --Yuriy kosygin (talk) 17:47, 9 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yuriy kosygin, I'm so sorry to hear that User:Hiokdat got "bit" by this bug. There was a terrible problem in the software, and it has just been fixed. About four thousand login attempts failed recently – far more than usual.
It is supposed to be working now, but, just in case, I hear that some editors were successful if they started to log in at their "home" wiki (usually the Wikipedia for your preferred language, but Special:CentralAuth will know for certain – it's marked with a "house" or a green "+" icon). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
One more thing, of more general interest: The fix involved temporarily reverting a lot of software changes. So, some recently fixed bugs have reappeared. Don't worry; they'll be re-fixed soon (expected time: today). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 12 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I know! thank you for your reminder.--Yuriy kosygin (talk) 11:03, 13 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Incubator help

Swept in from the pub

Please see incubator:Incubator:Community_Portal#maplink_and_imagemap Can anyone here help our fellow traveller? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:06, 13 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Swept in from the pub

Could I bother an admin to please edit the Pageinfo footer to add the same tools as in Wikipedia? So this: "WV footer" would look like this: "WP footer". Just a copy/paste. I'm mostly interested in the pageview functionality myself but the other tools might be useful to other people. This is how it would look in an actual page: Scroll down to the bottom. Thanks, Acer (talk) 18:45, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Actually, some changes are needed, pretty simple, just changing wikipedia to wikivoyage in the urls. I'm pasting the updated version below, I also removed the wikichecker as I couldn't get it to work. Acer (talk)

External tools

Yes Done. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:52, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, it's working fine Acer (talk) 20:19, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Save/Publish

Swept in from the pub

The Editing team is planning to change the name of the “Save page” button to “Publish page” and “Publish changes”. “Publish page” will be used when you create a new page. “Publish changes” will be used when you change an existing page. The names will be consistent in all editing environments.

This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016. The change will be announced in Tech News when it happens.

If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net for “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.

The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some new editors believed that “Save page” would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information after it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the “Save page” button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.

Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.

Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. On wiki pages, you can use the wikitext codes {{int:Publishpage}} and {{int:Publishchanges}} to display the new labels in the user's preferred language. For the language settings in your account preferences, these wikitext codes produce “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.

Please share this news with community members who teach new editors and with others who may be interested.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 9 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Two small observations from a new user

Swept in from the pub

Two thing's I've noticed since I started dropping by, probably because I'm new here...

  • The font size in the pagebanners is a bit small I think and the text can get lost in the background. I actually didn't see the navigation links for almost two weeks after I started visiting here more and assumed you guys didn't use them. Navigating large articles was a pain. I've been editing wikis for quite a while and don't have any vision impairment so if I missed them I'd say it's a fair bet some casual readers are missing the links as well.
  • Is the "Related sites" tab on the sidebar still relevant? I imagine it's a leftover from when this was a standalone project? It mostly just repeats what's in the sister projects tab now. The only other site I see there from time to time is DMOZ. More often than not it's just Commons and Wikipedia.

On a side note, I've been doing some interwiki work on the 'pedias related to WV, I'll do a write up later of what I've managed so far, mostly replacing WT links with WV ones and a few other things. Cheers, Acer (talk) 06:29, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Related sites is now mainly duplication. Until recently, there didn't used to be a "In other projects" section. Now that there is, I'm just wondering if we should remove all the [[wikipedia:]] and [[commons:]] links from the bottom of articles? We could also remove the [[dmoz:]] links and add some code into {{pagebanner}} to get the dmoz links from wikidata and still show them in the releated site section. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:13, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Would be a good idea. Do we need to do any cross check first before removing the [[wikipedia:]] and [[commons:]] links? Also using the "In other projects" facility, any way to auto generate Category:Articles without Wikipedia links? --Traveler100 (talk) 14:37, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We could add a little bit of code in {{pagebanner}} to see if wikidata has a wikipedia link and then add the page to Category:Articles without Wikipedia links if it doesn't or maybe adding it to a new category Category:Articles without Wikipedia links (via Wikidata) (or other name) so that a comparison can be done. -- WOSlinker (talk) 15:13, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Sound like a method that would work. I assume we could add to that a check that the wikidata WIkipadia name matches the [[wikipedia:]] entry so we can clean-up data before deleting the entries. Also create a categories of pages without wikidata page. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:14, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you just want a list of pages without a link from Wikidata, Special:UnconnectedPages will provide that information. The list is sorted by newest-pages first. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:24, 14 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you select Main Space in Special:UnconnectedPages that brings list down to 103 articles - Matroc (talk) 01:54, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I can see a few problems with removing the [[wikipedia:]]. Take a look at Icefields Parkway which has a wikidata page and corresponding pages on other language Wikivoyage sites as well as pages on non English Wikipdia such as German and French. The English Wikipedia, which did exist, now is part of w:Alberta Highway 93 with a redirect to the section. Based purely on Wikidata the link to English Wikipedia would be lost. And not sure what to do about Tokyo or Windsor and Eton. --Traveler100 (talk) 19:19, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Population in numbers or in comparison?

Swept in from the pub

How should articles present population of cities or regions? In approximate numbers, or by comparison to other cities, regions or countries?

This is due to a recently reverted edit for Yakutia (with 958,528 inhabitants in the 2010 census). A geography nerd myself, I have no idea of the order of magnitude for the population of Rhode Island, so for me it is less useful a comparison. A guess is that more people could have use for the rough number "one million".

What do you think? /Yvwv (talk) 01:01, 27 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There's no hard and fast rule. Every case is unique. In the specific case of Yakutia, the population is being compared to its land area. The latter is compared with that of India, so it makes sense to compare the population to that of some other (very small geographically) entity. Especially in the lede, we don't need to be worried about precision. The issue of whether Rhode Island's population is well known enough is a potential problem, of course. Powers (talk) 01:43, 27 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
While comparisons make for lively writing, they are only useful when the (large) majority or readers have an understanding of their size. In the Yakutia example, India is a good comparison as it is general knowledge that India is huge. Using US-states seems very US-centric to me, though. Especially a small one. I dare say that >90% of Europeans (including me) have no clue of the number of inhabitants or the size of Rhode Island. Comparing with any city is better; while people still have no exact idea of inhabitants of cities, the contrast between an area the size of India and a population the size of a mid-sized city (in whichever country) already gives more info than Rhode Island does. JuliasTravels (talk) 11:51, 29 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I also had no idea what the population in Rhode Island is (could as well have been 10,000 or 10,000,000). I tried to come up with a good comparison, but it is hard to find a 1 million inhabitants city that most of the world knows... "less than Manhattan" would probably be grasped by more people (1.6 M). Syced (talk) 02:52, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

destination "user rating" and "traveling style

Swept in from the pub

could be great to provide a way to "note" the interest of a page with several criteria "beauty" "historical interest" "physical difficulty" "engagement" "scientifical interest" could be great to provide a way to "classify" "Do" destination amongst "traveling style" for example a "night in tropical forest using indigenous lifestyle" should be classified "roots lifestyle" or an "difficult treck" should be classified as "well trained trecker"

(Jlmalet (talk) 15:40, 5 September 2016 (UTC))[reply]

I am not entirely sure what you mean and how you envision this looking? I think our current prose is - or should be - sufficient and there is no need for another hard to maintain layer of... something. Hobbitschuster (talk) 16:24, 5 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Data visualization hackathon in Seattle

Happening July 22nd at 10 am . Likely useful for those involved with technical map work. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:14, 15 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jmh649: I am a user of Korea interested in data visualization. I think wikivoyage is not perfect for how information is published. Using Data visualization should more clearly and easily deliver the content of wikivoyage.
Can you tell me how was your hackathon? Did you learn something useful? --Kimdon6hee (talk) 07:34, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Job for adventurous travellers

This Job Will Pay You $39k to Travel the World and Brave Its Most Extreme Conditions for Columbia Sportswear. Would it suit anyone here? Pashley (talk) 18:20, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gateway Error 502

Trying to click on map icon (geo) and getting this error - it may be temporary but thought I would mention it -- Matroc (talk) 03:52, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the old (more functional) version of the dynamic map was down already yesterday. Are they maybe going to discontinue it now? :( ϒpsilon (talk) 04:47, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And the new one has even less functionality, cannot see nearby articles.--Traveler100 (talk) 15:23, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have been seeing that error for a few days. Just tested at Xiamen & got it again. Pashley (talk) 17:58, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]


RevisionSlider

From September 13th on, RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature in your wiki. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page, so that you can easily move between revisions. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well in your work!

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:56, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Open call for Project Grants

Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from September 12 to October 11 to fund new tools, research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Project Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

Also accepting candidates to join the Project Grants Committee through October 1.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 14:49, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Interesting book?

Has anyone here read Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism? The one review I saw was quite positive. Does it have anything to say that should affect our approach? Pashley (talk) 13:09, 24 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gutenberg books

Gutenberg.org has over 50,000 free, legally downloadable, books. It is all older material for which copyright has expired, so (at least in the US) legally in the public domain and freely usable.

We already use them some, e.g. On the trail of Marco Polo and On the trail of Kipling's Kim are based on Gutenberg books and quote them extensively. Other articles have links, e.g. Retiring_abroad#Housing links to some 19th century cookbooks for those who might want traditional dishes from home.

There are some Gutenberg bookshelves that look likely to have more things we can use. e.g. Travel Bookshelf and Countries Bookshelf.

I'd say Gutenberg is another resource we should be using much as we do Commons, part of the huge range of sites that are part of the global commons. In fact we should be actively looking for ways to use them more. Pashley (talk) 15:39, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Grants to improve your project

Greetings! The Project Grants program is currently accepting proposals for funding. There is just over a week left to submit before the October 11 deadline. If you have ideas for software, offline outreach, research, online community organizing, or other projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:53, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Creative Commons 4.0

Hello! I'm writing from the Wikimedia Foundation to invite you to give your feedback on a proposed move from CC BY-SA 3.0 to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license across all Wikimedia projects. The consultation will run from October 5 to November 8, and we hope to receive a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. Please, if you are interested, take part in the discussion on Meta-Wiki.

Apologies that this message is only in English. This message can be read and translated in more languages here. Joe Sutherland (talk) 01:35, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Stuff's going to break in 2017

TLDR:

  1. Someone/some page at this project should probably be subscribed to m:Tech/News.
  2. The announcement in the most recent edition about mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy is going to affect you, but probably not very much.

More details:

w:HTML Tidy is a tool that the devs have been using to silently compensate for some typos in HTML and wikitext code after a page has been saved. Tidy is being removed (but not during 2016) as part of a multi-year plan to update the parsers and improve accessibility.

To give a simple example, </br> is an invalid HTML code (it should be <br> instead). It's easy for editors to get confused about which HTML tags need a slash and which don't, or they saw it somewhere and copied it, so this error happens all the time. This currently displays as if it were correct, but that will not be the case when Tidy is removed. You can see the pages affected by this particular error by searching for insource:/\<\/br\>/ in the regular search box. There are only about 25 pages in the mainspace that have this particular error (and no templates!), but that's only one of the errors.

More information, and a list of the major changes, is available at mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy. In (probably) December, there will be a tool that you can use to visually check previews on pages that you're concerned about (it'll probably be available in Special:Preferences, but turned off by default). In the meantime, there is a list of known errors at mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy that you may want to review and check your wiki for. I also recommend dropping by w:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Check Wikipedia and watch for information about scripts and tools. Much of this work can be handled with scripts or bots, but some of the changes (e.g., where to close a table that is missing the |} code to signal the end of the page) require human judgment.

Most of the information about projects like this is delivered via m:Tech/News. However, nobody at this wiki is subscribed to that weekly newsletter. If you aren't reliably getting this information via another wiki or mailing list, then you may want to subscribe and start watching for announcements like this.

I think that the Wikivoyages are going to be one of the least-affected sets of wikis, because of the decision to use as few templates and as little complicated formatting as possible. However, there are some pages that will be affected. I expect formal announcements to go out later, but I thought you'd want to know about this sooner rather than later. Also, if you work at any other project, please share this information.

If you have questions or information to share with the devs about this project, please feel free to {{ping}} me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:47, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Editing News #3—2016

Swept in from the pub

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

VisualEditor
Did you know?
Did you know that you can easily re-arrange columns and rows in the visual editor?
Screenshot showing a dropdown menu with options for editing the table structure


Select a cell in the column or row that you want to move. Click the arrow at the start of that row or column to open the dropdown menu (shown). Choose either "Move before" or "Move after" to move the column, or "Move above" or "Move below" to move the row.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.

Recent changes

  • You can now set text as small or big.
  • Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon. A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.
  • Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.
  • At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.
  • The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page. In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
  • Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.

Future changes

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

  • If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

—Elitre (WMF)

17:49, 15 October 2016 (UTC)


LP's "best destinations"

I read Lonely Planet gives Canada, Colombia and Finland as best destinations 2017. Would it be good to check our coverage, and try to update and improve the most important articles in these countries? --LPfi (talk) 05:36, 26 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@LPfi: Agreed. If we have some reason to think that travellers will be more likely to look at these places, then we should prioritize those articles (just like we do when a major event like the Olympics comes to town). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:51, 26 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Looking for your advice on software development

Hello, all. I wonder if a few of you would please review something one of my teammates has been working on? Keegan's been leading the development of a mw:Technical Collaboration Guideline.

The Technical Collaboration Guideline (TCG) is a set of best-practice recommendations related to planning and communicating product and project information, with the goal that content contributors and software developers (both volunteers and WMF staff) will work together better during the product development and deployment cycle. The TCG is intended to be flexible, since every project is unique and also since plans and products change during development.

I thought that with your recent experience with the map project, that you all might have the most helpful feedback on how things could/should work. Please share your thoughts at mw:Talk:Technical Collaboration Guideline. The TCG and the previous conversations about it are written in English, but comments from all languages are welcome.

Keegan promises me that all feedback will be read and taken into consideration when editing the next draft of this advice, even if he doesn't personally reply to every single comment. Please keep in mind that the TCG is intended to be lightweight advice, rather than completely comprehensive. (Or: This is being written by Keegan, the soul of brevity, rather than by me.  ;-) Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 27 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Update of Wikivoyage for Android

Hi all,

does anybody know, how to get the latest Wikivoyage files into the Android app? Current files are from August 2016. Similar situation on the Kiwix website.

Thanks René --Renek78 (talk) 22:03, 10 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Renek78: The only way to see the most up-to-date versions is live via the Web. Offline editions are based on data dumps from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ which are run intermittently. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:58, 12 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The app is updated every 6 months. This is a trade-off between being up-to-date and not bothering users too much (the APK and its extension are really huge, compared to other apps). Syced (talk) 07:26, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Password reset

I apologise that this message is in English. ⧼Centralnotice-shared-help-translate⧽

We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.

Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.

In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.

Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Adding to the above section (Password reset)

Please accept my apologies - that first line should read "Help with translations!". Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

fi.voy has been approved

See incubator:Wy/fi There is a ticket to track its progress at phabricator:T18976. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:40, 24 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's great to see the community grow. While I somewhat doubt that there are many people who speak Finnish but no English, I do hope that this wiki will be able to attract a thriving userbase and create great content. Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:02, 24 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it is growing. Statistics tells us that only 6 language versions have more than one very active editor (and "very active" is mere 100 edits per month), so the other 10 languages hardly develop, while some of them are not even curated. Of all Wikivoyages created after the migration, only Chinese one was really successful. That's something to think about when a new language version is established (and even more so for languages like Finnish that have plenty of content at WT). --Alexander (talk) 21:32, 24 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid Alexander is right, on the other hand we might well get over handful of contributors from the Finnish WP.
At the old site, the Finnish version started off pretty well sometime in 2007 or 2008 and I think there were almost ten fairly active users at one point. However, the number of contributors slowly started dropping and I was one of the last ones who left (in 2011 or so). Today I think there are just sporadic anonymous edits and people from IB dropping in every now and then. ϒpsilon (talk) 05:56, 25 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Live Just in case anyone wants to take a peek: voy:fi:. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:37, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It does not seem to be a Wikivoyage project. All interwiki's point to Wikipedia...?! --Alexander (talk) 17:21, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Added it to the list of languages on the Main Page. The issue with interwikis must be fixed ASAP, though. --Alexander (talk) 17:31, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Atsirlin: phab:T152201. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:31, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Help test offline Wikipedia

Hello! The Reading team at the Foundation is looking to support readers who want to take articles offline to read and share later on their phones - a use case we learned about from deep research earlier this year. We’ve built a few prototypes and are looking for people who would be interested in testing them. If you’d like to learn more and give us feedback, check out the page on Meta! Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Just a quick add-on, from a comment from K7L on that page. The prototypes are currently built for Wikipedia, but when we make these into real features, they would definitely be available to Wikivoyage. AGomez (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wishlist voting time

Hi everyone,

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team created a wishlist process, where the Wikimedia community would decide what they would work on during the year. This has also been the focus on hackathons and work by other developers. You can check the progress with the wishes from last year at m:2015 Community Wishist Survey/Results.

Voting started this week for this year's proposals at the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey. The "proposal" phase finished about 10 days ago. Voting will close on 12 December 2016. Smaller and non-English-speaking projects tend to be under-represented in this, so the team has set aside some time specifically for smaller projects like this one. Please consider voting and encouraging other people from smaller projects to do the same. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:15, 30 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That's a huge list of items, so it might be useful if anyone who finds something applicable to Wikivoyage could call it out. I went through the Wikidata items, and Ability to edit Wikidata from WP and other projects is one that would be of huge benefit to Wikivoyage since it would allow easier sharing of data between projects via Wikidata. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:25, 30 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Relevant items Include support for KML on c:. Take a look over at m:. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:59, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I noted the suggestion for support for KML as well - might be an idea to have a KML to GeoJSON conversion process as part of it. There are many proposals and I hope others take a look-see. Some proposals, I don't feel are really pertinent for Wikivoyage -- Matroc (talk) 06:39, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This one? m:2016 Community Wishlist Survey/Categories/Multimedia#Support KML files for geodata Everything is split into sub-pages by topic, so it might be helpful to add links, like Ryan did. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:26, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete? Back in the Wikitravel days, Evan and Maj inserted (camel case!) links to DMOZ, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia. These have been retained so that pages such as (e.g.) Spanish phrasebook have a side bar with "In other projects" that lists WMF sister sites and immediately below it "Related sites" which lists some of the same info. It looks like the only outlier here is DMOZ. We had a discussion on this a couple of years back and decided to keep it (the discussion was originally renaming it from "Open Directory Project") so it looks like now all of our "WikiPedia:foo" links are redundant. Should we remove all links to Commons and Wikipedia from the bottom of articles since they are all linked by d: now? Seems obvious enough to me. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:04, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How would you handle Wikivoyage articles that do not have corresponding Wikipedia or Wikidata pages? --Traveler100 (talk) 23:17, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Traveler100: Delete it and use Special:UnconnectedPages. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:20, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What delete all articles that do not have a direct Wikipedia page but nether the less have a link to a closely related Wikipedia page? --Traveler100 (talk) 23:30, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Traveler100: ? I am not suggesting we delete any articles... —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:02, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
One thing to check before declaring the "commons:" links redundant: are these pointing to commons pages (which are rare) or commons categories (which are common)? K7L (talk) 01:22, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not only that, but when we discussed this before, I said that I am all for eliminating redundancy, but I would support Justin's proposal only if it doesn't delete links to sister sites that are not on the same title but closely enough related to be useful. The example that I like to give is that since this is a travel guide, we have an article for Chiusure, not for the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, but on Wikipedia, the reverse is true. And since the overwhelming majority of visitors to the tiny and otherwise uninteresting village of Chiusure don't visit the village center at all but go straight to Monte Oliveto, a link to w:Territorial Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore is useful. If Justin's proposal is either going to willy-nilly delete this kind of link, requiring us to redo it, or make it completely impossible, I will oppose it. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:09, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Ikan Kekek: Agreed--I think we should include links higher up the hierarchy for all three sites if there's nothing that exists at a lower level. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:46, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with that, too, but the case I mentioned is something different from that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:04, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia has articles in four languages about Chiusure; see w:it:Chiusure (Asciano). The Wikidata entry is d:Q3675256. Which leads to another question: What if the Wikidata entry exists, but the English Wikipedia doesn't have an article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:58, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The solution would seem to be to link Wikidata for Chiusure but also the most nearly analogous article on en.wp. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:30, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think that it is probably a little soon to remove the Commons and Wikipedia links. In the past week I have edited one Commons link which was wrong and added a link to Hillsborough (Northern Ireland) which had no Commons link. I think that doing the same thing via Wikidata is sufficiently complicated that most editors won't bother. AlasdairW (talk) 23:17, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate Username in WT

By anonymous e-mail, was notified someone else has created an account there "for me"...? Is this common, and is there any reason for concern? Hennejohn (talk) 20:39, 4 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I won't link to WT, but it looks like someone with your exact user name was quite active on WT until late 2012 (are you sure it wasn't you?). It then appears a vandal put some content on your page the other day (2nd December).
I'd say nothing to worry about. Pity we can't deactivate our accounts over there. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 21:25, 4 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
User accounts For what it's worth, if you want your username blocked or your page deleted over there, I can do that. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:46, 4 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Justin: That would be great. Should have done that myself in 2012. Blocking may be enough; if you can delete my account there, terrific. Many thanks, Hennejohn (talk) 22:53, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Hennejohn: The block log:
2016-12-06T03:13:18 Koavf (Talk | contribs | block) blocked Hennejohn (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of indefinite (autoblock disabled) (Per user request, user can edit his talk page to request unblock) (unblock | change block)
2016-12-06T03:12:48 Koavf (Talk | contribs | block) deleted page User:Hennejohn (Author request: content before blanking was: "St Belly Fat | http://campusaitmelloul.ga http://campusaitmelloul.ga - http://campusaitmelloul.ga>>> Hi Each, Pleased as punch to be enduring found this forum. The ringing in my well-spring is terr...) (view/restore)
Let me know how else I can help. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:14, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Hennejohn: Also, this is evidently your old account here: User:(WT-en) Hennejohn. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:17, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Justin, Many thanks for the Christmas present. Unless this topic is somehow useful to others, should be deleted. Can do it unless best done by an expert. Hennejohn (talk) 01:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It should be archived per the instructions at the top of the page. There's no hurry. Powers (talk) 01:41, 9 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Can someone help me with a user test?

Hi everyone,

Editing Design Research is desperately seeking at least one editor (preferably two) to run a formal user test for a new editing mode. You don't need to be an admin or a technical person – this is just about ordinary editing. Probably everyone who reads this will qualify.

Users must:

  • be able to speak English,
  • have access to Google Hangouts (for screensharing and talking),
    • You don't have to be videotaped yourself, but you must be able to share your screen via Hangouts, so they can see what you're doing.
    • You must have access to a working microphone (either external or built-in is fine), so you can tell them what you think.
  • have access to quiet place for 30- to 45-minute-long research session,
  • be willing to sign a standard research release form (I can get you a copy), and
  • have access to Chrome, Firefox or Safari (I believe this must be on a desktop system, not on a smartphone).

And I'd like:

  • Someone who doesn't think that Wikipedia is the only project, which is why I'm posting here.  ;-)

If you're interested, or if you think you might know someone who is interested, then please click here to leave a note on my talk page. Thanks for considering it! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:05, 5 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Article creation wizard discussion

Hi all,

This proposal suggests WMF to fund the writing of an article creation wizard at Wikipedia, but with enough interest it may -- or may it not? -- be expanded to write an article creation wizards framework or library for use at non-Wikipedia wikis, such as here. If desired, please join the discussion before December 12. (I've sent this message to English wikis; I ask you to deliver it to non-English wikis, if you can. Even delivering it in English there may be better than nothing.)

  • What tools do we use here, now, to make article creation easier for newbies?
  • What requirements do we have for a potential implementation?
  • How would you like to inform the people of the article creation perks and difficulties on this wiki?
  • What else needs to be considered?

Thanks. --Gryllida (talk) 03:51, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great opportunity for us. What did all of you find most user-unfriendly about Wikivoyage early on? Any suggestions for ways to lessen the learning curve for new users? Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:38, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Probably the application of templates is not obvious to new users for new articles. Even if they see the text for article template creation, it isn't always obvious which type is to be applied.
Although it may open the floodgates to endless 'fire and forget' article creation, it would be great if I could generate a Wikivoyage destination article from its Wikipedia counterpart. For example a new town article could automatically insert hierarchy, geo location, local language spelling of the town, dynamic map in the right place, a couple of images etc. That would make it easier for the new user to get productive in shorter time... Andrewssi2 (talk) 09:30, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Super idea!
Some other ideas: Can listing templates be made more obvious defaults, and can they include hidden text warning users not to delete or move around fields? Is there a way for new titles, when typed in listing templates, to show logical Wikipedia and Commons links to editors as a default? Should we tweak the hidden text to blank templates, visible to editors, prompting them for what kind of content to insert (e.g., "insert street address here"; "insert alternate name here; if there is no alternate name, leave it blank"; "insert opening and closing hours here"; "insert a description of the business here; do not include information about nearby places that aren't right next to or across the street from it")? Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:25, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I love the idea of having some kind of onboarding process. Maybe there is a little wizard that walks new users through creating their user page. You could at least get familiar with the editing tools, and where to look up a policy or two. Eg.. "Did you know four tildes signs your name? It's kind of a standard around here." There could also be some "WV Tour", walking new people through the current top level policies, and how/why consensus was reached. It sucks when you write a bunch of stuff and somebody deletes it, citing some policy you've never heard of, and maybe don't agree with. "Growing a Thick Skin" might make a good wizard topic, haha. For example: I disagree with the "use exact dollar amounts, not $/$$/$$$" guideline. Hmmm, OK, is that info written on the listings page? Not really. Actually I can't find where it's written anywhere right now. Maybe it's just something I learned after making edits here.
Just in general consolidating consensus opinions somewhere would be super helpful. Often they are buried in some comment page from three years ago. Who cares? Just tell me what you decided, and where I can have opinions about it if I want. Even if no consensus was reached, it's still helpful to know that issue X is a thing at least.
So like one idea for an onboarding "task" would be something like: "enter your favorite restaurant" on their user page. Then ask them to enter another restaurant from any live article that's missing information. Now you're contributing! Even better if some Voyager could follow up within a week of the initial walkthrough edit to say "thanks for updating restaurant X!".
Answer the question "How do I add some nice place I love?", and "I have 20 minutes, how can I help WV?". (Give several options, I still don't really know how to do the latter.)
Add a "virtual history tour" eg.. link to first edit, first star, first national park template, 100,000th edit, first positive user feedback from the road, the WT/WV split, 10,000th article, most edited article, most viewed, etc.
Find an article that hasn't really been edited by humans in 10 years and ask them to take a shot at cleaning it up. Like an "adopt an article" thing when you finish the wizard maybe?
Also, yeah, the way of finding what headings are required for what templates is difficult. You have to know that policy pages exist, search around for the correct one, and then read each headline, deciding case by case if it's required-required or just required for your template. Also I'm not sure it's listed anywhere that events should be under do, or that dynamic maps should go under see. Or maybe there is but it's spread across several pages. And actually, it's hard to even find what dang template options there are in the first place! What is a "small city" versus a "region"? Which of these should I use to handle a group of small towns? (I'm still not sure.) It's fine it's just not written down anywhere. Mostly this action item is clean up the documentation. I know it's boring, I didn't do it either.
Examples of good/bad pages? Good is easy, pick a starred airport, itinerary, etc. Don't just link to Chicago, explain what makes it a great article. What went into it? How many Voyagers wrote it? How long did it take to put together? Linking to bad pages could be politically difficult, I don't know. Maybe there is a list already of pages that need help?
Maybe this last one is just me, but it would be cool to know why there are so many pages like this? Personally they seem like low value "I got here by mistake" pages. It might be worth explaining to new users the value these pages provide to WV. I'm sure there is a good reason they exist! Maybe something like: "We had problem X, so we tried to fix it with Y. It worked well, but Y wound up creating other issues. We're currently thinking about Z, please give your thoughts on the talk page!" I think it can be hard to acknowledge negative/WIP stuff, but users will understand and respect it. --ButteBag (talk) 22:47, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Some excellent ideas there! The main bar to an introduction video is probably volunteer time in creating it. I disagree on dollars signs, though, because (a) they're very US-centric; (b) we'd have to define them in every article for them to mean anything readers could understand; (c) they'd be stealing from Yelp. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:58, 6 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above contains some great brainstorming about ways to improve the site - is anyone interested in trying to turn these ideas into a Usability Expedition so that they can be organized and put into action? On a side note, regarding Ikan's suggestions for the listing editor, can you start a discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Listing editor so that they can be fleshed out and prioritized for a future update? -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:17, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@ButteBag: For what it's worth, the English-language Wikipedia has The Wikipedia Adventure which is a little similar to what you mentioned as a game and the English Wiktionary is really good at marking when things where discussed and what consensus/votes were reached. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:36, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes! The Wikipedia Adventure is exactly what I was thinking about! I was also thinking about using some tool like to build it. But whatever the technology, it's the content that's of primary importance. It's funny; I was not thinking about making a video at all, it just goes to show how difficult text-only communication is!
A UX expedition is a great idea. To build on the $/$$/$$$ example: when you log in and click an "add listing" link, you see the five most popular currency symbols. Each time you click "€", another symbol appears in the "Price" field. I had just assumed this meant "click your currency symbol a bunch of times for expensive places".
It's probably also worth mentioning to new users the differences between WV and the Big W. They're probably familiar with WP, and it would provide a good starting frame of reference. Like the fact that we have less strict policies and procedures. (Cool!) But we also have a smaller userbase, so article quality may be uneven. (Bummer!) However, this means your efforts will have a bigger impact. (Cool!) I don't know -- stuff like that. Thanks for listening all! --ButteBag (talk) 15:14, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Usually when it is clear someone came to WV from Wikipedia the {{wikipedian}} message is used to welcome them, which has a pointer to Wikivoyage:Welcome, Wikipedians. Suggestions for making that page easier to find would be a great addition. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:46, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]


New way to edit wikitext

Summary: There's a new opt-in Beta Feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. Please go try it out.


We in the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing department are responsible for making editing better for all our editors, new and experienced alike. We've been slowly improving the visual editor based on feedback, user tests, and feature requests. However, that doesn't work for all our user needs: whether you need to edit a wikitext talk page, create a template, or fix some broken reference syntax, sometimes you need to use wikitext, and many experienced editors prefer it.

Consequently, we've planned a "wikitext mode" for the visual editor for a long time. It provides as much of the visual editor's features as possible, for those times that you need or want wikitext. It has the same user interface as the visual editor, including the same toolbar across the top with the same buttons. It provides access to the citoid service for formatting citations, integrated search options for inserting images, and the ability to add new templates in a simple dialog. Like in the visual editor, if you paste in formatted text copied from another page, then formatting (such as bolding) will automatically be converted into wikitext.

All wikis now have access to this mode as a Beta Feature. When enabled, it replaces your existing wikitext editor everywhere. If you don't like it, you can reverse this at any time by turning off the Beta Feature in your preferences. We don't want to surprise anyone, so it's strictly an opt-in-only Beta Feature. It won't switch on automatically for anyone, even if you have previously checked the box to "Automatically enable most beta features".

The new wikitext edit mode is based on the visual editor, so it requires JavaScript (as does the current wikitext editor). It doesn't work with gadgets that have only been designed for the older one (and vice versa), so some users will miss gadgets they find important. We're happy to work with gadget authors to help them update their code to work with both editors. We're not planning to get rid of the current main wikitext editor on desktop in the foreseeable future. We're also not going to remove the existing ability to edit plain wikitext without JavaScript. Finally, though it should go without saying, if you prefer to continue using the current wikitext editor, then you may so do.

This is an early version, and we'd love to know what you think so we can make it better. Please leave feedback about the new mode on the feedback page. You may write comments in any language. Thank you.

James Forrester (Product Manager, Editing department, Wikimedia Foundation) --19:32, 14 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

2016 in review

At the beginning of the year a number of people posted their wishlists for 2016, and with the year almost over it seems like a good time to look back at how things went. Regarding my personal goals:

  1. I had hoped to see the number of site contributors increase, and while there are some new names in recent changes, sadly any increase appears to have been small.
  2. I also hoped to see continued SEO improvement, but unfortunately, after a bounce from the improved interwiki linking, I think Wikivoyage has actually regressed, at least for articles that I watch. This site does rank well for areas not covered by other travel sites, but as far as I can tell for most destinations WT maintains top billing, while other sites seem to have leap-frogged Wikivoyage in the Google results.
  3. On a positive note, it took a late push, but the sub-regions of California are starting to fill out nicely.

Some items that weren't on my wishlist that turned out to be highlights included:

  1. The Wikivoyage:Listing editor was significantly updated in August after User:Ikan Kekek helped spearhead an effort to allow sister project links in listings, and there appear to have been thousands of edits since then taking advantage of the fact that listings can now be linked with Wikidata to allow easier retrieval of lat/long and other shared info.
  2. Wrh2Bot has made over 12,000 edits this year to flag dead links, clean up formatting issues, and otherwise automate mundane tasks so that editors can focus on more important things. If people have suggestions for further cleanups that they'd like to see automated with a bot, please let me know.
  3. User:Yurik has introduced new dynamic map functions that allow a myriad of extremely valuable capabilities, including mapmasks imported from OpenStreetMap, User:Matroc's dynamic map draw, etc. See User:Wrh2/Maps for some experiments with these new features. There are still some rough edges to work out, but given the quick pace of development I suspect Wikivoyage's articles will have vastly better maps in a year's time.

There were obviously many more highlights (and a few lowlights) than what is above, so hopefully others can share their thoughts on 2016, as well as what their hopes are for 2017 - personally my goals will carry over from 2016, I'd also like to put some effort into improving the site's usability and UI, and I'm cautiously optimistic that the status quo bias that often stalls discussions will thaw enough to allow some significant changes to things that haven't changed in over a decade, including some site policies.

Best wishes to everyone over the holidays, and hopefully we can put some ideas in place to finally make 2017 the year that Wikivoyage fulfills its potential. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:28, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I am increasingly convinced that SEO won't happen unless we deliberately edit certain articles to get rid of "copied" content. It will be a long and tiresome slog uphill, but I can see no other way to do it. Hobbitschuster (talk) 04:41, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Static levels of site contributors is concerning. The same is true of Wikipedia which is experiencing declining contribution rates, although they still have tens of thousands of contributors and have plenty of buffer. Active admins could also be an issue, with most of the work done by only 9 people (determined as admins committing at least 10 admin actions this year), and of those a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting is done by the top 2. Andrewssi2 (talk) 10:30, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't disagree with the points made in this thread, but I'd like to point out that it's not all about quantity. Quality is important, too. So look at the honor roll of new posters: User:De88 has done a fantastic job on the Brownsville (Texas) article, among his other edits; User:RhinoMind, who joined in Sept. 2015, has spent quite a lot of time inputting a huge amount of information into the Aarhus guide, among others; User:Halowand added a tremendous number of pagebanners to articles about Japan, many of them notably excellent, plus information. These are just the contributors and contributions that come to my mind right now; there were many others, and I feel strongly that the quality of the site and its coverage has improved notably in the last year. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:12, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely agree with Ikan. The contribution of these new users and others has been amazing, and we should celebrate them :-) Not forgetting all of you admins who work tirelessly 'behind the scenes' for hours every day.
My concern, beyond the number of active contributors, is the number of visitors. Yes, we need people who are willing to give up some of their time to help the site to grow, but all of that only matters if we are reaching 'passive users' as well, i.e. readers who are using the travel guide for its intended purpose. Is there any way of checking this, beyond the possibly inaccurate search engine data? --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 12:21, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not only admins but other valuable established users like you, User:Ypsilon, User:StellarD, User:Hobbitschuster, User:The dog2, User:Erik den yngre and many others. And among the valuable new users, one I omitted above is User:Wauteurz. Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:29, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Precipitous drop in Alexa Rank since October

Now Alexa rank is not to my knowledge a scientific measure of anything, but it is cited quite often (including by our own page on Wikivoyage and Wikitravel), so even if there is no reason beyond "just 'cause" a drop is something that should worry us. Our site seems to have fallen from well above 25 000 (probably in the 22 000s) to an as of today rank of 30,253. Now this might be seasonal, but even if that is the case, this rank is worse than the January First 2016 rank (from which there was a slight but notable downwards trend until about March). Now the advertising hellhole has similarly dropped in rank since about October (from the 7 000s) to an as of today rank of 8,714, but the curve for 2016 does not exhibit any trend that could be construed as seasonal.

What is happening here? A statistical artifact? Something Alexa does? Something we did right before October? Something we did wrong since October? Random movement? A seasonal effect?

Should we do something about this? If so, what? Hobbitschuster (talk) 04:48, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No idea whether this is real or an Alexa quirk; the same numbers have Uncyclopedia traffic dropping off a cliff for no apparent reason. K7L (talk) 17:43, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I've been tracking our Alexa rank off and on since the WMF relaunch. It has a habit of random precipitous drops and meteoric rises that don't seem to have much rhyme or reason to them. I've given up trying to figure it out. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:06, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Is there some other site that measures whatever Alexa is measuring with more scientific basis to it? Hobbitschuster (talk) 19:19, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
similarweb seems like a good alternative with more detail, although still not providing you with that scientific basis.
I would say that fixating on traditional SEO in an increasingly mobile first world is maybe the wrong way to look at things.We do seem to have the aspiration to build a great product in splendid isolation and then wondering why this isn't more visible. How about:
* Mobile focus : Are our articles designed for a great mobile experience, or are they just a simplified and stripped down version of the 'main' desktop article?
* External community engagement : Discussions on the Traveler's pub and article talk pages work for us, but the conversation is invisible from the outside. What if we started moving these conversations to a community site such as Reddit?
* Social Media : Tweeting the DOTM to our 100 followers isn't really working. We could set up campaigns and use the community to broadcast and amplify through the different channels we all use. Why not have a discussion about best restaurants in #Manhatten over Twitter than the WV talk page and draw in new people that way?
Just some thoughts. Appreciate all this is effort, but I'm suggesting blue sky thinking rather than just focusing purely on content for our next Google rank. Andrewssi2 (talk) 19:59, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Hey everyone,

I leaned a little on the Analytics team, and collected some information for you – plus an invitation for any interested parties to join their public mailing list and ask whatever you want.

  • Alexa's methodology isn't appropriate for sites that don't get a high volume of traffic. I don't know what the cutoff is, but "inappropriate method for this size" may be the main explanation.
  • Traffic to the Wikivoyages is pretty stable.
    • The English Wikivoyage pageviews run around 60,000 per day; a third of your traffic comes from mobile. For comparison, about 40% of traffic to the English Wikipedia comes from mobile; Google has reported that they get more searches in the US on mobile devices than on desktop systems.
    • You get about 15,000 "unique devices" each day. I believe that I'm two of your unique devices for today, because I understand that each web browser is counted separately (and I've seen this page once in Firefox and once in Safari today), but with a very small number of exceptions for people like me, each unique device is one person.
    • That number, combined with the previous number, gives you an average of each device looking at four pages. Generally, mobile folks look at fewer pages than desktop folks.
    • You get about 300,000 unique devices per month.

Finally, if you want more information, then please subscribe to the Analytics mailing list, and feel free to ask the volunteers and staff there whatever you want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent, thanks ever so much for taking the trouble to provide that --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 23:03, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Here you can see information about what unique devices represents, you are right that 2 different browsers on the same computer are 2 devices, the best example is a mobile phone and a desktop for the same user, 1 user, two devices. So devices tells you about the "relative" size of your user base but not the absolute number of users you have. In the case of en.wikivoyage, if you assume every single user has two devices you are looking at a userbase of about 150.000 "users" monthly. 71.212.30.134 01:00, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Replace "very small number of exceptions" with "a relative majority of users at least in the western world", see also m:Research:Unique devices. The "unique devices" number is about twice the "unique visitors" number comScore used to give us, IIRC (totals are not officially provided yet because they could be misleading, as far as I understand). --[[User:Nemo_bis|Nemo]] (talk) 10:37, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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