Wikivoyage talk:Destination of the month candidates/Archive/2009-2013

Past DotMs

As the months and years pass, this page is becoming quite long. Do you think it would be better to put past years into their own folder, like DotmArchive/2007. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 22:45, 3 August 2009 (EDT)

Timing of DOTM

When nominating DotM, it states you must say a good time to visit, and this is when the article will be featured. Surely it would make sense to feature it a few months before the best time to go, since it takes time to make travel arangements etc? EG it is good best to visit X in August, so feature the article in May/June, so you can get to X in time for August?

I second this proposal--similar to publications in newspapers/travel magazines, we should feature a destination well in advance, so that if it evokes much interest from the reader, he could enjoy going there this year, not the next year. --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 11:16, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

Qualification for DOTM/OTBP

The rules currently say:

• "Any destination, region, itinerary or event that passes the "What is an article?" test is eligible for DotM/OtBP"
• "All objections have to be based on the guidelines above: poor formatting, missing information, etc. Personal opinions, dislikes, etc do not count."

Yet Walt Disney World and, apparently soon, Wake Island are about to be slushed due to fuzzy objections like "it's expensive, very commercial, and lacking in any form of "culture"" (for WDW) and "it isn't open to the general public" (for Wake). I think this is unacceptable: we need to either agree to stick with the stated guidelines, or amend them. (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:26, 15 January 2009 (EST)

Hi Jani. I am still new at this and have a question about the DOTM/OTBP process. The nominations page states these are not valid criticisms:

"Wrong time of year" and "Wrong type of place." It goes on to say, "Articles are supported or opposed based on their content. Timing can be worked out later."

I am curious. Where is the approproate place to discuss timing, sequencing and rotation? This page or the Nominations page? It currently seems like the scheduling gets all wrapped up in the copy editing and manual of style discussion. Regards, (WT-en) WineCountryInn 23:56, 15 January 2009 (EST)

What that bit of the rules (which I wrote) is trying to say is that it's fine to discuss timing, but you should/cannot oppose something just because it should be in January instead of July. Currently scheduling is mixed together with nominations, which is a little messy, but there are no better idea at the moment. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:28, 16 January 2009 (EST)

I slushed WDW since (WT-en) LtPowers wanted to reorganize, districtify and what not, as far as i'm concerned it was leaning towards a concensus to feature it. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 00:32, 16 January 2009 (EST)

In that case it shouldn't have been slushed, since that implies it was rejected... (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:28, 16 January 2009 (EST)

Oh, where should it go then? (WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) 02:59, 16 January 2009 (EST)

I just thought it was silly to feature it as a DotM while there were still significant concerns about the size and scope of the article (as seen in the star nomination), because then once we did get it fleshed out we wouldn't be able to feature the improved article(s) as a DotM. (WT-en) LtPowers 08:11, 16 January 2009 (EST)

I think WDW is fine to slush, it can be renominated once it's been sorted out, same as a star nom. I do however think that it's time to revise the criteria for dotm, since it's now being taken so literally. At the moment I could kick ass on the Fresno page and nominate it and well, it meets the criteria, so...

For Wake Island, I'm not trying to be ridiculous and say it's the end of the world if we feature it, but I just really don't see how I'm the only one objecting to it. Very difficult to get to, in my world, means you have to apply weeks ahead of time for a permit, travel 19 hours in a bus, hike through a cave, send smoke signals to the village elder, then hop into the village on one leg to avoid offending the women... all that I'm cool with. But if you can only visit Wake Island by emergency landing or getting a job there, I think we've crossed the line of reason, and I think it looks like we're desperate and short on good articles to feature – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 13:07, 17 January 2009 (EST)

I think rather than "we're short on good articles to feature", having a place like Wake Island as a featured article instead demonstrates the depth of articles that are on Wikivoyage. What other travel guide would include articles about such obscure destinations? As to the quality of the article for an OTBP, it is:

• Interesting.
• Well-written.
• Complete.

To me, that's the type of article we WANT to feature. The fact that it is next-to-impossible (currently) for a non-employee to visit Wake does not make this article any less great - it is an enjoyable read, and perhaps we may inspire someone to visit one day, either as an employee or after it becomes easier to get there. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:33, 17 January 2009 (EST)

Obviously we can both be right, but I would like to believe that people would look at the front page and think, "Wake island? what the hell is that" click on it and go "wow, that's pretty amazing information for a place that is off limits" (And in my dreams promptly go update the most obscure place they know of) --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 13:36, 17 January 2009 (EST)

I think those are all arguments for why it qualifies for an article, and why maybe it qualifies for guide or star status... but not why it should be featured as a dotm (which implies that you should go there, when in fact you can't)... but I'm clearly in the minority so I'll bow to consensus :) – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 03:39, 18 January 2009 (EST)

At the risk of inflicting further trauma on a long-dead horse, the criteria on the Previously Off the beaten path page are simply "Off the beaten path is a showcase article about a lesser-known or unusual travel destination, selected monthly by Wikivoyage's users." My understanding has always been that we aren't necessarily saying "you should go there", but we are saying "this would be a great place to go, and here's a great article about it". If (for example) the South Pole article was updated to guide status (if that's even possible) then I think that would be another great OTBP nomination, despite the fact that you either have to get a job with Raytheon, the NSF, or have hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up an expedition to visit; we don't necessarily have to feature places that are regularly visited, but can instead mix in a few destinations that inspire people with the possibilities for travel, even if those destinations are out of reach for the vast majority. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 04:29, 18 January 2009 (EST)

Uh-oh

We're a little short on dotm noms, mkay???? Can someone write up a good article on a large destination this afternoon and nominate it please? Slackers – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 12:11, 19 January 2009 (EST)

That's because Boracay and Walt Disney World were just pulled out of the queue. Boracay is almost ready to go, the Eat/Sleep sections just need a little TLC... (WT-en) Jpatokal 03:21, 20 January 2009 (EST)

Good job with the map, should we put it back on schedule for feb then?

Optimal dotm areas

The project page states in the criteria for dotm candidates that, The nominated article should not cover too large a subject (e.g. "India" or even "Indiana"). My suggestion that we feature Northern Territory would violate this criterion. But what is the reasoning behind this policy? If we had a fantastic guide to Indiana (we don't), I think that could make for a perfectly fine dotm/otbp feature. That could apply for countries as well—if we actually had any countries at guide status. This hasn't come up in the past for the simple reason that until Northern Territory, we lacked a single region article at guide status. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 11:26, 25 February 2009 (EST)

I think I wrote that way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but you're right, as long as the article is up to snuff I don't see much reason for it. (WT-en) Jpatokal 11:43, 25 February 2009 (EST)

Yes, I think that countries, states, and regions would be fine to feature as long as they meet the other requirements. A lot of people plan trips that way anyway. They first look at the country and then a region of the country and plan all of their travels within that area. Perhaps it will also encourage people to update/add to the broader categories... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:33, 27 February 2009 (EST)

August scheduling

Moving this debate off the main page -- while I have nothing against either Okayama or Hamamatsu, I think having two Japanese DotMs almost back-to-back is a bit too much, and that the steam bath of August is a dreadful time for any Japanese city. Edmonton's flaws are not fatal or unfixable, and August is a good time for it, so I'd be tempted to push for that instead. (WT-en) Jpatokal 07:17, 1 July 2009 (EDT)

I don't have a problem with that timing. There's a month between them, and there won't have been a Japanese DoTM or OtBP for more than a year prior to August. In the overall scheme of things, that's not excessive. We shouldn't get in the habit of scheduling articles until they're ready. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 09:04, 1 July 2009 (EDT)

Okayama lead pic

Dead?

Boring?

IMHO the top pic is superior both photographically and informatively. It's not "dead", it's showing a Japanese garden that still looks quite striking even in winter, while the 2nd could be from any old boring park. (WT-en) Jpatokal 02:55, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

I see what you're saying; you won't see a picture like the first one in another guide, and perhaps the one I uploaded is stereotypical... As the lead pic, I felt it should be presented at its best, to look appealing. I don't think the first picture is really any more "Japanese" than the second one (they were taken from exactly the same spot). The only difference in them is that the grass is dead in the first and green in the second. It's not a sand garden. I have a lot of other pictures, but the grass will be green in all of them, as well, because they were all taken the same day. The castle picture looks nicer, but the grass is dead there also, and the Saijo Inari picture is not dead but it is grey and brown. A green garden adds color to the page and makes it appealing. I honestly thought the picture posted prior to the new one was fine. Where did it go? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 03:20, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

It's still on Wikivoyage Shared, and can still be used. If you go back into the page history, such as here, you'll see it. I strongly prefer the top garden pic. Forget for a moment whether the plants are alive or dead — there's so much dead space in the bottom pic, which is dominated by that pond, and it's barely distinguishable from the trees, so more than two thirds of the photo is an amorphous forest green mass. (It looks a lot better at full size — some good photos just don't work well as thumbnails.) The top pic shows the activity of the gardeners through the interplay of shapes, and has a much broader range of colors. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 08:27, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

Certainly the top one is more dynamic and a better photograph from a compositional point of view, but does it accurately represent the destination to the traveler? (WT-en) LtPowers 09:40, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

Certainly, if you go in winter. (WT-en) Jpatokal 10:06, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

I'm not sure that it necessarily does reflect how the garden looks, though. This garden is much more open than most Japanese gardens. Those who visit during the winter will be treated to dead lillies, dead trees, a small barren plot of farming soil, tropical-looking plants that may still look appealing, the buildings, this view, and a sea of dead grass. It's hard for me to overlook all that... People who visit gardens do not really want to see any of that. I agree that the picture IS more dynamic; the angle is good, but I think it is deceptive. I visited Ritsurin Park in Takamatsu in January, which is a lot less open and full of green pines, but even so, there are many places where I thought to myself, "This would look really beautiful in the summer." Deciding to visit Korakuen Garden during this time is a decision that must be weighed against the fact that you will only get to see an outline of how beautiful the garden will be later. I'm not necessarily thrilled with my picture as a thumbnail, either, but I would prefer something a little more appealing. Does anybody else have photos of this garden? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 12:21, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

I think you're overstating the extent to which the garden is diminished in the winter. It's not a sea of death. I've only been to Korakuen once, in cherry blossom season, and my photos look nothing like either of the above. (They're not worth uploading, though: ) The season is part of the experience. I've been to Shukkeien in Hiroshima in every season, and it's no less beautiful in the winter. Hama-Rikyu in Tokyo was also lovely in both seasons I saw it. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 14:37, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

The top image has much better color contrast, more interesting composition, and does look more unique than the latter, which is overwhelmingly green and static. IMO, questions of representativeness are a lot less important when choosing a DotM photo for the Main Page. That's our portal, not our guide, and style should trump substance (not to say that I think either has more substance than the other)—the point is just to catch a viewers eye and get them to click the link. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 16:06, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

Oh, for the front page the top pic is far superior, I think. =) (WT-en) LtPowers 16:16, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

For someone who has the chance to see a garden in different seasons, the winter may be interesting and would certainly be easier to appreciate. If it's a one-shot deal, I don't think many people would feel that it looks best in the winter. This picture came from the Japanese version of the Wikivoyage Okayama page. What if this picture (the first) is used for the Main Page and a different picture were used on the actual Okayama page? I know I'm putting up quite a fuss, but I don't HATE the first picture; I agree with everything people are saying about the contrasts and such... I would just like something showing the garden at its best. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 17:42, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

I just created a Flickr account and uploaded some of my nicer photos of the garden (ignore the random museum picture). This way you can browse through the album and say what you like (if anything) rather than me uploading random photos to try out . (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 18:19, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

How's this for a compromise: we put the winter pic in the lead and the DOTM, but we add a summer pic or two into the park section of the article? (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:58, 10 July 2009 (EDT)

I wouldn't be against that. Although the city has a lot more to offer than just the garden, it is by far the most well known and most popular attraction here so two pictures probably wouldn't be overkill. With that, I have a question (and follow-up): The first being whether or not people think the compromise is necessary or if everyone would prefer that picture stand alone. If the consensus is that the first picture is best without any others, I'll respect the consensus. I don't want people to think they have to add another photo on account of me being difficult; Even when I disagree, I've always respected consensus/policy (once I'm aware of their existence) and I don't want to be unreasonable. If it is agreed to add another picture, what picture do you want to use? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 01:19, 11 July 2009 (EDT)

If adding another photo for the parks section, I'd suggest one that is pretty different from the lead. One of the castle(?) would be good—I like this one best (the other's sky is too bleached). --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 02:35, 11 July 2009 (EDT)

I've posted the picture you suggested on the page. I wish the quality was a little better, but does it look right on the page? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 16:22, 24 July 2009 (EDT)

Colorado Wine Country press release

I'm pretty sure this is the first time we've had a press release dedicated to a Wikivoyage DOTM:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/07/prweb2684934.htm

Might be worth linking in from "Welcome, business owners" etc as a showcase? (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:22, 28 July 2009 (EDT)

• Thanks, Jani. I do have to ask, has Wikivoyage formulated a policy about third party press releases? I looked everywhere on the Web site and found nothing. Is this something that the community needs to address? Looking forward to Aug 1. (WT-en) WineCountryInn 18:12, 29 July 2009 (EDT)

As long as the third party clarifies its relationship to Wikivoyage in the press release, I can't see how there would be any concerns. Speaking only for myself, I think yours was terrific, marks a unique highlight in this site's history, and should be held up as a model for anyone else who'd like to do something similar. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 18:18, 29 July 2009 (EDT)

Wow, thanks, Gorilla. I appreciate the feedback! (WT-en) WineCountryInn 18:27, 29 July 2009 (EDT)

Require Wikivoyage Format

I don't know if this is already a requirement or not, but it is not often mentioned as a reason for not supporting a destination however, I think it would be useful to require articles to use proper formatting before they are featured. Right now Kanazawa, Olomouc, and Frankfurt are all up for nomination and are close, but they are not properly formatted. The issues brought up against these are mostly related to formatting (lacking addresses, etc.), because I think users would add the information in the "Edit"/"Add listing" if it were there, but it is too easy to forget these things when the pages simply mimic Wikivoyage format.

DotM/OtBP are often the only place an article receives critique (aside from collaborations) prior to star nomination, so it would be helpful to use this as an opportunity to mold articles into exactly what Wikivoyage wants them to be. If formatting were something we looked for when considering a nomination, I think these other problems would also be easier to detect and correct. It would also assure that exemplary articles are being featured and push them all closer to star status at the same time. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 22:19, 29 August 2009 (EDT)

Whooops, hadn't seen this one. Anyways. While I do see your point, we have many legacy articles written before the new format was introduced, featuring any of those would require a fair bit of work. While this is OK for personal hobby horses like Chicago, Helsinki recent Bali or my own Copenhagen. I can see situations where such a policy would discourage from nominating perfectly good articles, on the basis that you don't really want to spend hours upgrading articles you have no real relation too, other than thinking it's a great article. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 16:18, 13 October 2009 (EDT)

I suppose it may, but the nominator is not necessarily obligated to be the one to do it. Nominating a DotM/OtBP does not have as much responsibility accompanying it as nominating a Collaboration of the month, right? After it is nominated, if the biggest issue with the article was formatting, any of us could do it to get it featured. Because I know what a Wikivoyage article should look like, when I see these articles that are not formatted properly, they look a bit sloppy to me, but if the formatting is the only problem, then there is no reason why it should have to remain that way... For Niamey, I think you started formatting it already. The consistency is just nice.

Also, featured destinations are a great place for newcomers to get a feel for how we want articles to look before plunging forward themselves. It is tedious work taking all the information and transferring into the boxes, but I think the end result makes the feature shine... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 19:52, 13 October 2009 (EDT)

While star articles are clearly designed to be exemplars, I don't think that's the real role of the DotM/OtBP features. Their real purpose is to attract new users—the vast majority of which will be people who read our guides, not write them. Something like listings format is, I think, too minor an issue to block a DotM nomination—what's more important is how interesting the article is. It of course is requisite that the article be good for it to be interesting, but the nitty-gritty of formatting perfection isn't that big of a deal. Whereas a new visitor seeing a cool guide featured to an exotic destination like Niamey is a big deal. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 12:00, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

I dunno. I definitely looked at the featured articles when I first came to see how things should be, since I assumed if it was good enough to be featured, then it was good enough to copy. If we don't require proper formatting, then what does the "and listings/headers/etc. that match our manual of style." indicate in the requirements? The formatting is part of the manual style. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:05, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

Having listings in the Project:Listings format isn't required for guide status (only for star status), so I don't see why we should require them here. The bit about "listings/headers/etc. that match our manual of style" was written long before we were using the new listings format (and actually, we still explicitly allow un-templated listings in the manual of style). IMO, it would be nice, though, to feature the star articles a little more prominently on the Main Page, in order to put our best foot forward to the world. I'll suggest this there. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 04:20, 1 November 2009 (EST)

Forbes article

Forbes is running an article on ten of "Europe's Hidden Travel Gems" . Would some of those be good OtBP candidates? (WT-en) Pashley 12:06, 28 September 2009 (EDT)

They would be great if the articles were of a bit higher quality. Stari Grad and Meteora are still at usable. The former's not that far off, though, and would be a great OtBP. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 14:57, 28 September 2009 (EDT)

Is Africa of the beaten path?

Swept in from Niamey nomination

I sort of feel like each country deserves to at least have some DotM-worthy destinations. Niamey and Agadez appear to have the nation's international airports. Perhaps Agadez is more famous, but that would still only give the nation 2 potential DotM candidates. With Agadez being unsafe (as AHeneen states), that goes back to just this one. Most cities in the world are OtBP, and to be honest, a lot of people in the world would not even be able to match Accra, Nairobi, Abuja, Addis Ababa, or most African capitals with their country. Our current DotM (Hamamatsu) is not really a known city outside of Japan... I know the statistics and facts will all point to Niamey as OtBP, so I guess the argument falls more on principle. If we just use the statistics, I think we sacrifice DotM diversity. There are only 4 African destinations in the top 50 tourism nations, and only one (South Africa) is outside of North Africa . Khartoum would surely be a OtBP, as well. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:28, 13 October 2009 (EDT)

I've added a bit to the see, do, & learn sections. There really isn't a plethora of things to do in Niamey. In response to ChubbyWimbus: I don't think something needs to be in the Top XX destinations in the world or even in a region to qualify as a DotM, i just think it should be a a place which attracts tourists or is well known. What little tourism Niger has attracted has all been near Agadez, and since that's practically ended, Niger is a country with few tourists. Even for Sub-Saharan Africa, most Southern/Eastern African countries, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, & the Gambia (I'm guessing) see more tourists than Niger...I really think it's off the beaten path. Even for W. African, there are far more popular places like Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Ghana, Cameroon, as well as people mostly passing through countries like Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, even Mauritania (people driving down from Europe) and then Nigeria & Cote d'Ivoire have sizable expat populations and are well-known. Niamey even see less tourists than another OtBP nominee Arusha, which see thousands of tourists annually who are either traveling south into Tanzania from Kenya or are stopping to explore Kilaminjaro or the Sarenghetti(?). Just my opinion.(WT-en) AHeneen 01:48, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

I do agree with you... Because Niamey does not actually have that much to do, it certainly reads like at OtBP destination, I admit. I guess my main concern is if the entire nation of Niger is OtBP, how many other nations would we also consider to be completely OtBP and where would they be? I imagine none would be European. Would we do that to Belarus? Or will it be Cameroon, Burundi, Togo, D.R.C., Central African Republic, etc.?

(I do appologize for making this such a long discussion. I'm really happy to see some African destinations that are actually up to standard and ready to be featured!) (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:38, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

I think the UN data is a good metric for determining this in a neutral kind of way; http://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx?crName=Niger. Belarus nearly has double the number of tourist arrivals Niger has (and this only included organised tours) , and yes AHeenen you are right - every surrounding country except Chad has at least double the number of tourists Niger has (though Chad only has half).

In my view Dakar, Lagos, Acra, Abidjan, Tripoli, Bamako and Algiers are DoTM cities, while Porto-Novo and N'Djamena are OtBP and Ouagadougou is a border line case. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 06:29, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

OK, climate section dictates Nov-Feb, so I shuffled it in in February, not meant as a push to make this as a OtBP, if there is a consensus it's a DoTM we'll just move it over there. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 17:27, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

If we use the "neutral" way of determining what is OtBP versus what is DotM, we shut out a large portion of Black Africa. This is why the "neutral" way doesn't end up looking so neutral. Essentially, we would shut out half of Central Africa, 3/5 of Saharan Africa, 6/14 West Africa, and 4/13 of East Africa (None of Southern Africa would be shut out). Benin was not included in that list, and it is a bigger destination than Belarus, according to that website, yet I imagine we would allow Belarus a DotM. If Burkina Faso is borderline, then that greatly increases the number of nations that cannot have a DotM. This is why I think the argument is a bit beyond statistics and tourism data. Statistically, most of Africa is OtBP, but such limits make the site appear biased, even if the neutral source is used as justification. It seems like a slippery slope, but it's not as if the DotM needs to be so exclusive. Eventually the site will exhaust them, and I assume it would be at a faster rate than OtBP, which most destinations fall under. That's why I don't see why we can't just give each nation the courtesy of being allowed at least one potential DotM destionation. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:27, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

Probably right on all counts, but, what's the problem here? so most African cities are of the tourist trail, isn't that exactly what OtBP is? considering the quality of our African guides I doubt this is going to turn into an issue any time soon anyway. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 00:49, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

I agree with Sertmann. It's not biased to feature African articles as "off the beaten path" if that's what they really are. I don't understand why "allowing" each nation a destination that could be DotM is somehow courteous; there's nothing pejorative about "Off the Beaten Path". (WT-en) LtPowers 09:26, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

One more "me too". Vast chunks of Africa are OtBP, as are eg. most Pacific island nations and large swathes of Central Asia. Even in congested old Europe you could make a pretty good case for eg. San Marino, Kosovo, Moldova or Liechtenstein as OtBP.

All that said, I don't think classifying nations as OtBP or not is particularly useful, and being "fair" just doesn't come into this at all. Calling a place OtBP doesn't mean "don't go there!", it means "there aren't too many people visiting this place, why not check it out?". (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:48, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

What about the idea that at least the top destination in each country be considered a DotM? In the case of Niger, I think that would be Agadez, so Niamey would remain OtBP. I concur that OtBP is not a negative thing (and for some it may even be more interesting than the DotM), but there is obviously more involved in DotMs than simply not being OtBP, because there is support for Khartoum as a DotM, yet it is not really a major tourist destination. Hamamatsu is now the DotM, but it's not a major travel destination either (although it probably sees more visitors than Khartoum). Discussions have taken place before about whether DotMs should represent the top world destinations versus the top regional destinations. I guess this is a branch of that argument. Would it be so bad to consider the top destination in each country to be DotM-worthy regardless of how popular the country itself may be? What do you think about doing that instead? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 16:54, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

I don't see what would be gained from doing that. Again, there is nothing pejorative about "Off the Beaten Path". Any policy that requires the capital of Nauru to be billed as one of the world's major travel destinations isn't serving travellers very well. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 22:47, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

I don't think it's a matter of "traveler coming first". I mean, Nauru has an international airport, so it's not as if it's difficult to get there if you want to go. It's not off the beaten path in terms of accessibility. It's just a matter of people not choosing to go there. Hamamatsu is only known within its country, and even then it is nowhere near the most popualar within Japan. I don't even know if it's among the top in the Chubu region. Why would Japan be given the privilege of having a DotM that isn't a major destination in the world, region, or even the country itself while entire countries and regions in Africa "don't fit the bill"? I'm surprised that people are actually opposed to having diverse DotM features. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:32, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

Again, there's this odd idea that having a DotM-worthy city is a "privilege" granted by this site, while others must settle for the lesser honor of OtBP. What makes an article a DotM is the volume of travelers who go there, not that it's better than that month's OtBP. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 23:59, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

Then why is Khartoum not considered OtBP? Compared to most places, the overall volume of tourists there is... not much. The only stated requirements for DotM are that they must be "Well-known and/or popular destinations", but no statement is made about what a "popular" destination is. There are popular destinations in the world, popular destinations in South America, and popular destinations in the Gambia. We can all formulate our ideas on where that line is drawn. I don't know exactly how broad anyone is thinking, and there doesn't really seem to be any consistency about it either. At what level do we judge what is "popular"? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:16, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

Travellers do not necessarily equal tourists. There are no tourists in Riyadh (since Saudi doesn't do tourist visas), but it was featured as a DOTM because it's a ginormous city and a important business destination.

And oh, regarding anointing the capital of every nation as a DOTM, I'd like to hear some arguments in favor of Melekeok (pop. around 250). (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:05, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

I dropped the capital city idea in favor of the most popular/visited destination in each nation, because it makes more sense and is also consistent with the DotM requirements. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 14:27, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

what results a DotM typically brings?

I wonder what value it gives to an article and/or to its key contributors when the article becomes a DotM? I mean, besides "1 month of fame" for the contributors--what else? Are there many previous examples when a featured destination got really a significant contribution during being featured? What other results the previous featuring brought to the respective articles and authors??

For example, I'm thinking on whether it's a right time for Lisbon to be featured. On one hand, it's quite young and immature--and ideally I would nominate it after I find enough time to contribute with my experiences from the recent trip. On the other, it's quite possible that I won't have enough motivation to contribute fast--but if DotM will bring one or two active long-time contributors/local experts, I would definitely vote for "release early" here. --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 14:58, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

I think it depends on the type of work that needs done on the article. If it is a matter of formatting, grammar, or something that can easily be fixed, an article could be a reasonable nomination. If you are looking for help adding content, organizing the page, etc. then it may be a better candidate for the collaboration of the month. DotM nominations are better for receiving critique on an article for you to personally address rather than for receiving help building an article. I imagine if others have been to Lisbon and see potential in the article, it could generate some motivation to make the improvements to get it featured, but I think that's a hit-and-miss sort of thing and not really what DotM nominations are meant for. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 17:46, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

DOTM/OTBP are meant for showcase articles, at guide or star level. If it's not at guide level, it shouldn't be even proposed, and I'd set the bar pretty high up for major cities/destinations like Lisbon. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:25, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

Can/Should Any Self-Sustaining Article be DotM/OtBP?

Although it states that disliking a place is not a valid reason for not supporting a nomination, the nomination of Franklin received some reactions that made me wonder: Is every self-sustainable article able to become either DotM/OtBP? Are there instances where an article that has enough content to support a page but should not be featured because it is too boring? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 03:05, 14 December 2009 (EST)

I am not sure the initial reactions to Franklin were ones of dislike. Rather that is was not a very interesting article. Surely a DotM/OtBP should involve an article which makes people want to visit that location? --(WT-en) Burmesedays 01:06, 20 December 2009 (EST)

February scheduling

Why the non-American/Asian stipulation for dotm? We've only had one American DotM in the entire year of 2009, and that was in February. And I agree with what I thought was the rough consensus at #Asian was that Asia is a little too large to discriminate against—a very different case from having lots of features from one country, rather than lots of features from any of 47 countries. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 00:41, 20 December 2009 (EST)

I'm European, it's in my nature to discriminate against Americans :o) More to the point, I was a little unsure about this one, central America is a bit of both so I just slapped it all together. But since Tobacco caye is in English Speaking Belize, I guess South American destinations are perfectly fine. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 10:15, 20 December 2009 (EST)

Asia is enormous, but if we'd have to split up the world, I certainly think it'd be nice to have DOTM varied across the different continents. As we have Bali, the Gili Islands, Vientiane and Nara in the list, and we had plenty of articles from Japan and the United States before, it'd be nice to have some cultural and geographic variation. I think you could be right about the Middle East though, I wouldn't mind having a DOTM from that region. (WT-en) Globe-trotter 09:54, 20 December 2009 (EST)

I guess I'm not too happy with the newly added practice of stating no-X/Y destinations in the schedule. Especially because I think what matters more in scheduling is featuring the destination at a good time—Copenhagen this month made a lot of sense, D.C. makes sense for April, July for Bayreuth, etc, for the reasons we discuss in the respective discussions.

I absolutely agree that it's nice to get geographical diversity from month to month, but I don't think we should be adding definitive "none of this" lines in the scheduling box—we can work that out in a more organic and consensual manner, I think. At any given time, we don't have a very long list of guides that a) haven't been featured before, and b) would make good features, so I don't think we can be too persnickety. Case in point, the box is supposed to be basically full 6 months in advance, and we don't even have a dotm in the second row right now. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 15:00, 20 December 2009 (EST)

I think generally everyone has it in mind to diversify the featured articles, and we do as best we can. We have some unique nominations, like Khartoum, but it is not ready yet. I think I agree with Peter that we have to work with what we have. If someone could whip up articles like Tehran, Nairobi, or Montevideo, then I would definitely support them, but we aren't at a point where we can choose anyplace we want to feature... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 01:47, 21 December 2009 (EST)

DC Image

I am just wondering if there are any cherry blossom pictures of DC for the front page image, since that is the reason we are featuring it in April? There is no problem with the current image; I just thought that if we had a nice cherry blossom image, it might be better. I have some with the Washington Monument, but perhaps someone else has more good ones? If not, it's not a big deal! Just thought it'd be nice to coincide the image with the seasonal significance. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:35, 2 March 2010 (EST)

I've scoured the internet over some 10 times, and there really aren't any worthwhile free pics of D.C.'s cherry blossoms (although this could be perfectionism on my part talking, I suppose). I could try and take some myself, but that would have to wait until, well, we feature it ;) --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 01:19, 2 March 2010 (EST)

April 2010 OtBP

We need an OtBP selection for April, and I would not support Kawasaki at this time -- it's far too short and lacking in eat/drink options. We could bump Hilversum up from May, but it looks like Sakhalin, Falun, and Ravello are also ready to go if need be. Thoughts? (WT-en) LtPowers 08:57, 15 April 2010 (EDT)

I think April is probably still winter in Sakhalin? Falun should maybe not be featured so close to Tromso? That leaves Ravello for me. Another alternative would be Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:11, 15 April 2010 (EDT)

I flipped a coin, and it told me we should feature Ravello. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 09:59, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

I support Ravello, it should be fine around now and it's actually one of few locations in Europe that is not effected by the volcano ash. Peter: just do the change. (WT-en) jan 10:41, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

Done. Norway and Italy are sufficiently different that it's not a huge deal to feature two European OtBPs in a row. But Hilversum is up next and that would make three. (WT-en) LtPowers 11:09, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

It will be more than just two: We had Norway, now Italy, then Netherlands, Russia, and Sweden. It's almost half a year of European OtBPs. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 19:55, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

Point taken, although calling Sakhalin "European" is stretching the definition to the breaking point. It's farther east than Shanghai for heaven's sake! =) (WT-en) LtPowers 20:48, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

And Europe officially ends at the Urals, 5000 kilometers to the west. To me it's an Asian destination by any standards I can think of. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 23:42, 16 April 2010 (EDT)

Europe may end at the Urals, but Russia doesn't, and despite the fact that most of the country is in Asia, it's not viewed as an "Asian nation" by any standards I can think of. Even if Sakhalin's culture is more Asian, Russia is European, so I think it still looks like 5 European destinations in a row. Geographically, it seems like a stretch to call it European, but I still see it as European. No matter, though. Although the next feature really should be outside of Europe (non-Western would be even better), that still leaves some time to find/improve other articles. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:55, 17 April 2010 (EDT)

Indeed. I suspect very few of our users would regard anything in Russia as being Asian, even though it is. If we want non-European OtbPs: Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park has been ready for quite some time - could be OtbP or DotM as stated in the discussion, same goes for Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, Kununurra is definitely ready and Dogon Country is almost ready. I will keep an eye out for more candidates. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 01:51, 17 April 2010 (EDT)

Whoa, I couldn't disagree any more. Russia is a country of Europe and Asia, in terms of geography, culture, spirituality, and history. Any other way of thinking about it is just wrong. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 02:13, 17 April 2010 (EDT)

I am not disagreeing with that. Perception amongst the general populace though is surely that Russia is in Europe. Not saying that is correct. And in any case, let's not get hung up on that. The issue is, we need some more non-European OtbPs :). --(WT-en) Burmesedays 02:18, 17 April 2010 (EDT)

lol. It's like Xinjiang to China: Clearly "Middle Eastern/Central Asian" culturally, but being in China makes it (East) Asian. Being in Russia makes Sakhalin European. It's the way people are educated about Russia, I think and perhaps also the way Russia portrays itself. Is Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park nice in May? If it is good, I think it might be the best option, and in May it wouldn't create Asian overlap with the nature reserve later. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 03:52, 17 April 2010 (EDT)

I think Hilversum should not be featured in October as then it gets cold and wet in Northern Europe and imho the city is a spring or summer destination. I think at certain times European destinations are very pleasant to visit but exploring European cities in late autumm or winter is less pleasant... My suggestion would be that in May we feature Figueres and Hilversum. For non-European Dotm we also have Vientiane ready (instead of Figueres) and Bromo could be good for October. (WT-en) jan 03:37, 22 April 2010 (EDT)

I thought this might be the case when I switched them. The main issue is that we want to avoid 5 European destinations in a row, but those that are left are all in places that are not so good winter destinations. Probably the current feature (Ravello) would have been the best to move to October, but we can't do that now. Hilversum seemed to be the best option to move (although I knew none of them were really good)...Can the Swedish or Sakhalin be moved to October? If none of them could be moved to October, then I guess our only options are to just feature the string of European destinations OR hold one until next year... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:16, 23 April 2010 (EDT)

Ravello is perfect for this time of the year but might have been okish for October. Falun and Sakhalin are only summer destinations because it is dark and snow will fall... I think it's not bad to have five European destinations in a row as i think the featured destination should fit with the weather. (WT-en) jan 03:39, 23 April 2010 (EDT)

There are plenty of other places to go in Northern Hemisphere summer besides Europe. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:05, 23 April 2010 (EDT)

Like Sakhalin. I don't think the argument that it's Russia and therefore people will think Europe holds water for several reasons. Not the least of which is that someone of that opinion wouldn't have heard of Sakhalin before, and would need to check out the article. We could even include something in the blurb like "At the far east tip of the Asian continent..." or something like that. And besides, isn't the idea just to feature articles with a good spread of geographical representation? Sakhalin does not represent Europe in any way shape or form. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 09:39, 23 April 2010 (EDT)

Well, Hawaiian culture and history don't coincide with the United States, but if we featured Honolulu after Halifax, I'd say they are two destinations from the same region (North America), despite Honolulu's obvious position in Oceania. That's not good geographic representation, even though they are on opposite sides of the world. It would look rather boring/stale to order the features like that, and I think this is much the same: Half a year of only European destinations? It's just boring, and I am not talking about the destinations themselves being boring (they're not). Just the way we feature them.

Putting one destination without ties to Europe in-between a long string of those with ties to Europe is not meant to offend anyone or put down the feature that is moved/held; It just keeps us fresh and varied. I think it's good for the features and is the policy of how to feature destinations. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 03:15, 24 April 2010 (EDT)

CW: I think you are too much oriented on geographical maps because Hawaii and Halifax has nothing in common and in my view are not even at the same continent. Sakhalin is so far from Europe that you can't seriously argue it's Europe. Is this really important for you because most others don't seem to share your opinion on that rather wide definition of continents. (WT-en) jan 05:09, 24 April 2010 (EDT)

I didn't literally mean they are in North America, and I see the examples are just getting everybody off on tangents. Featuring an American destination after a Canadian destination would seem dull and undiversified to me, regardless of whether it were Honolulu and Halifax (which are far) or Vancouver and Seattle (which are quite close) and certainly 5 European ones in a row is extremely stale, regardless of location. Even if you call it 4 European destinations and Russian Sakhalin, it remains rather dull. The point is not about whether Sakhalin is in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else: It's simply that there are too many European destinations bunched up together. Do we no longer care about diversity? We have another site to put in there, so I don't see why there is opposition. I was under the assumption that diversifying features was important to the community as a whole, but I guess if there is such a strong backing for this unnecessary Eurocentric string of features and Wikivoyage doesn't actually care about diversifying features, then I am mistaken and there is nothing left to say. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 05:46, 24 April 2010 (EDT)

I really don't mind of we switch stuff around, but May 15 to Jun 15, is a really good time to feature Sakhalin - it's the best time to go, and it still leaves some room for those who should get inspired to sort out this route before the ferry service to Japan halts for the winter in September. And come on, there are 9000 kilometers between Ravello and Sakhalin, and I can't think of many destinations that are more different than those two.

So for now how about we do Sakhalin > Bromo-Tengger > Hilversum > Franklin > Falun > Kununurra? From what I know about those destinations, that would be good times to feature all of them --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 06:19, 24 April 2010 (EDT)

I'm feeling kind of stupid for not noticing this earlier, but Kununurra is said to be nice from April to October according to the nomination, so it could really be placed anywhere. I think either of those would work. I've updated the main page so everyone can see how these changes look. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 18:16, 24 April 2010 (EDT)

I just switched Falun and Hilversum because the main attraction of Falun is only daily open during the summer also northern Sweden is much nicer in July than late September... (WT-en) jan 04:58, 26 April 2010 (EDT)

Slushpiling

In the spirit of keeping the article clean, and to give a clear indication of how many realistic candidates are up for scheduling, what are the criteria for slushpiling? How long should a nomination that is seemingly going nowhere sit in the article? I would suggest the following could be slushpiled:

• Christchurch
• Lisbon

--(WT-en) Burmesedays 03:44, 29 April 2010 (EDT)

• Space is also ready for slushpiling.

It's a bit sad that nobody seems to have knowledge of Christchuch because it is not far away from our standards. A map and the sleep section are the only issues. I fully agree with Lisbon which is too far away to make it. (WT-en) jan 03:52, 29 April 2010 (EDT)

Not sure about these. When considering when to slush or leave, I always look at the page history; if the article is being worked on fairly diligently, I leave it. If not, slush it. Christchurch has not had anything going on since mid-March except for the past couple of days.

Lisbon has had a steady flow of contributions, but I didn't really check the quality. Only a couple have been reverted, though. User:(WT-en) DenisYurkin seemed interested in this nomination however, s/he has not made any contributions to it in a long time. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 09:59, 30 April 2010 (EDT)

Indeed, I asked for criticism--but after receiving it I've realized that personally I can't address any of the issues raised. I've just copied the criticism to Talk:Lisbon#ToDo to help potential contributors to identify how they can help.

AFAIK, Lisbon is not currently worked on actively by anyone, so I think it's quite OK to slushpile it for now. --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 16:24, 30 April 2010 (EDT)

Nominations

We've had a number of nominations lately such as this one that simply list a destination name with no rationale behind it. The second sentence on the nominations page is the following:

You can nominate an article you would like to see featured; just say a few words about why, and select a good time to go.

My preference would be that if someone is unwilling to state even one sentence about why something is being nominated then the edit should simply be reverted; it takes time to look at an article and comment on why it would or wouldn't be a good choice, and I think any nomination that shows the nominator didn't bother to read any of the nomination criteria is more a waste of time than a true nomination.

Given that short rant, is there some agreement that nominations made without any rationale can simply be removed and ignored? We can add a line to Project:Destination of the Month candidates#Nominate stating as much to avoid any possible confusion. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:10, 18 June 2010 (EDT)

In principle, I wouldn't mind such a rule, but in practice a number of those no-text DotM suggestions are actually fairly worthwhile. (WT-en) LtPowers 20:34, 18 June 2010 (EDT)

Agreed: introduce the rule, but if another user sees the nomination and votes yea, let it stay. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 20:30, 19 June 2010 (EDT)

Peter - fully agreed; if someone takes the time to comment on a nomination then there would be no reason to remove it. And LtPowers - while some of these nominations are worthwhile, I just feel strongly that there should be some responsibility on nominators to do the bare minimum to justify the nomination - we've got tons of great articles and no lack of nominations, so it doesn't seem like we're losing much if we remove empty nominations. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:09, 19 June 2010 (EDT)

"Smuggled"

Re: this edit, I meant "snuggled", not "smuggled". Just a typo. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:59, 15 August 2010 (EDT)

Ah, that makes more sense! Sounds much better! (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 17:26, 15 August 2010 (EDT)

Anyway, it was somewhat facetious, not wanting to re-insert "nestled" but recognizing that the clause needed a verb. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:49, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

Well, there is still a month if someone thinks of another way to word it! (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 19:21, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

Kakadu scheduling

Is there any way we can adjust the scheduling so that we don't have two Australian OtBPs in a row? (Kununurra currently; Kakadu NP next month) (WT-en) LtPowers 08:48, 18 October 2010 (EDT)

I'm sorry I didn't notice this. There was a period where the Destination of the Month pages were not showing up as "watched" on my profile for some reason, so I missed this and didn't pay attention when I changed them. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:23, 17 December 2010 (EST)

Curmudgeonly griping

Formattingwise, both Vientiane and Kakadu are in pretty terrible shape, and not really the kind of stuff we should be showcasing as the best of Wikivoyage. And the queue is looking pretty empty too. What's going on? (WT-en) Jpatokal 07:00, 15 December 2010 (EST)

A lack of available options? (WT-en) LtPowers 08:32, 15 December 2010 (EST)

Maybe, by some chance, Mayrhofen look mature enough to be nominated? --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 15:21, 15 December 2010 (EST)

I agree, but the pickings are slim. Discussions about articles have ceased, and new nominations have not been proposed in a while... Usually the summertime is when we rely on old nominations to carry through and the winter is when we get contributions, but either we don't have enough people improving articles or we just haven't found the articles that are up to standard... The OtBP needs switched now, though. Is the next one okay? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 04:39, 16 December 2010 (EST)

Out of all the OtBP on the list Pensacola appears to be the most complete. It needs work on the formatting. The see/eat/drink/sleep listings are fairly complete. The history section could use some pruning. The Petrified Forest National Park page is quite minimal in Eat/Sleep/Drink, and that map doesnt look particularly good or helpful, but it is complete as far as it probably could be. Perhaps it will fill the void till the next month? - (WT-en) Cardboardbird 06:11, 16 December 2010 (EST)

Pensacola is off the beaten path? (WT-en) LtPowers 09:03, 16 December 2010 (EST)

Well then it's decision time, since this is already late. Pensacola or stick with Petrified Forest NP? Pensacola is definitely more complete, but either will do. (If anyone would like to do the switch themselves, that would be appreciated) (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 16:10, 16 December 2010 (EST)

Since it was already 2 days late, I just went by the schedule, so Petrified Forest National Park is the OtBP this month. And thanks Sertmann for scouting a couple more nominations!

June DotM

Tomorrow's June 1 and the only comment on Lyon is a non-support. There's no way we should feature it on the front page.

Aside from Lyon, the candidates that appear ready to go are Walt Disney World, Antigua Guatemala, Frankfurt, Kanazawa, Kuching, and Kabul. 2011 has been heavy on Asian DotMs so far, so I'd prefer to avoid those latter three (plus there is an outstanding Strong Objection to Kabul). That pretty much leaves WDW, La Antigua, and Frankfurt (though La Antigua might be OtBP, hard to say).

Thoughts?

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 12:55, 31 May 2011 (EDT)

Both Frankfurt and Walt Disney World are fine choices I'd say. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 13:05, 31 May 2011 (EDT)

Ryan went ahead and proposed Disney World for June, so if someone wants to slap it up on the Main Page, I'd greatly appreciate it! Otherwise I'll try to do it tomorrow. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 22:08, 31 May 2011 (EDT)

I've taken a stab at writing the blurb, but don't have time to actually make the change right now. (WT-en) LtPowers 22:41, 31 May 2011 (EDT)

Yikes!

What's happened to our schedule? Have we run out of good articles? I'll try and nominate a few, while I have longer term projects in my back pocket. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 20:22, 2 June 2011 (EDT)

Same old thing again. The OtBP list has only one upcoming article and the rest of the nominations have only a few comments. There are two newish nominations without comment. Some have a laundry list of fixes and no apparent interest to do the fixing. It's hard to tell which one(s) look likely to be ready by August. It would be terrible to put a substandard article up there if none are ready by the 15th. Could we get some comment going to at least identify those that can be brought up to standard quickly? - (WT-en) Cardboardbird 10:30, 8 July 2011 (EDT)

I nominated Nusa Lembongan for DotM but it could equally be OtBP. It is a Star so ready to go at any time.

Of the other current OtBP nominations, the following look ready to me: Nanao and New Orleans/Lower 9th Ward.

Of the other current DotM nominations, I think we can schedule Kanazawa and Kuching.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 10:52, 8 July 2011 (EDT)

I will have a dig around for more. There are other Indonesian articles which I know are ready, but that might get to be a bit of a broken record. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 11:29, 8 July 2011 (EDT)

Thanks Burmesedays. You come through, yet again. - (WT-en) Cardboardbird 12:08, 8 July 2011 (EDT)

Project:Destination_of_the_Month_candidates

Moved here from traveller's pub

Hi! We have a significant shortage of suitable nominees for Dotm/OtBP. Feel free to comment and work on current nomination or add more suitable articles! Thanks in advance, (WT-en) jan 10:32, 22 February 2011 (EST)

OtBP

Are we going to have an April OtBP? It's 4 days late and no one has commented for a long time... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 01:36, 19 April 2011 (EDT)

The only ones that appear ready are Oxford, Wakkanai, and Jeju. If we do Oxford, that's two U.S. destinations in a row. Wakkanai is in Japan, which really doesn't need tourists right now. Jeju would probably be our best bet. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:44, 20 April 2011 (EDT)

Actually, it would've been three in a row, but no worries. I got Jeju up now. We don't seem to have (m)any users working to get articles up to guide status for featuring like we used to... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:25, 21 April 2011 (EDT)

Problems with Previously Off the beaten path

I have changed this month's OtBP on the main page. I have tried repeatedly to edit Previously Off the beaten path to add the June and July selections but keep getting an error message, "..... unable to create thumbnail, permission denied....". Please can somebody else try.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 12:01, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

Same problem for me. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 17:02, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

I just deleted several images (per VFD) without getting any errors, but the images are still there and there is no record in the deletion log. Something is clearly amiss - I've filed a bug report at wts:WtTech:Permissions errors with images. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 20:09, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

Lack of interest continues

Shall we can this feature altogether? The lack of interest is disheartening. We spend so much time debating unimportant minutiae here, and at the same time neglect this high profile feature. We still don't have a worthwhile schedule despite efforts to drum up interest. If DotM is to continue, can somebody please write the text for Mykonos and then make the DotM change (due now)? Or please just write the text and I will make the change. --(WT-en) burmesedays 10:42, 1 September 2011 (EDT)

I tried to think of some prose yesterday, but I'm not really familiar with Mykonos. I have now written something, you can adapt it a little if you want and then put it live. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 11:38, 1 September 2011 (EDT)

I have a candidate i'll try to bump up to something useful during the weekend. I think it's one of wikivoyages prime features, and it would be sad to see it go --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 13:21, 1 September 2011 (EDT)

I think scrapping this feature would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, perhaps make the nominations more complete and the criteria a bit less ambiguous/subject to nitpicks? I'd suggest:

1. We should create a template to use in nominations that includes a preview of how the article will look on the front page so that every nomination comes pre-packaged with photo & description.
2. This template should also include a field to indicate a good time to feature the article.
3. Nomination criteria should simply be guide or better. If someone nominates a non-guide article then it should be immediately slushed, but so long as the article is at least guide status it's a valid nomination, and for any complaints about prose, formatting, etc see Project:Plunge forward.

While it would obviously be great if all featured articles were perfect, I think that the nomination discussions often become bogged down in subjective objections that make the process more of a chore than it needs to be. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:50, 1 September 2011 (EDT)

That all sounds good Ryan. Would it be possible for you to get that template together, and put the draft up for discussion? For the record, I think this is one of our more important initiatives here. It would be great if any editors who feel likewise could post some candidates, and comment upon outstanding nominations on the project page. --(WT-en) burmesedays 02:24, 2 September 2011 (EDT)

(Re-indenting) I'm imagining something like the following:

{{DotmNomination| place=Nusa Lembongan
| status=star
| time=June-September would be best
| comment=This is one of my absolute favorite places because they have
  sideways fish that look like [[:wikipedia:Blended wing body|blended
  wing body]] airplanes.
| nominatedBy=~~~~
| DotMImage=[[Image:Nusa Lembongan Mola Mola.jpg|none|200px]]
| DotMBlurb= The island paradise of '''[[Nusa Lembongan]]''' is a world
  away from the hassle and hectic pace of much of [[Bali]]. Neither hawkers
  nor traffic mar the magnificent scenery; this is a fine place to just put
  your feet up and relax. Main activities include surfing, diving and
  snorkeling in the vivid aqua blue waters.
}}

...which would generate:

(template deleted)

{{DotmNomination| place=Nusa Lembongan | status=star | time=June-September would be best | comment=This is one of my absolute favorite places because they have sideways fish that look like [[:wikipedia:Blended wing body|blended wing body]] airplanes. | nominatedBy=[[User:(WT-en) Wrh2|(WT-en) Ryan]] • ([[User talk:(WT-en) Wrh2|talk]]) • 21:27, 7 September 2011 (EDT) | DotMImage=[[Image:Nusa Lembongan Mola Mola.jpg|none|200px]] | DotMBlurb= The island paradise of '''[[Nusa Lembongan]]''' is a world away from the hassle and hectic pace of much of [[Bali]]. Neither hawkers nor traffic mar the magnificent scenery; this is a fine place to just put your feet up and relax. Main activities include surfing, diving and snorkeling in the vivid aqua blue waters. }}

"Support" mentions could be placed below this template as is currently done. Every nomination would thus have an image and a description, a field to call out the "guide" status explicitly for anyone making a nomination, and a "time to feature" field to ensure that no nomination is made without that info. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 14:14, 3 September 2011 (EDT)

Excellent work Ryan. The only downside I can see to this is that the nominator has to put together a little chunk of prose. But the benefits certainly outweigh that minor concern. Let's go for it, I say. (Oh, and that's a very amusing description of a sunfish :)) --(WT-en) burmesedays 21:13, 3 September 2011 (EDT)

I like the template idea but I'm concerned filling it out might be a bit daunting to the casual editor and put them off from nominating. Granted, most nominations seem to come from seasoned editors but we shouldn't put up barriers that limit nominations to that small pool. Perhaps still allowing one liner nominations and then putting in a template with descriptions etc once it gets a bit of support? - (WT-en) Cardboardbird 00:24, 4 September 2011 (EDT)

With good instructions, that shouldn't be a significant problem. (WT-en) LtPowers 13:47, 4 September 2011 (EDT)

The template has been created as Template:DotmNomination. Comments appreciated. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:32, 7 September 2011 (EDT)

Really good job Ryan. Thanks.--(WT-en) burmesedays 21:44, 7 September 2011 (EDT)

I love it. Make it known when we decide to update the DotM nominations page to suggest this template, and I'll start filling up the page.

Slightly unrelated, but one thing that does discourage me with DotM is when articles that do meet guide status wind up getting slushed due odd reasons, in particular concerns over whether we should be recommending the destination, or whether it is difficult/dangerous to travel to. Similarly, it's frustrating to see perfectly good articles like Arusha get slushed over concerns about coverage in the surrounding areas. I hate to renominate slushed articles, though... --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 23:50, 7 September 2011 (EDT)

I have already started :). --(WT-en) burmesedays 00:59, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

Should the Luang Prabang link in the template be removed since the same link appears immediately above in the section header for the nomination? See Project:Destination of the Month candidates#Luang Prabang?

And to Peter's point about nominations being slushed for subjective reasons, per #3 above I would propose that any article that is guide or above is a valid nomination - the only valid reason to object would be if the article is incorrectly tagged as a guide, and any other objection can be responded to with "Project:Plunge forward". We could then modify the approval criteria to "X number of support votes with no valid objections" - that allows people to not vote for destinations that they don't want featured, but won't stop a good article with X votes from being featured just because someone thinks Walt Disney World is too commercial or Arusha doesn't have good coverage of the surrounding areas. My two cents. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:15, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

But I don't think the points are completely invalid. The point about Arusha was made because most people who visit Arusha are only there because they plan to use it as a safari base, so I think it is a good idea to make sure that there is information in the articles of the places connected to it in that case. The Disney issue for me was about the type of destination, which would have become a policy-forming discussion had I cared enough to push for it (although others did object for personal reasons). I think flexibility is still necessary unless we are so desperate for articles/nominations that we are willing to feature anything. Some guide articles are only guides because they are large articles rather than because they have useful content. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 18:38, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

I agree with ChubbyWimbus. Current policy states that only formatting issues should hold back a nomination, but I think this policy goes beyond its intended target. The DoTM has been designed to interest the traveler in possible destinations and show off our best articles on the frontpage — so good formatting is required. But that doesn't work the other way around — good formatting does not immediately make an article good front page material. Many articles, I think, should not be featured on the frontpage, including airports (like O'Hare International Airport), war zone territories (like Kabul or Mogadishu), and to be frank, having attractions and businesses on the frontpage (like Isha Yoga Centre or Walt Disney World) also strikes me as wrong. I even think "I don't like it" could be a good argument, as some places are really not interesting enough to be showing off. Imagine Poipet becomes guide status, why would we show it off on the frontpage? It's a horrible place, and if the description is fair, it would probably get a horrible description too. As such, I don't think articles should only be "objectively" measured by just formatting, a DoTM choice is by definition subjective and I think should only be featured by community consensus. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 19:29, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

(re-indenting). I partially agree with that. Not liking a place can't really be a reason not to feature it though. That is far too subjective, and very much in the eyes of the beholder. For example, I think Kuala Lumpur is a remarkably unattractive and uninteresting city, and one of the last places any traveler should think of visiting in Asia. Others would have a very different opinion. All that being said, I do think we should avoid uninteresting places as much as possible. Airports are certainly a no-no for me.--(WT-en) burmesedays 20:08, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

So, globe-trotter, just what in the world is wrong with featuring a star-level article on a destination that receives over 20 million visitors a year? That's more than the entire population of the state of New York. Heck, that's more visitors than Canada gets in one year. (WT-en) LtPowers 20:10, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

Why don't you nominate it, and we can have that discussion there? Otherwise, I can see this discussion thread slipping even further off-topic.--(WT-en) burmesedays 20:15, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

To the comments regarding subjective objections above - one of the original points raised in this discussion thread was that nominations get bogged down in subjective arguments that can't easily be resolved. The above proposal is that opposition to nominations should be based on objective criteria, but assuming that "X" votes are required to actually feature an article, only those articles which have enough votes would be featured, so if you don't want to see a place featured don't support the nomination. Some people may not like seeing Walt Disney World or Kabul on the front page, but we currently have a problem where otherwise valid articles with plenty of support can't be featured due to concerns that are impossible to address. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 20:20, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

There is no objective way of picking DoTM. It's subjective to only care about formatting, while there are many other factors important to make a destination frontpage material. I just gave some examples, didn't mean to intensify a specific debate about WDW. All I meant to say is that only community consensus should be applied to decide on a DOTM — if the community decides that WDW should be featured, then it's all fine with me. And Ryan, I don't think it's a problem if concerns are impossible to address, some destinations have nothing that needs to be addressed I think. Some destinations are just plain horrible and I think should never be featured. Showcasing O'Hare International Airport on the frontpage would be absurd, and it fulfills all current criteria. I could nominate it right now, and technically, it'd be featured next year if we'd follow current rules. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 20:32, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

I think the notion that our features are somehow "recommendations" odd, and the notion that our features drive traveler choices in trip planning silly. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 21:49, 10 September 2011 (EDT)

For what it's worth, using personal opinion about a destination's "worthiness" also contradicts the current Project:Destination of the Month candidates#Select criteria. Quoting:

Please note that the following are not considered valid reasons to oppose a nomination:

• "I don't like it." All objections have to be based on the guidelines above: poor formatting, missing information, etc. Personal opinions, dislikes, etc do not count.
• "Wrong type of place." Articles are supported or opposed based on their content. Whether it's DoTM or OtBP can be worked out later.

We have several years worth of precedent where criteria beyond those spelled out currently have been considered valid for consideration, so a credible argument could be made that usage of the DotM/OtBP feature has changed and the selection criteria should be updated, but I would actually argue (as I did above) that we should stick with objective criteria and use a threshold for a minimum number of "support" votes as the sole determining subjective factor. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 17:51, 11 September 2011 (EDT)

I agree. Our nominations often get held up on what essentially is the "I don't like it" objection, whether it's a destination owned by a private company, hard to get to or with restricted access, "dangerous," or simply uninteresting. (I've been guilty of such objections.) This is especially frustrating for anyone who has been hard at work improving such articles. But the point is valid that some destinations aren't necessarily worth featuring (O'Hare being a good example), and I think Ryan's suggestion of a minimum number of support votes is a good way to limit nominations of, well, places no one is interested in featuring. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 19:31, 11 September 2011 (EDT)

What minimum number of votes do you propose? So few people bother to comment on these nominations, I am not convinced that a hard number will work.--(WT-en) burmesedays 21:16, 11 September 2011 (EDT)

How about 3. If a certain number were required, that would make these "votes" more important, maybe making it more worth voters time? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 00:40, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

Even if there are 3 supporters, the support still has to be weighed against whatever opposition their is, regardless of how many supporters there are. If the opposition is legitimate, then otherwise infinite support is meaningless. I think we've all seen support for bad articles. It is the reasoning behind support vs opposition that should determine both validity of the user's vote and the featurability of the article.

"I think the notion that our features are somehow "recommendations" odd, and the notion that our features drive traveler choices in trip planning silly." If the features are not recommendations and we don't have any hopes of inspiring any sort of travel through features then what the heck is the DotM/OtBP to you? Just a space filler? I find it odd that someone would NOT think of it as a sort recommendation. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 05:45, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

I very much agree. At the very least, it's an encouragement for people to read up on that particular destination, but for most visitors it's surely a recommendation. The Nusa Lembongan article that was featured recently convinced me that I really really should see Indonesia, and made us start planning a trip. I'm surprised that the main reasons for featuring would be content and format-related. That mostly matters to WT-writers. For travellers, of course there has to be some guide quality information, but "interesting places" are way more important than format. Frankly, if someone wrote a guideline stating otherwise, I think he or she just made a mistake and those guidelines should be up for discussion and change. "I don't like it" is not a usable comment to me, but "it's a boring place for visitors" or "it's a war zone" totally is. (WT-en) Justme 06:36, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

As an aside, I am delighted that the Nusa Lembongan article had that effect :). I am actually sitting on that very island listening to the crashing surf as I type this message. Have a look around the Indonesia articles - we have a lot of good ones, not just Bali. --(WT-en) burmesedays 07:03, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

(re-indenting) I think that casual users of Wikivoyage do view our featured sites as some sort of recommendation. I don't necessarily think they should, but I am sure they do. We have in the past (and I believe I remember you saying this Peter), made the point that a featured article should make a destination sound interesting and give the reader a reason to want to go there. Above all, I think the featured articles should be about interesting places. They should also be at at least guide standard as clearly we want to showcase the best we have. Those are my considerations.

Safety is not a factor that especially concerns me, as it means different things to different people. Any traveler can make his or her own informed decision about that. I have traveled into so- called "war zones" before, and no doubt I will do so again. That's a conscious decision anyone can make using their own criteria, and one that we cannot.--(WT-en) burmesedays 07:03, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

Excuse the upcoming wall of text:

I think the DotM serves the purpose of recommending that people read our guides (and hopefully decide to contribute). Wikivoyage has no vested interest in promoting anything other than itself. That's why we feature well written, well formatted articles, and articles that show off our strengths, rather than simply featuring interesting destinations. Svaneti is one of the most fascinating and beautiful places in the world, but it would not serve our site well to feature it until it features better content.

The point I have made in the past, or what I should have made, is really more that articles should be written in such a way that they are interesting to read. If a place is boring, then we should not be telling anyone otherwise. As I said, though, I've been guilty of the "I don't like it" trap too.

In any rate, if we are not going to limit objections to issues with the articles, but are going to allow objections to the actual destinations, then we should come up with an idea of what types of objections are allowable (and I think we'll have trouble agreeing on this):

1) Danger. For the reason Burmesedays says, I don't think "danger" is a good point of objection. Different people have different comfort levels with risk (and generally don't calculate risk rationally, anyway—someone spending two days in Kabul is far less likely to die there from exotic violence than they are at home in a car crash, or of a heart attack from not exercising and eating too much cheese ;)). If a place has danger of some sort or other, that's something we should be clear about in the article, and not be so arrogant as to think we are directing traveler choices. Should we limit what type of danger is acceptable? Plenty of people wouldn't travel to Chicago/Bronzeville, but we featured it. Would Baltimore be off limits? How about Slovakia, which regularly tops lists of countries with the most traffic fatalities per capita? Anywhere in West Africa, due to the risks from mosquito-borne, potentially fatal illnesses? Yakutsk is cold to the point of real danger in the winter, but the article contains information about what to do in the winter. In any rate, we're just recommending that people read the article, which is a pretty safe activity, and potentially a fun activity that gets people interested in Wikivoyage.

2) Boringness. This is the one objection to which I am somewhat sympathetic. If the point of the feature, as I see it, is to get people interested in Wikivoyage, then featuring dull destinations will not be effective, as they are generally difficult to make into interesting articles. This is highly subjective though, and it's potentially offensive to the author of an article to say, "you wrote about a boring destination, nobody cares."

3) Commerciality. This one is contentious here, but I don't really understand why. I guess people might not like the business that owns a destination and therefore don't want to inspire people to patronize it. One could make the same argument about non-commercial destinations though—"I don't like the Cuban government, so lets not feature Cuba."

4) Accessibility. I don't think this is a good point for objection. Again, the point of the feature, as I see it, is simply to interest people in reading/contributing to our guides. Besides, there are an infinite number of things that can restrict access to destinations. U.S. destinations are not visitable for the vast majority of mankind, for reasons of cost and the difficulty in obtaining visas.

Or we could avoid all this morass and allow objections only on objective grounds pertaining to the quality of the article, and let a minimum number of supports take care of the weeding out features undesirable for some other reason. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 16:14, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

I think we all agree that any featured article should have good content too, and a bad article should never be featured, no matter how wonderful the destination. In the same way, I think a truly boring destination should never be featured, no matter how perfectly the content of it is formatted. I don't think we need a lot of guideline discussions though. There will be case to case discussions anyway and I think it's just fine when a writer of a seemingly boring place can actually make a case strong enough to convince us all to not vote against it. This is a tiny community and if we just have a rough understanding of the ideal candidates, that should get us a good way ahead.

Basically, I think there are plenty of fantastic places in the world without the problems you mention, so we shouldn't have huge problems finding suited destinations. If we do, we should join forces more to bring a suited place up to guide status, once a month. As for safety, I don't think we should worry too much about minor arguable risks, or even some disputed but quiet territories. However, with so many other destinations in the world, it seems bad taste and bad timing to feature active current or very recent war zones, as it would be to feature areas recently damaged by natural disasters. (WT-en) Justme 17:01, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

I think there are plenty of articles that meet the loosely defined criteria. What we need is more people finding and nominating. It is somewhat ironic that this discussion thread has elicited far more response than any nomination ever does.--(WT-en) burmesedays 21:14, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

For whatever it's worth, I stopped contributing regularly to DotM nominations when it became a similar process to Project:Star nominations - the current process of finding near-perfect articles, and then further having to argue for the validity of a nomination like Walt Disney World, requires a not-insignificant effort expended on tasks that I don't get much enjoyment from. If the result of this discussion was a simplified, clearer process for getting articles featured as DotM or OtBP I'd be likely to contribute more often. Similarly, I'd also be fine with a stringent process that involves lots of people, but as you've pointed out, despite the attention this discussion is getting very few people have clicked over to comment on any nominations. As a result I think we're left with a great feature that is somewhat stalled, and sadly there don't seem to be many supported suggestions for getting it going again. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 23:03, 12 September 2011 (EDT)

I think in the case of safety, ongoing conflicts may be moot but new developments are valid reasons for opposition. For example, if the Fukushima article was a guide and had been nominated for the March OtBP, it would look like a sick joke to feature it 4 days after the disaster. But I would not oppose a "dangerous" place like Palestine if it were a guide.

Can we delete objections or cross them out as they are addressed? Some destinations may start with many objections but after a dedicated user addresses them, people do not come back for a long time. Also invalid objections are really annoying and seem like they should be deleted. Of course, I could then see someone getting mad if they felt their objection was valid and someone just deleted it...

As far as boring vs interesting goes, I do think it is the responsibility of the author to make the article interesting. People objected to Franklin (Venango County) with the "Looks boring" objection and at first I was a little offended but then as I wrote my response regarding the important question, "Why would (or should) anyone go here?" the comments made me realize that I had written a dry article that actually didn't highlight what made the town interesting, so although it stung a little to read comments that said it looked lame, it gave me more focus as I rewrote and added more content and it was featured. Maybe it's still boring to some people but I think many articles can be written in a way that makes it interesting and is still truthful. Some places are interesting only to travelers with specific interests which may be boring to most other travelers, but if the article is written with that in mind, it can still be a respectable and featurable article. I guess my point is that the "it's boring" objection should still be qualified. Articles that are written in a boring way can be salvaged, so I think when the "it's boring" argument is used we need to say what the issue is because there is often potentially helpful input hiding behind the grim "it's boring" comment. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 09:30, 13 September 2011 (EDT)

About safety, I do agree that general safety issues should not be a concern. But there is a limit, and I think articles where you need to read War zone safety before heading off fall within this reach. Kabul is hard to judge, but just reading the news today shows its hard to predict at best and highly dangerous at worst. So better to feature a destination like that when travelers can more safely go there. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 11:52, 13 September 2011 (EDT)

Schedule

By necessity, the majority of the currently accepted nominations are in Asia. Europe in particular is severely lacking candidates, and Africa always has. If anyone can find some non-Asian candidates, please do post them. --(WT-en) burmesedays 23:55, 3 September 2011 (EDT)

The new template

I have now templated all outstanding nominations except Staraya Russa (which I know Peter will want to do) and Eindhoven (which I will leave to g-t as I was struggling to make it sound interesting). Kabul is templated but needs blurb. Also, anyone please feel free to improve the blurb text in any of the templates. I know next to nothing about some of these places). --(WT-en) burmesedays 01:21, 9 September 2011 (EDT)

Love the template Ryan, but you are correct - the destination Wikilinking on the top left should go, as it repeats the sub-section heading directly above. We should keep the sub-section heading for indexing purposes.--(WT-en) burmesedays 01:21, 9 September 2011 (EDT)

Heading removed. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:26, 9 September 2011 (EDT)

Great template! --(WT-en) SaxonWarrior 05:47, 11 September 2011 (EDT)

Nice template. Need to update "Nominate" section.(WT-en) AHeneen 15:34, 27 October 2011 (EDT)

Schedule again

I've gone with Bath over Celle for December's DotM because we just had a German city in July.

We currently have three Southeast Asian destinations scheduled for December and January's OtBPs and January's DotM, all of them on the heels of November's OtBP, also from Southeast Asia. I don't think this is ideal in any way. If someone could take a stab at spacing them out a bit more, I'd appreciate it.

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 10:14, 4 December 2011 (EST)

Request for nominations

We're running low on nominations - if you've got a favorite article that hasn't been featured in the past then now would be a good time to nominate it. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:22, 17 March 2012 (EDT)

Is it OK to nominate an article that I have been personally working on? (WT-en) Jjtk 14:48, 27 March 2012 (EDT)

Of course. Nomination criteria are at Project:Destination of the Month candidates#Nominate. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:42, 27 March 2012 (EDT)

*Bump*. We've got an extremely tiny queue at this point, so nominations and comments on existing nominations are very much needed. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 14:15, 15 April 2012 (EDT)

We're now down to the last viable DOTM nomination, which I've penciled in for June (although August or September would be better). If ever there was a time to nominate your favorite destination, now would be it. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:28, 1 May 2012 (EDT)

Assuming we feature London, I should have Baltimore up to star status for the next feature. I'll have Maryland (which is a rather nearby destination to Baltimore...) ready for our first state level feature not long after that. New Orleans is just one sustained push away as well. But yeah, the lack of new options for DotMs speaks volumes to the downhill trajectory we have been on for some time now. I do remain optimistic, though, that we will be able to turn things around this year. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 20:31, 2 June 2012 (EDT)

Buffalo/London

I'm still in favor of featuring London in July, and optionally extending it to August, due to the Olympics. If we feature it in August, even if we start on July 27, it's too late for anyone to do anything Olympics-related, and the feature will extend long past the end of the event. We should feature London in July and save Buffalo for later.

Regarding Buffalo's blurb, this version I think over-emphasizes issues important to residents over issues important to tourists. "a growing and diverse economy, high quality of life and low cost of living" are fairly irrelevant to tourists; with a limited amount of space, we should put more focus on things that will attract visitors.

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 13:24, 18 June 2012 (EDT)

I think London should definitely be featured during the Olympics, so making it the DOTM for both July and August makes the most sense to me. I penciled Buffalo in for July solely because nothing was listed and we're 12 days away from the new month. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:34, 18 June 2012 (EDT)

Suspend until migration complete?

I propose we suspend updating DotM and OtBP selections until we have migrated to the WMF. I realize this is a bit drastic and will leave gaps in our archives, but I think it's unfair to the destinations featured during these transition months to have relatively few visitors find them. Besides which, we do have a limited number of nominees and I'm afraid we'd run out before we fully migrated. LtPowers (talk) 16:24, 7 September 2012 (CEST)

Agree. It is better to upgrade a number of articles during the cleanup process and have them ready for nomination when the the site becomes public and settled. Atsirlin (talk) 20:00, 7 September 2012 (CEST)

I second that motion. JamesA ^>talk 03:48, 8 September 2012 (CEST)

I think we should change the OtBP as we are ready and imho it differenciates us. Any opposition to add Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park on the front page? Jc8136 (talk) 16:04, 18 September 2012 (CEST)

P.S. I think we can leave the new maybe a bit longer to compensate the fewer visitors but our main page would look different compared to the current WT. Jc8136 (talk) 16:05, 18 September 2012 (CEST)

Actually, yes, I do oppose, though I see Sumone has gone ahead and made the change before I had a chance to object. LtPowers (talk) 00:27, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

@LtP: I think the differenciation to WT is good. Would you mind if the DotM is also changing? I understand your reason but imho we should show that we change while others are static. Jc8136 (talk) 11:07, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

I would mind very much so, yes. I nominated Buffalo, not expecting it to be featured during a transition period when attention is directed elsewhere. We are not pretending to have a completely separate history from WT; this is frankly a fork, and I don't think it's fair to Buffalo or Nevyansk to give their features short shrift. LtPowers (talk) 23:15, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

Agree with LtPowers, featuring destinations in a password-only period is baffling. I was the one making the change to Buffalo (following WT), but now I think we should just revert the OTBP to Nevyansk and revert the DOTM back to London. Then Buffalo can feature once we go live. --Globe-trotter (talk) 00:23, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

Also agreed. DotM serves more than one purpose, but a very clear one is to reward the immense and difficult work that contributors do to get an article up to that quality. --Peter ^Talk 01:32, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

I understand the point Peter and LtP have but don't you think it would look better to have two articles that differenciate us from WT? I know we are a fork and would suggest that Buffalo might be put back in line to be shown at a later time. I know its a big effort to build a DotM/OtBP (did i myself a few times), so maybe we list an all time favourite (e.g. SF?)? When we go public on the weekend, everybody will look at our main page and this should show a different one than a WT copy imho. Jc8136 (talk) 08:56, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

I think Jan's idea of temporarily showing a DotM and an OtBP from the past again is a good one. The images from the two features articles are the most prominent of the main page, and changing them is one of the best ways to differentiate. On the other hand, we would want to re-highlight the great articles that are Buffalo and Nevyansk (sic) at a later date. JamesA ^>talk 09:43, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

That seems a reasonable compromise. LtPowers (talk) 03:40, 21 September 2012 (CEST)

Gosh, I feel foolish for having tweaked the DotM/OtBP lineup so carefully over the past little while without having known about this conversation. Suffice it to say that I'm in full support of the conclusion here—particularly as the docent and principal author of the Buffalo article as well as a contributor to the Nevyansk article, both of which would likely have been shafted out of part or all of their tenures as DotM and OtBP if not for this discussion!

I would like to add the following: I'm pleased that others hold my work on the Buffalo article in such high regard, but all else being equal, I'd much rather wait and see Buffalo featured as DotM at a time that's appropriate for visitors—April, at the very earliest—than have it rushed back into the limelight out of sympathy for the fact that it should have been on the front page in September. I can't speak for Atsirlin, but I suspect he might feel the same way about his Nevyansk article. Earlier, I saw Buffalo listed tentatively in the February 2013 timeslot, which is emphatically NOT a good time for folks to visit there. The weather is often brutal and most attractions are open with a reduced schedule or closed entirely.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:17, 23 September 2012 (CEST)

DOTM only for destinations?

The policy outline indicates that Wikivoyage has four kinds of articles: destinations, itineraries, travel topics and phrasebooks. This article states that "any destination, region, itinerary or event that passes the "What is an article?" test is eligible for DotM/OtBP." I think this doesn't really make sense—why would a travel topic or a phrasebook be eligible to pass for destination of the month? I think we should rephrase this section so that only destination articles would qualify. --Globe-trotter (talk) 00:43, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

I would support it. Jc8136 (talk) 11:07, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

Featured Travel Topic

Quick question: I may be way off base here, but do we have enough Travel Topics that are at Guide status or better to justify this feature being monthly as opposed to, say, quarterly? From the old site I seem to recall, though I may be wrong, that we have far fewer would-be FTTs than would-be DotMs or OtBPs. I'd hate for us to exhaust our supply of the former.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:49, 29 September 2012 (CEST)

I think if we were to have different cycles for different boxes on the main page, it'd just get confusing. If we really do exhaust our supply, just start the cycle all over again. It also gives us a challenge to improve enough articles to keep it going! ;) JamesA ^>talk 02:43, 29 September 2012 (CEST)

I would argue that phrasebooks would fall under a broad definition of "travel topics". Perhaps if we made those eligible for FTT, it would ease the shortage a bit. Just a thought.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:38, 29 September 2012 (CEST)

Yes, phrasebooks should be included I think. --Globe-trotter (talk) 03:44, 29 September 2012 (CEST)

Agreed. JamesA ^>talk 13:23, 30 September 2012 (CEST)

Support. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:06, 2 October 2012 (CEST)

Proposed move

I say we move this page to Wikivoyage:Articles of the month candidates. It just doesn't make sense to call it Destinations of the month, when it also includes Off the beaten track and featured travel topic. I pluralised Articles as there are three we have to decide upon. If that sounds awkward, we can get rid of the 's'. An alternative is Wikivoyage:Featured article candidates. JamesA ^>talk 13:23, 30 September 2012 (CEST)

Seems reasonable to me. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:18, 1 October 2012 (CEST)

Hmm, the disadvantage would be the endless talk page "DotM" references! --Peter ^Talk 20:51, 1 October 2012 (CEST)

I like "Featured articles", but will go with the flow. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:08, 2 October 2012 (CEST)

Now that I think about it, I like Features articles too. JamesA ^>talk 11:36, 2 October 2012 (CEST)

Too similar to Wikipedia, perhaps? LtPowers (talk) 16:52, 2 October 2012 (CEST)

Given the fact that we'll be under the umbrella of the WMF soon enough, is "similarity to Wikipedia" necessarily a bad thing? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:27, 3 October 2012 (CEST)

I'd say yes; Wikipedia already dominates so much of what WMF does, I think it behooves other projects to carve out their own identities. LtPowers (talk) 04:25, 3 October 2012 (CEST)

I think featured articles has in a way just become a wiki thing, mostly because of the dominance of Wikipedia. Lots of other wikis use Featured Articles. If there's another name you're thinking of, feel free to suggest it, but I feel that 'Articles of the Month' is just too long, and sounds too much like Destination of the Month, ignoring the other two boxes. It's a minor issue anyway. JamesA ^>talk 04:32, 3 October 2012 (CEST)

At the risk of being a wet blanket, I'll hop off the fence and oppose this idea. There are upsides and downsides to the proposed name change described above, and it doesn't seem important enough to warrant the work to change it (would we search and replace all instances of non–wiki-linked "DotM"?). While travel topics aren't necessarily about destinations, everything else still is. --Peter ^Talk 04:44, 3 October 2012 (CEST)

I'd think you'd find that most references to DotM are actually referring to our Destinations showcase, rather than the Off the Beaten Path showcase, where OtBP would be used. All I'd be proposing is a change to the name of this page, just to avoid confusion between the nominations for all the showcases (DotM, OtBP and FTT) and the DotM showcase itself. As it stands, we use the term "Destinations of the Month" to refer to all three collectively and to the destination-specific showcase. I don't think modifying all talk page references would be necessary. JamesA ^>talk 05:09, 3 October 2012 (CEST)

When do we change FTTs?

Precedent says 16th, but we do not have anything mentioned on this page. — Ravikiran (talk) 03:03, 2 November 2012 (CET)

I was under the impression we change all three showcases at the same time: the 1st of every month. If that's not how it works, then that's how it should work to avoid confusion among viewers and unnecessary squabble. JamesA ^>talk 06:07, 2 November 2012 (CET)

Nope. That was never the case, and there is good reason why that shouldn't be the case. We change DotM on the first and OtBP on the 16th. The reason for this is to avoid keeping the Main Page unchanged for too long — which is why we introduced OtBP in the first place. Now that we have the FTT, we just need to pick a date and stick with it. I don't think it will cause much confusion or squabbling. We are all nice people after all :) — Ravikiran (talk) 06:18, 2 November 2012 (CET)

That's a valid reason then, and I guess squabbling wouldn't be an issue here! :) In that case, I'd propose changing the DotM on the 1st, OtBP on the 11th and FTT on the 21st. That way we get a more dynamic Main Page and an even spread of all three showcases. JamesA ^>talk 06:35, 2 November 2012 (CET)

Sounds good to me.--Globe-trotter (talk) 11:35, 2 November 2012 (CET)

The schedule grid for upcoming DotM/OtBP/FTT

...as it's formatted now, seems a bit confusing.

To wit: between December 11th and 21st, Yangon and Tennant Creek will still be listed as "upcoming for December 2012", even though both of those destinations will have already been on the front page for a long time. It seems like there's likely a better way of setting this up than describing as "upcoming" places like Yangon that, on the 21st of the month, will have already been more than halfway through their tenure as a featured destination.

Perhaps we could place text like "ALREADY ON FRONT PAGE" in the schedule, for instance, in place of that?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:58, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying, but I don't see this as a big issue. The question mark should be eliminated once the destination/topic is moved to the Main Page. Maybe if we add a strike-through? AHeneen (talk) 19:49, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

The strike-through sounds like a good idea. I agree that it's not a huge issue, but I do remember updating this feature on some past occasions and being a bit confused by this. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:15, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Upcoming DotM's and OtBP's

Has anyone else noticed how overrepresented the USA is on the DotM and OtBP schedule for spring and summer 2013? This is likely not an ideal situation, especially given that Wikivoyage's beta test period will have recently ended and a lot of new viewers will be getting to know us for the first time. Let's see if we can hunt down and nominate some alternative candidates and switch the schedule around a bit. I will be returning home to Buffalo from my own travels in a few days, and will be able to "pitch in" on that front beginning then.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:11, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that would be great. With regards to your move of New Mexico Pueblos from Mar->Apr...Keep in mind that the March FTT would be displayed from 21 March-20 April. I can't find the words to support this on the page, but I thought I once saw somewhere that candidates should be scheduled a month or two before their optimal time to visit, to allow for travelers to plan an upcoming trip. Late March and early-mid April seems like a rather reasonable time period for this article...not too cold, but not excessively hot either. Plus, if scheduled for April, then with Madison as the April OtBP and Buffalo as the May DotM...from May 1-10 all three featured articles would be in the U.S.! I recently went through all nominees and tried to work out the best schedule based on our nominees, but it's hard to work around the lack of non-US nominees and the best time to visit/feature for each nominee. AHeneen (talk) 08:18, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Why don't we dig a bit deeper into our back catalog and work on re-featuring some of our many Star articles? LtPowers (talk) 18:55, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Re-featuring our best articles for the launch is a great idea! --Peter ^Talk 19:55, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Refeaturing Star articles has my support! AHeneen (talk) 20:00, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I suggest the following:

• San Francisco, Bangkok, Bali, or Copenhagen
• Nusa Lembongan or Staraya Russa
• Loop Art Tour or Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour

--Peter ^Talk 20:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Other previously-featured star articles are (excluding 2012 ones): Albuquerque (DotM, Oct 07), Big Bend National Park (OtBP, Dec 09), Copenhagen (DotM, Dec 09), Hilversum (OtBP, Aug 10), Hiroshima (DotM, Nov 07), Isle Royale National Park (OtBP, Jun 06), Kununurra (OtBP, Oct 10), Lausanne (DotM, Oct 05), Menzies (OtBP, Jul 11), Nusa Lembongan (DotM, Aug 11), Santa Fe (New Mexico) (DotM, Jul 06), Sheki (OtBP, Mar 08), Singapore (DotM, Nov 06), Ubud (DotM, Feb 11), Walt Disney World (DotM, June 11), Washington, D.C. (DotM, Apr 10), Yosemite National Park (DotM, Apr 07), Zion National Park (DotM, Aug 07). Destinations that are bolded are one I like for no particular reason at all. Some need cleaned up and verified for up-to-date content...for example, Isle Royale NP is a great guide, but has no pictures anymore! Paris/1st arrondissement, Baltimore/Fells Point, & London/Hampstead were never featured. Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay needs to be nominated for FTT (I just don't feel like determining the best time to go and writing up a nomination right now). AHeneen (talk) 21:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Looking at these again, I'm inclined to suggest the following combination for the launch: Bangkok, Staraya Russa, and Loop Art Tour. Those three are pretty flashy and interesting, and have a nice geographic spread. --Peter ^Talk 22:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Haven't heard much on this front lately, and it's almost the first of the month. Shall it be assumed that Guadalajara, Johor Bahru and Fundamentals of flying are our featured articles for January 2013, rather than the previously-featured Star articles? User:AHeneen raised some issues here that I think are quite valid. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 11:03, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Purely selfishly, I wouldn't mind seeing Walt Disney World featured again; I can personally guarantee that it's as up to date as it was when it was first starred and featured, and the New Fantasyland expansion is still in the news as a recent development (don't worry, I made sure our map has been updated; WT's is now out of date!). But San Francisco, Chicago, or Washington would be great options as well. There's a risk of being too U.S.-focused, but it's only one of the three. Unless we go with Loop Art Tour for the FTT... LtPowers (talk) 15:27, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

It's getting to be crunch time—and I happen to agree with AHeneen that Guadalajara isn't quite ready for prime time, especially given that this month is the launch. If there are no objections, I'm going to assume we have a consensus here and place Walt Disney World, Staraya Russa, and Loop Art Tour on for January. That's two U.S. destinations, but there will be only 10 days where they'll both be on the front page at the same time. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:21, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd still encourage a non-U.S. destination for the prime slot. If people aren't feeling Bangkok (which is a fabulous guide), then I'd recommend Bali. Either way, we're going to have to red-link hunt each featured destination! --Peter ^Talk 23:20, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

My concern with Bangkok was that the Loop Art Tour doesn't kick in until 21st January, until which time it would be sharing space with the Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour. I'll update the schedule to replace Walt Disney World with Bali—barring, as before, any further objections. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:01, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think Bangkok is a good idea (featuring at same time as Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour). We haven't yet featured Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay. It's a star travel topic (!!) and IMO a very good piece. There's no clear indication of the best times to visit, but the Cape Town page states summer is hot (not important underwater), dry (so probably no rain runoff or storms to make the water more murky), and the sun sets later (longer days for diving). The Loop Art tour hasn't been updated in the last 5 years (see differences)...has anything changed? Staraya Russa has a red-link image. Jan is also the last month that the South Pole is accessible for travel until next Nov/Dec, so if that is the basis for the time of year to feature it (see its nomination), then the South Pole would be a great location to feature as OtBP at launch! AHeneen (talk) 01:07, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I think there may be a misunderstanding—I think we should have three star articles up for the launch, and should be disregarding our usual schedule. (And no, nothing relevant has changed on the Loop Art Tour.)

I'm a little sad to see this getting picked apart now, since it seemed like we were on the same page. We could argue endlessly about which ones to put up there. --Peter ^Talk 02:58, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Peter. Time is too much of the essence to dwell on minutiae.

I will be updating the schedule to reflect Walt Disney World and Staraya Russa to kick in on January 1st, and to be fair to Globe-trotter who nominated the excellent Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour, we'll keep that article up as FTT through the end of January, rather than truncating its run to ten days. Peter is correct, I was unaware that we'd be disregarding our usual 1st of the month/11th of the month/21st of the month rotation. If there are any objections to this schema, let's hear them, but I think most of us would agree that given the briefness of the window we have in which to work, any such complaint ought to have considerable substance behind it.

Regarding AHeneen's concerns about the South Pole as OtBP, it was my understanding that given Ryan's comments on its nomination, not to mention AHeneen's own acknowledgement that "travel must be planned at least 6-12 months in advance", the consensus was that timing was irrelevant. I see no issue with simply plugging the South Pole in during any of the many months with ?'s in the OtBP slot, with the understanding that, as Ryan said, "very few people will ever visit, so this article will be mainly read by those who think it's an interesting subject but not a potential trip destination". In fact, to be as fair as possible to AHeneen who had expected to see his nominee on the front page soon (as the author of Buffalo, I sympathize completely), I would even support bumping Madison out of the April slot—I understand there were some issues with the article that could use some ironing out before it goes on the front page, and frankly, for the foreseeable future most of my efforts on Wikivoyage will be tied up in districting Buffalo ahead of its stint as DotM. Given the lack of FTT candidates in the queue, I'm also glad to see he nominated the excellent Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay itinerary.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:25, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

By the way: do we go live on January 1st, or simply at some unspecified time during the month of January? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:01, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

We should plan on it being 15 January. --Peter ^Talk 07:08, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't see a strong reason to disrupt the normal schedule. If we stick to the normal schedule, and use previously featured star articles for DotM and OtBP, all three features will be star articles on January 15 when we officially launch. No need to cut Tennant Creek short. LtPowers (talk) 15:33, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Agreed with LtPowers. To reduce confusion in the coming months, newbies who come on board after we go live on Wikimedia should be habituated to the usual schedule immediately. More importantly than that, however, why make it any more complicated for ourselves than necessary? I imagine it would be a real headache trying to return to a staggered schedule, while also trying to ensure that articles on the front page get a fair amount of time in the limelight without overstaying their welcome, while also trying to continue to put our best face forward for the newbies. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:36, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we should change the normal schedule either, but simply break policy and re-feature some star-quality, previously-featured pages. Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour is the Dec 2012 FTT, which will be featured from 21 Dec-20 Jan (which includes the launch)...we need something else for Jan FTT (which gets featured Jan 21...remaining until Feb 20). Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay is pretty much the best star travel topic we have...no need to re-feature something else. I don't really care about articles I've nominated, since most work on these were done by others, I just happened to find them and thought they were good. I've worked on some cities in my home region and, eventually, would love to get Polk County (Florida) to guide status and featured as OtBP (or maybe just Lake Wales or Winter Haven, which are already at guide & just need pics and small additions/clean-up). But that's a future matter and with the best time to visit around Oct/Nov-Mar/Apr, they probably won't fit into the schedule until next winter (N. Hemisphere) anyways. AHeneen (talk) 02:01, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, if we're going to be sticking to the normal schedule there's really no point in keeping Yaowarat/Phahurat up past January 21st. I have no objection to putting Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay in for Jan 21st-Feb 20th provided the nomination has received enough additional positive feedback by that time (a virtual certainty, in my estimation).

Let's leave FTT for January 2013 as a ? for now, with the understanding that we'll fill it with Cape Peninsula and False Bay once we get another Support vote or two.

Yes, I know I'm going against what I said before, "time is too much of the essence to dwell on minutiae"...

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:51, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Post-launch

I think we should stack our main page with the best options we have for February too, even if that means ignoring some of our usual scheduling concerns. In particular, I think Guadalajara and Johor Bahru are on the weak side of our current nominations. Canberra, Rotterdam, and Pittsburgh are very solid DotM nominations (I think Andre wants to hold off on Buffalo until after districting). Our current OtBP noms are (surprisingly) weaker, but Udupi and La Macarena are strong. We could also do Churchill, which will be a spectacular feature once I get my $#&@ing photos from my friend. --Peter ^Talk 18:30, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Agreed about Guadalajara and Johor Bahru (and you're correct about my desires for Buffalo). However, I submit that it would be preferable to do for February the same thing we did for January—re-feature exceptionally good previous DotMs or OtBPs.

I think it bears reminding ourselves that a) the people we most want to impress by making the schedule as strong as possible—those new to Wikivoyage—mostly weren't around when those articles were on the front page the first time, and b) it's highly unlikely that a newbie will quickly find his way to a page like Previous Destinations of the month or Previously Off the beaten path and then be underwhelmed when articles he's already read are featured.

Meanwhile, I think that the great articles that haven't been on the front page yet—Pittsburgh or La Macarena, to use some of Peter's examples—would be done a disservice if we featured them at unsuitable times. And I think it would be truly unfortunate if we removed Canberra and Rotterdam from the March and April spots, respectively, because of the events that their scheduling has been timed to coincide with.

I'd love to see Churchill on the front page—it's on my own shortlist of places I want to visit. But I think holding it off till polar bear season (October-November) is a no-brainer.

I humbly suggest Dubai as February's DotM and Cape Maclear as OtBP, and leaving Fundamentals of flying as FTT.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:42, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe. Both could be fixed up very quickly, but neither has a map (not usually a criterion for DotM, but if we're going for the best articles...). I could churn out a Dubai map quickly, but wouldn't have time to place listings. --Peter ^Talk 23:36, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I actually really like this idea—when we decided to re-feature the old articles in January, I took the opportunity to be a little bit more choosy in filling out the months of February and March, before the warm months begin in the Northern Hemisphere. (You'll notice that the extremely weak Antigua Guatemala article is no longer on the schedule grid; I predict that one will be slushed if the major problems it has aren't addressed soon.)

I'm going to change up the schedule grid now, replacing the entire month of February with ?'s until we come to a consensus as to what articles to put there. There's still a lot of mediocre articles on the schedule—Guadalajara and Johor Bahru, as you mentioned, as well as Udupi and Madison—whose tenure on the front page really should be delayed until some more work is put into spit-shining them.

I'm certainly not married to the Dubai/Cape Maclear/Fundamentals of Flying combination, but as I said, I definitely would rather keep Canberra and Rotterdam where they are, and I think any destinations we feature in February should be tropical or Southern Hemipshere ones. Those two issues, to me, are the most important.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 11:14, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd suggest Bali, Sheki, Fundamentals of flying. That would have great geographic spread (everything far away from the last month's, too), and they are some of the strongest guides on the site. The photo hunt would need to roll through each before moving forward, though. I've already done the Bali photo hunt, but FoF needs illustration badly. --Peter ^Talk 21:40, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

@Peter: I have done the photo change in Guadalajara and it is better but certainly not as strong as our star article. I think we shouldn't shot our best articles all at once. GDL would be good as our North American friends wouldn't see a perfect article but one they can contribute, too. jan (talk) 10:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

That's an interesting take on the matter. After all, wikis are interactive; ideally, our visitors won't simply read the articles, as they would a Lonely Planet guidebook, but contribute to them as well. And we Wikivoyagers make much of the fact that there are ways to improve even the cream-of-the-crop articles, the ones that we see fit to feature on the front page. I think Jan's argument has a lot of merit. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 11:18, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Changing the featured article & related cleanup tasks

Took me quite a while to figure out how to update the FTT. As a result, I've created the updating section. Please correct any mistakes made or add any other tasks that belong in the process. A couple notes about issues found during the process:

• Should Template:Dotm, Template:Otbp, & Template:Ftt be added to the Wikivoyage:Template index? Should they have documentation regarding how to use them?
• Adding {{title-icons|ftt-icon}} to past FTTs creates a link in the title bar to Previous Featured travel topics, but there is no icon yet for previous FTTs and it is displayed as "Prev -" in red (see: Russian phrasebook or Retiring abroad)
• Wikivoyage:Destination of the Month candidates/Archive is getting long...should it be divided into Wikivoyage:Destination of the Month candidates/DotM Archive, Wikivoyage:Destination of the Month candidates/OtBP Archive, and Wikivoyage:Destination of the Month candidates/FTT Archive? If not, then there's also no clear order for DotM/OtBP/FTT for each month or identification of which category each nomination was for...is this worth the effort to clean up, or not?
• Would it be helpful to add a "Schedule discussion" section to discuss changes to the Upcoming#Schedule table? This wouldn't necessarily be for the best timing of each nominee (which would belong in the nominee's section), but rather the issue of which nominee should be scheduled when. For example, the OtBP for Jan 2013 is scheduled as Johor Bahru, which doesn't have much support...nominated by Peter plus one "soft support" vs. "not yet" & "needs work". It has nonetheless managed to get into the schedule (maybe a lack of timely OtBP nominees when it was first inserted?). Would we want a high quality OtBP featured when we launch Jan 15th? Issues like these might be better resolved in a schedule discussion section, rather than beneath the nomination (where it won't be very visible).

AHeneen (talk) 06:02, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

In general, as someone who is far less knowledgeable on the subject than many others in the WV community, I try not to poke my nose into discussions about the technical end of things. However, speaking to your last bullet point: a separate schedule discussion section would strike me as unnecessarily redundant. But I do agree with you that conducting such discussions under the nominations has raised problems with visibility. I think the best way to go here is to continue to consolidate the discussions in one area, but place it in a more prominent spot on the page. As to whether it's possible to do that without completely redesigning the whole page, or what the final product should look like, for me that's veering back into "I don't know what I'm talking about" territory.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:21, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Also, to answer your question regarding Johor Bahru: if I remember correctly, at the time it was placed into the schedule we were indeed running very low on suitable DotMs and OtBPs. As I mentioned in the discussion on the other DOTM candidates page, November through March can be pretty tricky if you don't have a strong stable of candidate destinations at the ready (the schism with Internet Brands happened at exactly the wrong time in that regard!), and most of the nominees at that time were in temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere, thus unfeatureable during those months.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:33, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Too few attractions to be featured

This issue concerns the current nomination of Childs for OtBP. The hamlet only has one attraction, one restaurant, & one place to sleep. Since it's so small, there's little content to add and thus it is complete & at guide status. The problem is that I don't think this should be featured because it's too small and the page is short, but opinion is not a valid reason to oppose...it's at guide status with no MoS issues. But is this really something we as a community want "featured" on the main page? The issue isn't size of the town physically or in terms of population, but lack of breadth of the article...there' little to say and little content in each section. Thoughts? AHeneen (talk) 04:54, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Despite my vote of Support, I am also torn. I personally like the article and think it's extremely well-written, but the size of Childs places limits that are pretty severe on the amount of content that the article could possibly have even in the best-case scenario.

Unfortunately, there's really no precedent to follow in this matter, and with the exception of Wikivoyage:What is an article? (a litmus test that the Childs article passes), Wikivoyage policy is of no help either. I agree with you that this is a subject that needs more discussion.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:38, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, what's the issue? It meets the article and DotM requirements, we're agreed on that at least. But what is it about the destination that makes it seem inappropriate for featuring? What negative consequence is being envisioned should the article be featured? LtPowers (talk) 13:47, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

All I can think of is that the very small number of listings means that it maybe should be amalgamated into a larger area? Very similar to putting Damascus, Maryland (which has just about the same amount of listings) in Rural Montgomery County. I'm ambivalent, though. --Peter ^Talk 17:59, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

It's not necessarily that this page should be merged into a larger area, but rather, that is there is simply not much content...is this really someplace that is worth featuring? Maybe if there were absolutely no other feasible destinations for a particular month, but otherwise this doesn't seem like a great piece to feature on front-page real estate for a month. If we featured art/crafts, it would be like saying a block of wood (even if finely polished & carefully measured to be perfectly square) is worthy of being featured, versus a detailed animal sculpture...both are quality pieces as defined by the attention to detail (like with our guide status req.), but the sculpture would be a much better choice to feature, because it has more "content" (visual appeal) and is complex, rather than simple (for ease of making a point, forget "modern art"). Wikipedia references have been made ad nauseum, but to give an example, out of 3769 featured pages (as of Dec 23), the shortest was 7256 bytes and the lowest 1%ile mark (3731th FP) was 14862 bytes. Childs is 6950 bytes. Of course, we're a smaller site, but are there not much better pages to feature. Strictly speaking, if I created a page for a town of 20 people, with one house serving as a guesthouse for up to two people, add one see/do listing (an old water tower), and 1-2 sentences in each section, and a couple pictures, bringing it to guide status, this could be a valid OtBP. If not an official criteria (X bytes or X number of attractions), then at least "too short" or "not enough attractions" could be made valid criteria to oppose a nomination. By the way, this issue has nothing to do with LtPower's work to create the page...it's the destination itself that is at issue, not the quality of the article. AHeneen (talk) 07:01, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

So your concern is not that it's unworthy, but that it's less worthy than other worthy destinations? I think ranking featured destinations sets a bad precedent, as it's very difficult to judge worthiness. LtPowers (talk) 21:29, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

We are in complete disagreement, LtPowers. Comparative judgments about worthiness seem to me to be an important part of the discussion on what should be featured. We aren't unthinking robots here and should allow ourselves to judge worthiness. AHeneen's points are very well argued, while yours strike me as mere negation without engaging the issues he brings up. We need to use criteria other than merely randomly featuring articles at guide status by, say, flipping a coin. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:03, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I did not intend to merely negate without engaging the issues; you will note that I asked a question for clarification that was never answered. It's difficult to "engage" without making sure we're talking about the same thing, don't you think?

On the issues, no one has proposed what kind of threshhold makes a destination "worthy" of appearing on the front page. This all strikes me as very similar to the ridiculous cold feet some people got over featuring Walt Disney World, just because it's a commercial entity rather than a community. You all don't like it, and can't point to any rule that says why it's unsuitable for featuring, so you're grasping at straws to prevent it from appearing on the front page.

Let's think about what "Off the Beaten Path" really means. It was made for destinations like this, not state capitals with hundreds of thousands of people and major universities. Essentially we're compressing the scope of featurable articles by calling Madison OtBP and declaring Childs to be so unworthy of notice that it's not even off the beaten path.

Wouldn't it be better to recalibrate our concept of what constitutes "Off the Beaten Path", which seems to have become skewed? Shouldn't every article have a chance to be featured on the front page?

-- LtPowers (talk) 14:13, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I could not agree more with the two final paragraphs of LtPowers' comment. It seems utterly nonsensical to reject a nominee for Off the Beaten Path because it's too "off the beaten path". -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:29, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

You make a good point, Andre. No, no destination should be rejected for being "too off the beaten path." I'd like to see the Tristan da Cunha article to be whipped into sufficient shape to be featured, and it's certainly way off the beaten path. But does lack of attractions make a place off the beaten path? At least this article is about a place with one attraction, which you visited and found worthy. But how about an article about a place that has no attractions?

In short, no, I do not think every article should have a chance to be featured on the front page, and whichever articles are featured - whether on or off the beaten path - should be sufficiently interesting that there weren't loads of other more fascinating locations or/and other articles with better content that could have been featured, instead. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:54, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

LtPowers, I agree with you on Madison: It should be a DotM, not an OtBP. I also agree with you about Walt Disney World. But even if I could be persuaded about Childs (and a couple of more photos in that article would help), I do think there should be a threshold, as I argue above. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:02, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

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

In this particular instance I would agree that if an article is at guide status then it's suitable for featuring, but we may want to revisit what "guide" status means. In particular, I'd agree with Peter that if a destination really is so tiny that there is very little we can say about it, perhaps we should consider merging it rather than promoting it to guide status. Unfortunately I don't have any specific suggestions for updating policy to resolve the issue of articles with limited content, but if anyone has any ideas then Wikivoyage talk:What is an article? might be a good place to propose them - Wikivoyage talk:What is an article?#What MIGHT NOT get its own article? had some ideas that might be worth considering. Wikivoyage talk:Geographical hierarchy#Weak regions is another related discussion that might provide a possible solution. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:11, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Ryan here. I think we might need to look again at just what merits an article of its own, no matter how well written said article is. Perhaps some sort of '2 day test' would be appropriate: can the destination sustain a visit of two days without going anywhere else? As Ikan Kekek has suggested, it does seem a shame to ignore so many interesting places that we feature in favour of somewhere that, whilst interesting and equipped with an excellent article, is not really large enough to excite the traveller. As our featured articles are, in effect, tacit recommendations of particular locations, we need to be careful not to use any category (including OTBP) as an 'anything else' category. I personally think of OTBP as somewhere that you might not immediately consider a top travel destination, but surely it has to be somewhere that people would consider making a special effort to visit?

I'd like to see more exotic destinations up for the Main Page (we seem to have a lot from the USA in particular at the moment), as well as a deeper discussion on how we can sort out this issue and define just what constitutes a guide. --Nick (talk) 19:03, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I continue to be baffled. The feature is called "Off the Beaten Path". By its very name it is understood that these destinations are small, unusual, offbeat, "not for everyone". That's the whole point, as far as I can tell.

Also, I disagree that we need to define what a "destination" is beyond what is already contained in wiaa. I can name several worthwhile destinations that would fail your proposed two-day test: off the top of my head, Clarence, whose nomination for OtBP has been acclaimed unanimously and which has been described on several occasions as Starnom material.

What Wikivoyage should strive for is to have a Star article on every place that passes the sleep test. Obviously that's not a realistically attainable goal, but our decisions, I think, should be informed by the question of what puts us closer to that goal. And I don't see how we're served by talk of merging information contained in an uncommonly good article - because why? Other places may be larger but have more poorly written articles? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

I would think any place with a Sleep listing automatically meets the 2-day test, as, prima facie, people stay overnight in that location. I sympathize with the lack of geographic diversity, but there's nothing I can do about that -- and that's a scheduling issue. I sincerely hope you don't think we should be rejecting candidates for the main page just because they're in an area well covered by our guides.

I would not be in favor of merging this particular article, either to Albion (New York) (not yet written) or to Orleans County (New York). It's a coherent little destination and I fear its attraction and amenities would get lost in an article about the whole county (or one about the medium-sized village a few miles to the south). As Maj said on Wikivoyage talk:What is an article?: "The reason we have that rule-of-thumb is exactly to avoid some people deciding what's a 'worthwhile destination.' We're just not going to get very far with something that says 'you would want to go there' or 'you should go there' or 'it's worth a visit.'"

Now that we have featured travel topics on the main page, I don't see any reason to exclude any article from the possibility of ever being featured. If it's good enough to put a guide status (or even star) on, then it ought to be good enough for the main page.

-- LtPowers (talk) 21:03, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough. I do realise that it's very difficult to work with any arbitrary criteria and that the 'two day test' (patent pending) is pretty rubbish. I'm still not completely convinced that a settlement of this size is ideal, but let's try it and see how it works - it's just very off the beaten path!

As for my comments about the number of locations in the USA, I certainly wasn't suggesting that that would be a reason to oppose any nomination including that of Childs. Obviously, there's going to be some leaning towards areas with good coverage, simply because we want to showcase Wikivoyage's best. To be honest, its really not my place to raise such issues - if I'm unhappy with the geographic diversity, I should really just nominate some more places! --Nick (talk) 21:36, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I think the bigger issue here is regarding content organization, and that the question regarding whether there is a threshold for destination-ness for features would go away if we successfully tackled that issue. Virtually any travel guide would roll its coverage of Childs into a region article (without sub-pages like we have for every individual locality). Places that are not of interest regarding things to see, do, eat, and drink would similarly not wind up with their own articles—anything that truly needs to be said about them would be done in the same sort of "East X Region" article. My impression is that other editors here basically agree with this, but think the task might be too hard, and requires too much regional knowledge.

This is all a bit off topic, though ;) To sum, the feature criteria make sense, and troubles arise only because our "what gets an article" criteria need refining. --Peter ^Talk 22:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Like some comments above, I am of two minds here. Childs clearly fails on something like the WP notability criterion; that does not seem to matter much for OtBP, but it still makes me uneasy. The article is well-written, but are there enough attractions to make it worth featuring? I do not know & am not even sure how to tell. Best I can think of follows.

People who know the region: would you send a friend to Childs? To make it concrete, assume the friend has a few weeks in the Northeast US. Beyond New York, Boston and Niagara falls, he or she is not sure where to visit, and asks for advice. Would you include Childs in a suggested itinerary?

As I see, if Childs is not at least a serious candidate for such an itinerary, it is not worth featuring. Pashley (talk) 23:18, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

There seem to be three issues being discussed here:

1. Should we change the criteria for OTBP from "article must be guide status or above" to something more subjective.
2. Should we revisit our geographical hierarchy to better handle destinations with little that we can write about.
3. Related to #2, is an article with so little information in it really a "guide".

As Peter noted, answering #2 and #3 should probably be done on more relevant discussion pages (Wikivoyage talk:What is an article?). As to #1, as it stands currently Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates#Nominate includes no criteria that would bar us from featuring a guide status article, regardless of the size of the destination, and until someone proposes a change to current guidelines and there is agreement to implement that change it would set a poor precedent for us to create a new, unwritten guideline in order to prevent a destination like Childs from being featured. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:48, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there needs to be a cut and dried written rule for everything. I think that including subjective considerations of notability or/and ability to sustain interest in decisions about what to feature on OtBP and DotM would be good, and I don't think that we should worry about discriminating against well-written articles about places that are not that interesting, whether or not Childs would fail that test. The idea that all guides are equal and should have an equal chance of being featured doesn't seem sensible or well-considered to me, and I would much rather engage in debates about something as important for the site as which articles are featured each month than worry that it's somehow a bad precedent to make subjective decisions (which I don't think is true). I do think that anyplace that's a great day trip is fine to feature, though, so I disagree with the proposal of a "2-day rule." Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:59, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I strongly disagree. One of the incentives we have to write about destinations is the possibility of one's work being featured on the front page. To cut off articles from that route of promotion is, I feel, short-sighted and unfair. Would you also propose that such an article could never reach star status, because it's not capable of being an example of our best work? LtPowers (talk) 02:29, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I think LtPowers has his finger on the reason for the objective criteria. I think it would have to be a truly exceptional situation to rule out a feature that someone has worked hard on for subjective reasons. Basically, I'd only bring it up if I thought someone was trolling. --Peter ^Talk 03:06, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

For further reference on the "objective criteria" statement, see #Qualification for DOTM/OTBP, a related discussion that was raised when the nomination of Walt Disney World was nearly derailed because someone felt it was too commercial, and Wake Island was almost rejected for being too difficult to visit. While I agree with Ikan that we don't want to have a situation where an explicit rule is needed for everything, LtPowers is also correct that it's pretty harsh to state any guide article can be featured and then shoot down a nomination because someone doesn't like a destination, thinks it is too commercial, or objects for some other reason that can't be addressed through improving the article. With that said, if someone has a proposal for updating the criteria for a "guide" status, that might be a way to address everyone's concerns (→Wikivoyage talk:Guide articles). -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:55, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Very well, it may be necessary to update criteria for guide status (which strikes me as both harder and more unnecessarily inflexible than just allowing for specific kinds of subjective evaluation of featured articles). But if any guide article has an equal chance to be featured, why do we discuss proposed DotM candidates at all? Why not just create a bot that randomly cycles through guide articles? Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:07, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't think this site will go down the tubes if an article with one sight and one photo is featured, but I do think we have to draw a line somewhere, so please join the discussion I've started at Wikivoyage talk:Guide articles#Number of attractions and pictures needed for guide status, and let's see if we can come to a consensus about what's needed going forward. I don't think it'll be easy, but maybe it's important.

By the way, I hope no-one feels personally dissed in this discussion. I think there are a lot of ways to reward people's good work, including not only DotM and OtBP (which I really wasn't thinking of as a reward for a particular person's work, but I see the point on that), personal compliments, barnstars, etc., but for my part, I never seek recognition for my work here; I just do it because it gives me a sense of pride to make things better. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:48, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Re: "why do we discuss proposed DotM candidates at all", in many cases people voice concerns about the article content that can be addressed (see the current Yellowstone nomination for one example). In contrast, an objection about the destination itself, such as deeming Disneyworld "too commercial" or Wake Island as "too hard to visit", cannot be corrected and essentially prevent the destination from ever being featured; the latter concerns me, as ideally there should always be an opportunity for someone to see their work featured. -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:30, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I get your point on why we discuss proposed DotM candidates, Ryan.

But the focus on "an opportunity for someone to see their work featured" really personalizes things too much, in my opinion. This is a collectively-authored site, and I think it's questionable for someone to take too much personal ownership of any article. I'd much rather we made decisions based on the best interests of the site than on the desire of an individual who worked on a guide to have it featured for personal gratification, or for others to so honor them. I'm actually a bit taken aback by this intense focus on featuring articles as a personal reward, because I thought the entire spirit of this site was exemplified by the exclusive use of the third and second persons - it (the place) and you (the reader) - not I the author.

I do think that the fact that a destination is commercial or difficult (though not impossible) to visit should not be a reason not to feature it. However, I do think that a destination not being interesting enough is a good reason not to feature it, and so some decision has to be made about minimum content and interest, though apparently not in this thread. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:10, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Is it stated anywhere that an Otbp destination is either a recommendation by WV or even that it is desirable for any reason at all to go there? A place my be distinctive by being a real dump, a one horse town where the horse died, and well worth avoiding at all costs, and a decent guide article could still be written for it, and as far as I am concerned, it could still make a valid Otbp. It may in other words be off the beaten path because everyone beats a path around it so as to avoid going there. (if this happens, it would only be fair to mention this, so the place dooesnt get an influx of unsuspecting visitors).

This is just my opinion of course, but I don't see that a destination which makes the criteria should be disqualified on lack of attractions, when the lack of attractions is probably why the path was not beaten in the first place. On the other hand, if there are lots of places that are more interesting to visit queuing up for Otbp, it makes sense to me, in the interests of the larger number of travellers who are likely to find it useful, to use the more attractive destinations first. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:52, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Featuring a place in order to tell people to avoid it violates the spirit if not letter of our policy on negative reviews, doesn't it? I think it does. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:38, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

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

Sometime between now and June July 11th, I will head to Childs and take some photos with which to improve the article. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:56, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Great! Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:08, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I keep meaning to, but never seem to find the time. But on that note, is it a good idea to feature Pittsburgh and Childs in the same month? Seems like we usually aim for a bit more variety in locations. LtPowers (talk) 13:20, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. I will reorder the schedule thusly. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:23, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps a stupid question...

Has anybody got any idea how to update the Main Page to reflect the new DotM/OtBP/FTT? I happened to get around to it first this month and updated the archive and the candidates page, but was clueless as to how to actually put Walt Disney World on the front page. An admittedly cursory search around the Help section of the site turned up nothing. Is this something that only admins can do?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 08:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Not a stupid question at all. Template:Dotm, Template:Otbp and Template:Ftt are the templates to modify in order to update the main page. See Wikivoyage:Main Page guidelines for additional details. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:59, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Not a stupid question...I had the same issues when going to update the FTT a couple weeks ago! It took an hour or so to hunt through all the Project pages I could think of to finally figure things out. This is mentioned in the "Changing the featured article & related cleanup tasks" section above and I added the Updating section to the DotM candidates page. Step one:

1. Update the featured articles on the main page by visiting the DotM template, OtBP template, or FTT template, as appropriate, and replace the entire contents of the appropriate page with the image & "blurb" for the new DotM/OtBP/FTT found in the Next change section above.

Hopefully, if you take a look at the steps, they're all correct and clear yet concise (don't need 3 sentences for each step). AHeneen (talk) 22:15, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Preventing vandalism on featured articles

I don't know if this has already been discussed/implemented, so if I'm being redundant I apologize in advance.

I suspect I am far from the only one who has had his hands full today in managing edits of varying degrees of quality made by overeager newbies. Buffalo hasn't seen any outright vandalism yet, but I suspect it's only a matter of time.

I believe I remember that there's a policy at Wikipedia that dictates that, as a matter of course, their featured article of the day is protected from edits by anonymous users for the duration of its tenure on the front page. It goes without saying that linking to an article on the front page of Wikipedia or Wikivoyage accords it the highest possible visibility, which in turn will lead to a high volume of edits - helpful and not - if left unchecked.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun a little bit, but I think we should perhaps keep the idea in mind of doing something similar if vandalism problems develop in featured articles. This is especially important, I think, given that we'll likely continue to strain to deal with problem edits and "breaking in the newbies" in general, and that a lot of our energy is still being directed toward working the final kinks out of our partnership with the WMF.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:42, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

*Support. I agree that the form of semi-protection you propose would be prudent. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:01, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm changing my vote to Oppose. The arguments by the opponents are convincing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:47, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• If this is the English Wikipedia, that's not exactly correct. The TFA as it's called is set move=sysop. There is no semi-protection to encourage people to edit; however, it is used if the vandalism is bad. However, any pictures used on the Main Page are full-protected (too easy for someone to stick a penis on the front page). If the photos are on Commons, they are protected on Commons (there is a bot that does it for us). In an emergency or if Commons falls through, admins (and only admins) can upload the same file by the same name locally and protect that. --Rschen7754 08:04, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Do you mean that the three images currently on the Main Page are protected on Commons? I can't confirm that. It would make sense to do, though.

I'm coming around to the idea of protecting the three features, but I'd rather limit it to autoconfirmed, rather than admin-only. It's a trade off between promoting the "anyone can edit" ethos of our site and keeping our features nice and polished for first time visitors (and for right now, the press). --Peter ^Talk 09:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

They don't appear to be protected on Commons. I know that User:LtPowers is a Commons admin and would probably know where to ask to get them protected on a regular basis, if you decide to go that way. I doubt that you'll get as much vandalism as the English Wikipedia gets (we've had compromised admin accounts deleting the Main Page before, leading to an elaborate safety net system), but it's probably good to be thinking about MP vandalism. --Rschen7754 09:32, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't actually know off the top of my head. LtPowers (talk) 13:24, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Move-protecting the pages may be a good idea though - there's no reason that the destination of the month should be renamed, and I've seen page move vandals who like to move popular pages to something inappropriate. --Rschen7754 18:37, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose; protect only as necessary. Especially with the current flood of new users, it's churlish to show them featured articles and say "Hah, but you can't edit them!" -- unless we absolutely have to. LtPowers (talk) 13:24, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose. The nice thing about these featured articles is that they get a lot of traffic, which means they'll get a lot of good edits as well. Sure, there'll be vandalism as well, but I think that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. If it really turns out of hand, we could always make a policy later, but this is not yet the time for it. Globe-trotter (talk) 14:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose Don't like this idea. Articles on the main page are well watched, are the best way to draw new users in and should only be protected if there is excessive vandalism. --RegentsPark (talk) 17:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

As there clearly is opposition to protecting the featured articles, I have unprotected them for editing, although they remain move protected admin only. Be sure to keep a good eye on them now—the kind of work I'm doing on the site precludes me from doing that very well myself. --Peter ^Talk 19:41, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to keep Walt Disney World's history page up in my browser and try to check it periodically. LtPowers (talk) 19:53, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I think the WdW article can be protected as excessive vandalism is going on at this moment. I was just opposing a policy that always protects them pre-emptively. Globe-trotter (talk) 21:48, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Nonetheless, I think it would be prudent to leave the door open to revisiting this issue at a later time, if it becomes necessary. In fact, my original post was not intended to suggest that we institute such a policy right now, but rather keep it in mind depending on whether or not Wikivoyage continues to see the amount of activity it's seeing now after the novelty of Wikivoyage-as-WMF-project wears off, and how well we're able to address problems of vandalism in general going forward given the increased user base. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:25, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

FWIW I just created a sock account for the sole purpose of monitoring the featured articles ;) --Peter ^Talk 23:22, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• Comment I don't think we should be protecting articles by default, but per existing policy if an article is getting a high amount of vandalism then a short protection is called for. In this case I've twice protected the WDW article from IP edits since this is a high visibility article and all IP edits I've reviewed have been vandalism. I'm not swayed by the argument that IP users will leave because they can't edit - the main page is the first page people see, and that's protected for everyone, and attempts by IPs to edit WDW provide a clear message about why that article is temporarily protected. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:22, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
  • It's not just IP users, though, it's also new users who aren't yet autoconfirmed (which is what, 30 days? Or is it 4?). LtPowers (talk) 16:42, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

• Right now it's 4. I'd like to keep the protection off Staraya Russa, for what that's worth. It's an obscure destination, and we could benefit from updates, even if it requires paying close attention and reverting often. I'll unprotect for now. --Peter ^Talk 19:32, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

I would propose that we move-protect featured articles by default, if not protecting them from edits. --Peter ^Talk 19:35, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with that (except, perhaps requiring that the editor who makes the tri-monthly change would need to be, or acquire the assistance of, an admin). LtPowers (talk) 19:49, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Better get Andre's switches flipped ;) --Peter ^Talk 20:08, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

February 2013???

After having scrapped Guadalajara, Johor Bahru and Fundamentals of flying as our February slate of nominees per Peter's suggestion, no one other than Peter and myself have given any input regarding what they should be replaced with. I know we're all abuzz with the launch, but there's not much time between now and February 1st, and as it is now we have three ?s in a row in Upcoming nominations. Two opinions does not a consensus make (let alone two opinions that don't agree on anything other than Fundamentals of Flying as FTT), so let's hear some ideas. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:43, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

To recap our suggestions, Andre suggested Dubai and Cape Maclear, while I suggested Bali and Sheki. --Peter ^Talk 09:16, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Still no input. That being the case, pending any eleventh-hour suggestions between now and February 1st, I'm going to defer to Peter and slot Bali and Sheki in as DotM and OtBP, respectively, and Fundamentals of flying as FTT. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:39, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I support Bali & Fundamentals of Flying, but Sheki is not a place to visit in February...cold & snowy. So naturally, my top pick would be the South Pole...there's no reason why we need to re-feature past featured pages and February would at least be close the the time of year that people can visit (Nov-Jan). Cape Le Grand National Park & Kakadu National Park are very nice, if not a little too close to Bali geographically to feature at the same time. Pensacola (needs pics) & Big Bend National Park are also nice destinations, but do we want any more U.S. featured pages? Virgin Gorda & Niamey are my top picks for OtBP. Winter is relatively cooler in the Caribbean (drier & warm, not hot). I like Niamey because it represents coverage in Africa (and I greatly contributed to it...not unlike Peter & Sheki). It is currently quite close to some unsafe areas, but the region has long been sketchy and the city itself is ok to visit (travelers just shouldn't venture north or north east of the city)...if anything, there are more hotel rooms available. So my picks would be: 1)South Pole, 2)Niamey, 3)Virgin Gorda, 4) Big Bend National Park, & 5) Cape Le Grand National Park. AHeneen (talk) 07:57, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Excellent point, and I've long been an admirer of that Niamey article (I was once very close to nominating it as OtBP before I realized I'd missed the "Previously OtBP" tag!) I'll update the nominations page thusly, barring any objections. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 08:47, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Hong Kong for Wikimania?

I know Hong Kong's been done before, but can we feature it again in time for Wikimania? — Ravikiran (talk) 17:43, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Speaking for myself, I'm strongly against any further recycling of old featured destinations. I was on board with doing so in January and February because our launch as a WMF project was an event that was unprecedented in the history of our project, and also our DotM schedule at the time was exceptionally weak. But overall, I feel that at this point there are way too many worthy destinations backed up on the list to take up space on the main page with one that's already had its time in the limelight. Canberra, Rotterdam, Buffalo et al. deserve their turns.

Furthermore, regarding Wikimania: It's necessary to keep in mind the question of who is our target audience in writing Wikivoyage. As much as it may appear to be so now, we're not supposed to be a closed circuit, with Wikivoyagers writing articles solely for each other to read—complete with clannish inside references to obscure (let's face it) events like Wikimania that may be well-known to certain hardcore WMF project editors, but that very few members of the public at large have heard of or would have any interest in. We're supposed to be writing to benefit the larger community of travellers, and in so doing inspire casual readers—maybe even first-time visitors—to use Wikivoyage for their travel needs (and even to get involved in writing articles, as we did). The traveller comes first.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:18, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. Hong Kong was featured as DotM in April 2005. I don't see a conflict with featuring this for Wikimania...featuring at the time of Wikimania doesn't mean that we aren't serving the needs of the general public (HK is a major destination and, as noted, was featured in 2005)...and it could give us better exposure in the Wiki community. I'd like to see a prominent link to WV in place of some of the "Conference info" on the official site that is not conference-specific (like tourist attractions, etc.). In featuring our H.K. guide prominently, we can hopefully attract some edits (cleanup, new/updated listings) from conference-goers and improve our guide. AHeneen (talk) 21:14, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Hong Kong is certainly a major travel destination, but I'm just not on board with this idea. We have a long list of worthy DotM nominees in queue. After January and February, to yet again put off these articles' time on the Main Page in favor of a destination that's already been featured, regardless of how long ago it was, and for a reason that (if you'll excuse my frankness) isn't a very good one, strikes me as unfair to the editors who put in work to make those articles worthy of being featured.

Furthermore, even among the WMF community at large, there's still only a minority of editors who have the interest, financial resources, and practical ability to attend Wikimania. Frankly, I don't buy that Wikimania is a big enough deal to a big enough number of people, on or off the wikis, for Hong Kong as DotM to generate any interest-by-association for us at Wikivoyage.

I might also note that after the 21st, when Fundamentals of flying is rotated in as FTT and another month is added to the grid, the schedule will extend to September 2013. After that point, we'll have to begin to restrict what kind of destinations are featured due to colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes many current DotM candidates. Some articles that are currently in the queue have been there since the Internet Brands days, and to make one or more of those destinations wait a year and a half or more to be featured (until the spring of 2014) just so some other article can double-dip, strikes me as unconscionable.

To reiterate, the only reason I supported Peter's suggestion to re-feature articles in January and February was because a) the WMF launch was a major event that was unprecedented in Wikitravel/Wikivoyage history, and b) our schedule of upcoming nominees at that time was very weak. Neither of the above are true in this case. In point of fact, my main reservation about re-featuring old articles at the WMF launch was that it might set exactly this precedent, of re-featuring old destinations willy-nilly to the detriment of deserving articles that have never been on the Main Page before.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

If I might suggest a compromise, perhaps we could talk to the WMF about linking to the Hong Kong Wikivoyage article on whichever page Wikimania is described on. That way, those people who are truly interested in Wikimania can obtain the necessary travel information, Wikivoyage can be cross-promoted on one or more of the other wikis, and Wikivoyage's Main Page real estate can be devoted to other articles as I described above.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I did that just after I wrote the above comment. See: . AHeneen (talk) 01:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Just for the record, I think re-featuring guides that have changed radically from a time long ago when they were featured should be OK. Just imagine if we had featured a one-page, barely guide-status Buffalo back in 2004 before Andre did all this fabulous work! --Peter ^Talk 20:35, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Could we choose an area near HK, Macau or Pearl River Delta, to feature as DotM? Pashley (talk) 21:37, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

I guess we could, but I would prefer the idea of featuring HK, because I think there are few occasions where featured articles are as likely to be actually used by a larger group of people. Excellent compromise to ask for links to the article on relevant Wikimania sites. They have experience using our articles in that context: I remember even printed versions of the WT articles for Alexandria - Cairo (including the Pyramids) and the Egyptian Arabic phrasebook being handed out at the Alexandria Wikimania, and people did use it. Great way to get some exposure again for Wikivoyage, maybe find a few new contributors. I agree with the idea that other destinations "deserve" a feature, but it shouldn't hold us back when we have great reasons to re-use an old one. For me, this is an example of such a case :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 21:53, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

I reiterate my strong opposition to this, for all the reasons I mentioned above, and not necessarily because Buffalo is in the running as DotM. (I already pushed it back a month in the schedule because of slower than anticipated progress on the districting, and may have to do so again). I am extremely wary of the precedent that's already beginning to be established by this very discussion, and specifically by quotes such as "I think re-featuring guides that have changed radically from a time long ago when they were featured should be OK".

The fact that we need to have a new DotM, OtBP, and FTT every month, I think, has served as an impetus to our editors to bring more articles up to guide status, and in so doing to improve the quality of our material for the good of our visitors. I know it's been a major inspiration to me personally. To take away that constant need for new featured articles by deciding that we can merely rerun old ones, takes away any sense of immediacy in regard to improving articles. It's for that same reason that I was opposed to the recent proposal to allow exceptions for articles below guide status (Kolyma Highway and Northern Lights). Moreover, if we rerun old featured articles willy-nilly, certainly somewhere down the line a reader is going to notice.

Perhaps the fact that an article like Hong Kong has been radically improved since it was featured tends to soften that blow. Even so, I think it's far superior to showcase articles that are completely new, rather than start down the slippery slope of looking for circumstances that justify re-featuring old articles.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:11, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

I think I somehow conveyed the opposite of what I meant to convey. If we had featured an undistricted and far smaller guide to Buffalo years before you started your work on it, you would not have had the (ahem) carrot of a potential destination of the month feature. The fact that we wouldn't be willing to "re-feature" the guide, despite the fact that the featured content would be mostly new, would be a disincentive for you to do that work. --Peter ^Talk 06:18, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree, and more generally speaking, I just don't think it's so black & white. There's miles between rerunning old articles "nilly-willy" and just rerunning a particular one 8 years (!) later because we see good reasons for it. I agree on your basic understanding of why we want to encourage new articles and therefore not just recycle previous DOTM's, but I don't see why we have to be so very rigid. Let's just be thoughtful and aware of this as an exception. Lately I've read the word "slippery slope" a lot more around here than I'd like to.. And let's be fair: the list of destinations ready to be featured isn't so terribly long at the moment. I don't think the current candidates would be harmed, and it's not like there's a long waiting list for future ones. And if we would ever be in the happy position of having way to many great star articles, we just switch to 2 week features :-) By that time, visitors and thus exposure surely will have grown too, so it wouldn't even necessarily change that! Again, I get your point, Andre, but in this case I think the use and opportunities in rerunning the HK article greatly outweigh the fear of slippery slopes of precedents. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:22, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

How about limiting re-features to timely destinations which were featured more than 5 years ago? When Hong Kong was first displayed on that other site, there was probably not much traffic to it and it was so long ago that I think it's a shame it should not be featured just because it was a long time ago. If Rio de Janeiro had been featured in 2004, then we wouldn't feature it for the 2014 World Cup or 2016 Olympics? Re-features should be tied to specific high-profile events when nominated to prevent a surge in re-features. I doubt contributors are most motivated by a DotM/OtBP/FTT nomination and that the rare re-feature would be a huge detriment to new, quality contributions. AHeneen (talk) 05:09, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm coming around to the idea of featuring Hong Kong again, but regarding what AHeneen said above, I would go a bit further. Re-featured articles should 1) as above, be limited to articles more than five years old and 2) should be done only for a reason that consensus agrees is truly compelling. I'd prefer to see a discussion much like this one, with a view to rigorously determining how compelling the reason really is for rerunning any previously featured article, precede any nomination. What say you?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Five years seems reasonable to start from, and if I understand correctly you're proposing that any re-features should first be properly discussed in order to determine whether there are indeed compelling enough reasons to re-use them, as we otherwise want new destinations to be featured? That seems right, and probably unavoidable anyway ;-) JuliasTravels (talk) 11:41, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I think that makes sense. It always really bugged me that Globe-trotter did such incredible work on Bangkok, but we wouldn't feature his work just because the article had been featured six years prior in January 2005 . --Peter ^Talk 17:50, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Now with all due respect to Globe-trotter and the great things he's done with Bangkok, I think that re-featuring an article simply because a lot of has been work put into it since it was last featured, is a lot further down the "willy-nilly" road than I'd like to go. In my opinion, the factor of "timeliness" that AHeneen mentioned is of paramount importance. To use AHeneen's example of Rio de Janeiro, if it's proposed that we re-feature it for the 2016 Olympics, under the framework of this discussion I'd be in support of that. And obviously Hong Kong qualifies too (though, IMO, Wikimania is still pretty weak for a "compelling reason").

However, the foregoing still isn't fair to editors like Globe-trotter who ought to be recognized for doing great and necessary work that is currently thankless. And I repeat that a lot of the arguments above that rebutted my skepticism of refeaturing articles make good points. The more I think about this, the more I wonder whether articles like Bangkok (or even Hong Kong) that have already been DotMs, but which have been substantially improved or updated since then, would be better off as a separate feature. "Past DotMs Revisited", or something like that. What say you to that? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:27, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

To be honest I'd say that's making things more complicated than needed, as we just agreed there should only be the rare re-feature now or then. Besides, I feel this whole discussion is mainly an insiders thing. Apart from the few loyal 8 year active users here, no-one knows if a featured article is featured for a second time and I don't think average users will even care. They just expect well-chosen, well-written links on the front page, and not tóo many doubles when scrolling through the list of previous features. I'm happy with some ground rules in order to encourage new articles and not re-feature all the time, but I think that's quite enough. Let's just see how it goes, if in a year or so we conclude there's too many re-features, we can always look into it again. I don't expect that to happen though. For the record, I think HK totally qualifies for reasons mentioned above ;-) JuliasTravels (talk) 23:48, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Understood. How about this alternate proposal, then: we set for ourselves an absolute limit of no more than one re-featured DotM and one re-featured OtBP in any twelve-month period (given the five-year rule, no FTT will be eligible for re-featuring until late 2017). This will force us to be very stringent in deciding whether a given circumstance justifies re-featuring. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I'd be willing to support that, but my point of view in general is that there are so many possible destinations in the World that we should never re-feature a destination, unless there is an exceptional reason to do so. (The Olympics could qualify, but to make Wikimania qualify seems to me to require a little too much Wiki-centeredness than I'd like - which I'd describe, at the unfortunate risk of offense, as a degree of self-absorption - and mere improvement of an article, to no matter what degree, would never qualify, in my opinion.) To AndreCarrotflower's point that great editors like Globe-trotter do "thankless" work, improving guides, I think there are other ways to thank them than by re-featuring an article to the detriment of every other never-featured destination guide that could instead have attention called to it. If the rest of you don't agree with me, I won't be upset or repeatedly argue for my point of view, but I did want to offer my opinion as part of this discussion, for your consideration. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:25, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, we all agree I guess, it's the definition of exceptional that we'll have to define as we go :-) I find it a bit of a shame that we're talking so much about hard rules and no-go's. We all agree in principle, we're talking about an odd exception now or then, in the case where someone is enthusiastic enough to make a strong case for it and finds a way to convince most of us. Why not leave some room for things like that? It's way more welcoming and (in my mind) a lot more "wiki-spirited". And sure, 1 and 1 max as a kind of target number seems fine - I'm not even sure we'll need them. We don't need a *rule* imho, anyone wanting to go over 2 will need to make one hell of a case anyway ;-) We tend to reach consensus well enough, don't you think?

As for HK, I don't at all think it qualifies in terms of an event alone: it's not comparable to the Olympics, of course :-) So looking at it that way, yes, that would just be wiki-centeredness and a bit silly. However, I think the other reasons are very compelling a this moment in time. The simple truth is that our guides are currently hardly used, simply because people don't find them. We can talk all we want about the perfect main page and features, but rather few people see it now. We could really really use some attention and good new editors, and Wikimania seems to offer a great chance for wiki-oriented people to *actively* use one of our guides, print them perhaps, get to know how they work. Small step for a Wiki-person to make and edit, and small step from there to getting hooked ;-) I can testify to that: I got to know WT and started editing after Wikimania Alexandria, where printed WT guides were handed out. As I see it, until we're back to at least half our old audience, we're still in transition. We need to be practical, push the process along where we can, and the rest will pick up. We don't necessarily need to promote Wikimania on our main page: the random visitor indeed won't care. But for them, HK is just a fine destination that totally belongs on a travel guide main page. JuliasTravels (talk) 09:24, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Your point is well made, Julias. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:31, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Very well said regarding the reason to feature Hong Kong for Wikimania—it will mean that ever wiki-expert at the conference will take notice of our project, and that's a lot of really useful people. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone has made a case for a re-feature, all of which were just for the launch (which was a pretty singular event), so I tend to think we can just use our judgement in future such discussions, rather than establishing a lot of rules for something so infrequent. --Peter ^Talk 22:23, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

(re-indent) But it's precisely the things that have happened over the past little while that have made me wonder how "singular" and "infrequent" it will be to re-feature DotMs. From the first Destination of the Month in July 2004 until January 2013, eight and a half years, we'd never rerun a DotM, OtBP, or FTT. After that, we put reruns into both the DotM and OtBP slots in January to coincide with the launch, then we decided to extend the launch-rerun period into February for both features, and now the consensus is trending strongly toward doing it yet again for a much less compelling reason. That's four, probably five reruns all in the space of four short months.

Now it's true that, in each case, we had (or will have had) logical reasons for re-featuring the articles, reasons that in some cases were compelling enough for me to lend my unreserved support. And it may very well be that rerunning featured articles ends up being a rare occasion going forward. But I think my suspicions that we've opened a Pandora's box are understandable given the fact that, since January, we've rerun previously featured articles almost more often than putting up new ones. Hence my talk about "slippery slopes" and "precedents". Bluntly, I'm skeptical that future reruns will be as infrequent as some say.

That is precisely why I introduced the proposal to limit re-features to once per feature per year—a limit that, I might add, we'd have already exceeded by now if this proposal had been in effect all along—or, alternatively, to turn reruns into a separate feature (which I still think would be a good idea). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:12, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Also, regarding JuliasTravels' comments: in my estimation, the problem with our site is not lack of awareness or attention among the Wikimedia community, it's lack of attention or awareness among the general public. According to Wikipedia, total attendance at Wikimania is usually well under a thousand, and it only broke into the four-figure range once—last year, when it was held in Washington, D.C.—likely due to the disproportionately large number of North Americans among the Wikimedia community. These are obviously the cream of the crop as far as active participants in Wikimedia projects, but in absolute terms that's still a miniscule number.

What is the goal in drawing attention to Wikivoyage among Wikimedia attendees (who, if they're so active in Wikimedia projects, have no doubt already heard of us anyway)? According to the points that have been made above, it's to attract new active editors. The actual numbers would probably be much lower than the hypothetical I'm about to lay out, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that attendance at this year's Wikimania matches last year's, and 10% of the attendees become regular Wikivoyage contributors. That would make 120 new active Wikivoyagers buffing up articles, making edits, participating in policy discussions... for the benefit of whom exactly, aside from the established Wikivoyage community and the 120 new editors themselves?

That scenario does not address the main problem with Wikivoyage, which is that we're basically an echo chamber at this point. That doesn't change just because there's more voices echoing in the chamber. And yes, we're slowly and gradually becoming known to the general public, but loudly proclaiming our existence to people who, in all likelihood, are already aware of it doesn't affect that process one bit. I think that if the only benefit we're likely to reap from this scheme is that our community will grow marginally bigger but no less insular, that's a wholly uncompelling argument for breaking the no-repeat-destination precedent. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:33, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

DotM banners

The new Main Page will require us to have banners ready before putting up new features. I have created Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates/Banners for that purpose. --Peter ^Talk 20:35, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

:I have the perfect one for Buffalo picked out () (replaced the foregoing with three properly-scaled alternatives), but I don't know how to add text, etc. Please advise. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:17, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

You may have already found this, but the text is added as part of a template. Check it out in use here . --Peter ^Talk 06:15, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

More banner-related concerns

Now that we've switched over to the new Main Page, should we edit the Updating section to reflect that we no longer use {{Template:Dotm}}, {{Template:Otbp}}, and {{Template:Ftt}} to update the featured articles? And should we VfD those templates, or will we perhaps be modifying them to work with the banners rather than the old-style links?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:26, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that will definitely need updating. I'm not sure about vfds. I think the new process is just to copy-paste the banners needed from Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates/Banners directly to the Main Page, so that at least is pretty simple. Some information on how to propose banners is clearly needed too. Template:DotmNomination is now out of date; I'll see if I can't fix that. --Peter ^Talk 22:04, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

{{FeatureNom}} should replace {{DotmNomination}} for future nominations. It's pretty dull, though, so if someone can think of a way to make it more colorful, go for it.

I don't think we should put the onus on the nominator to design the banner, simply because the (modest) amount of graphics-fu needed will prevent some people from feeling confident about participating in the process. --Peter ^Talk 00:15, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Too much North America?

The current "upcoming" list shows Pittsburgh & Oakland for DotM, Childs & Churchill for OtBP, Madison somewhere "pending decision on whether to feature as DotM or OtBP" (I'd say obviously OtBP.), and Across Canada by train & Chicago skyline for Featured travel topics, all in the next few months. Buffalo & Yellowstone are nominated for DotM but not scheduled. Checking archives, I see one US DotM and one travel topic so far this year. (Neither schedule nor archive shows a May DotM. Was there one?) I'd say that is too many North American destinations, too close together. Granted, there are many interesting destinations on the continent and our coverage is often better there than in other areas. Even so, I think there's a problem.

One solution would be some sort of addition to policy such as:

at least six months between DotMs from the same country

no more than, say, five Dotm+OtBP+FTT from a single country in a year

I do not think such a policy would be a good solution, but I have nothing better to suggest.

Other opinions? suggestions? Pashley (talk) 17:53, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

This has been the case for some time. As the person who's probably done the most over the past year to handle DotM, my own ad hoc policy has been to manage the schedule such that only one U.S. destination is featured per month (i.e. either as DotM, OtBP, or FTT). I realize the comment you posted addresses Canada as well as the U.S.; until recently there hadn't been enough Canadian destinations up for featuring to merit worrying about.

I personally don't think this is a serious enough problem to merit a policy change; certainly not one as restrictive as the one you propose. After all, there are only seven continents—and certain ones, i.e. Africa and South America, are comparatively lacking in quality Wikivoyage coverage, meaning we would quickly exhaust our supply of guide-or-better articles in those regions. If we just keep in the back of our collective mind that we need a more diverse slate of featured destinations, I think we'll do all right.

Another way to address this problem is to simply propose new, non-North American candidates for featured articles, as I recently did with Bilbao, Nagoya and the location-ambiguous travel topic Leave-no-trace camping. New nominations have been trickling in very slowly of late, another problem that would be solved using that strategy.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:46, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Also, let's not forget what time of year this is: the Northern Hemisphere summer. North America is a particularly destination-rich region of the world, but the vast majority of those destinations (with the exception of ski resorts and oddities like Churchill whose tourist season falls during a climatically inhospitable time of year) are effectively unfeatureable for a large portion of the year. Many of the current North American destinations on the schedule—Pittsburgh, Childs, Clarence—were proposed last year and had to wait out the winter. And on the other hand, it's an annual struggle between November and March trying to find destination articles that are both good enough to feature and climatically appropriate given that the Northern Hemisphere is covered in snow. In fact, part of the reason I was such a strong supporter of Peter's suggestion to re-feature past DotMs during the WMF launch, which took place a few months ago in the dead of the Northern Hemipshere winter, was because it prevented us having to do ridiculous things like running Johor Bahru as OtBP despite the fact that the majority of commenters rightly opposed it, or featuring Guadalajara as DotM before I had the time to do the major reconstructive surgery on that article required to make it truly feature-worthy. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:10, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I've noticed this too, but there probably is truth in the suggestion that a lot of North American articles are in better shape than those about the rest of the world; I've recently spent several happy evenings merging stubs in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside.

I'm currently trying to push Manchester and Blackpool up to the point where they're ready to be featured, but it will take a little time. Either way, it would be nice to see greater variation here. If we were to change policy (I'm not necessarily advocating doing so), perhaps we could say that both DotM and OtBP should rotate between continents (but staggered so they don't coincide), so each part of the world is featured equally. --Nick ^talk 21:09, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

If the consensus ends up being to change policy - and I reiterate that I am opposed to any such change - I think that, at the very least, the new policy needs to take into account the fact that not all places are created equal.

There have been proposals bandied about that would call for rotating continents on a month-to-month basis. Leaving aside for a moment the aforementioned issue that Wikivoyage simply has better coverage of some regions than others - which I still find pertinent - the fact remains that it would be ludicrous to expect two continents to compete on a level playing field such as, for example, South America, which contains 400 million people living in 14 countries and dependent territories, and Asia, which has over ten times as many people living in 51 countries and dependent territories (including Russia and Palestine), at least two of which individually are more populous than all of South America combined.

But really, to reduce the issue to a simple matter of population or number of countries is to oversimplify the discussion far beyond the threshold of usefulness. As one of numerous other variables, we can also say that Africa has a far less well-developed tourist infrastructure than, say, Europe. And of course, a poorly-developed tourist industry - even inherent danger in travelling to a certain place, which applies to huge swaths of Africa and a negligible portion of Europe - is not enough to disqualify a place from having an article on Wikivoyage, even a Guide or Star article. But it's unavoidable that factors like that will affect the depth of Wikivoyage's coverage of certain places, which in turn affects the number of articles that are featureable now or ever will be.

So, if we're going to go the route of changing policy, we're going to have to take this inherent inequality into account and assign each continent different weights. We should never simultaneously have a backlog of North American or European DotM's and a shortage of South American or African ones.

If this all seems far more complicated than the issue merits, then perhaps we'll be better off simply reminding ourselves periodically to ratchet up the diversity factor. :)

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:08, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I like that! Let's ratchet up the diversity factor! :) --Nick ^talk 15:43, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Would any of Teaching English, Silk Road, On the trail of Marco Polo or On the trail of Kipling's Kim be a good nominee for FTT? I cannot really judge since I wrote large parts of the first two and nearly all of the last two. Any of them would increase diversity. Pashley (talk) 18:44, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Silk Road could be the best candidate. It has to be a guide though (or is it one already?). At the moment Marco Polo and Kipling's Kim lack sections useful for todays travelers to follow the journey - a hint at least how to follow the trail, when, by which means, etc. I can imagine Teaching English to be a great FTT, sadly only restricted to that part of traveling community being able to do so ;)- but this might actually be the case for a large part of WV readers. Danapit (talk) 07:38, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Right off the bat, of the four potential FTTs cited by Pashley, only Teaching English is at Guide or better status. Frankly, though—at quick glance, and with the caveat that I'm much less qualified to judge what status a travel topic article should have rather than a destination article, I think an argument could probably be made to bump any of the other three up to Guide. At the very least, if consensus ran against it, bringing any of them up to Guide status would take very little work. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:30, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

In the case of On the trail of Marco Polo and On the trail of Kipling's Kim, though I understand we allow a lot more leeway in this regard with travel topics than with destination articles, I echo Danapit's concerns in that I too would prefer to see an article layout that strikes a better balance between the practicalities of retracing these footsteps on the one hand and rehashing the plot of a book or the historical details of Marco Polo's voyage on the other. Silk Road, I feel, would actually be a great model to follow in doing that. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:39, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Madison???

To be blunt, we need to make a decision on whether Madison should be DotM or OtBP. We have nothing approaching a consensus on this issue, opinions are running about 50/50, and the debate is proceeding at a snail's pace. Meanwhile, the article is due to be featured on the front page in September in some form or fashion, and we need to come up with either a non-U.S. DotM candidate or a non-U.S. OtBP candidate to feature opposite Madison. I'd like to have this problem solved before our back is up against the wall. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 10:49, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't see any strong grounds for considering it off the beaten path. If Madison is OtBP, so is Buffalo, and so is Rochester. And so are countless other cities with upwards of 150,000 residents. (Not saying population is the only guide, but...) The metric Pashley suggested is so limiting as to be unworkable; we'd quickly run out of DotM candidates. It's also unfair, as it treats the entire United States as the domain from which to select "worthy" destinations; if our hypothetical traveler is instead flying into Milwaukee, and limiting his travels to Wisconsin, then Madison doesn't look so unappealing anymore. LtPowers (talk) 23:32, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

With opinions split and diverging every which way, I'd recommend to slot this in whichever makes sense from a scheduling perspective (whether we have more of a need for DotMs or OtBPs, whether using one or the other would help spread out North American features, etc.). --Peter ^Talk 22:01, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

In that case, given what's been said on this thread, I envision moving Madison to the DotM column. I nominated Soltau as OtBP with an eye toward putting it into the September slot (opposite Madison) as soon as it garners enough support. Your votes are appreciated. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:29, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Imho Madison is OtBP if it fits better in the schedule for Dtom, i would object too hard. Andre, its your call.jan (talk) 13:02, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Please explain your criteria for considering a destination off the beaten path, then. Because if Madison is off the beaten path, then so are 95% or more of our articles. LtPowers (talk) 21:03, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

As I have said all through this protracted debate, I agree with LtPowers.

Quite frankly, something that strikes me about this discussion is the fact that it has gone on for months and not only is there no clear dominant opinion (let alone a consensus), but neither side has even budged from their original position on the matter. This says to me that there's no consensus now and never will be. That's precisely the reason I jumped at the chance to make the executive decision of putting Madison in the DotM column rather than the OtBP. I envision it staying there unless and until a massive groundswell of support for the opposite position manifests itself—not so much because I personally think that it belongs in the DotM column than because I'd like to have any definite answer to the question of what to do.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:44, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

For what it's worth (not that this really changes anything), I agree that Madison should be a DotM. Ann Arbor has a similar amount of clout as a tourist destination and is smaller population-wise than Madison, and I don't recall anyone arguing that it should have been anything but a DotM. PerryPlanet (talk) 23:17, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Buffalo

Mates, just a stupid question: Buffalo is now for about a year on hold. I think with the summertime approaching it either gets imediately on the list or it will sit one more year on the list. I know Andre and LtP are working on it but it looks it a bit weird to see it lingering on or nomination list with comments from 2012...jan (talk) 11:21, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe districtification is taking a lot longer than anyone expected, and I'm not able to help as much as I thought I might. Andre is incredibly thorough with these things. Although perhaps he's farther along than I realize, since the work is being done in his userspace. Andre, keeping in mind the district articles don't need to be perfect, how close are we to taking them live (allowing us to remove the listings from Buffalo)? LtPowers (talk) 12:05, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I took Buffalo off the schedule entirely for the precise reason that I expected it would not be featured until 2014. I'd much rather give in to reality than repeatedly disrupt the schedule by moving it down a month once reality strikes. LtPowers is correct—districtification is taking much longer than I expected, largely because of a huge number of things I've had to take care of in my off-wiki life.

To answer your question, LtPowers, I'd say I'm about 75% done with districtification. At the current time I'm finishing up the fourth of seven district articles. I say 75% rather than whatever percentage four-sevenths is because the four district articles that have already been written are the main areas of Buffalo of interest to visitors, and therefore contain the longest "See", "Do", "Sleep", and especially "Eat", "Drink", and "Buy" sections. By far, the "Buy" section is what takes the most time to write in any given district article, because I have to write each listing from scratch—unlike "See", "Do", "Sleep", "Eat", and "Drink" which I can simply import from the larger Buffalo article.

For perspective, each of the four district articles that are complete or nearly complete will be in the neighborhood of 150K in length. The West Side may or may not break the 100K mark, and a liberal estimate for the East Side and South Buffalo would be 75K. I estimate that the districts will "go live" (and listings will come off the larger Buffalo article) before the end of the year, and Buffalo will likely be DotM around April or May 2014. I would be opposed to featuring Buffalo as DotM as it is now because it is ridiculously overlong—by far the longest article on Wikivoyage. The listings badly need to be devolved from the main article to the districts.

If you're interested in tracking my progress, here are the relevant links:

User:AndreCarrotflower/Downtown—complete

User:AndreCarrotflower/Allentown and the Delaware District—complete

User:AndreCarrotflower/Elmwood Village—complete

User:AndreCarrotflower/North Buffalo—nearly complete

User:AndreCarrotflower/West Side—contains only imported info from Buffalo so far

User:AndreCarrotflower/South Buffalo—contains only imported info from Buffalo so far

User:AndreCarrotflower/East Side—not begun yet

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:14, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Is there any reason that work is being done in userspace? It's sort of anti-wiki as it prevents others from collaborating to help fix things, and you also miss out on global mainspace updates such as changes made by bots. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:18, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, I wanted to avoid the awkward phenomenon of having, for a long period of time, links to unfinished or half-finished district articles from the larger Buffalo article. I was originally planning on writing the district articles in mainspace and having them be orphans, but it was suggested to me—for some reason I want to say it was Peter who said so, but I'm not really inclined to dig through reams and reams of old talk-page conversations to find out for sure—that I write the district articles in userspace and move them over en masse once they are finished. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:43, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Shall we take it off the nominees list? We can renomiate it anytime when/if you are ready? Otherwise users will "fall" over it again and again. I think we need new nominees and shouldn't linger around with this over two years. Do you agree? I think there will be overwhelming support once it is done. Regards,jan (talk) 15:01, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

I'd say slush the nomination for now, ask Andre to move his stuff from userspace to mainspace as soon as reasonably possible (his call), and as soon as that is done consider nominating the whole group as Wikivoyage:Collaboration of the month to get additional work done. Pashley (talk) 17:18, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree that slushing the nomination is probably the best thing to do in the immediate term.

Regarding moving the articles from mainspace to userspace, I'd prefer to first finish work on North Buffalo—the district article that I'm currently nearing completion on—if only to avoid disrupting my rhythm. After I complete that, I will move the four completed district articles to mainspace, put the Buffalo district map that Peter made on the main Buffalo article, and devolve the listings in "See", "Do", "Eat", "Drink", and "Sleep" to the district articles in favor of general overviews (this will also entail creating suburb articles such as Amherst (New York), Cheektowaga, Tonawanda etc., as I included first-ring suburban attractions in "See" and a few annual festivals in the suburbs under "Do").

As for the three articles that haven't yet been completed (West Side, South Buffalo, and East Side), I'd like to initially leave them as redlinks, and move them to mainspace only after the substantial portion of work has been completed for them. Again, I envision Buffalo being fully districted by the end of the year if not before.

Please let me know if that sounds okay.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:53, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Also, if possible, I'd like to leave the banners I made for Buffalo up on Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates/Banners, because 1) we don't really have a set protocol for dealing with destinations that have been slushed with banners ready to go, 2) it's understood that Buffalo will eventually be re-nominated, and 3) when the renomination occurs, it will be easier to find the banners that were previously made. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:59, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

By way of updating interested parties in my progress, I've begun editing in userspace the new, much less flabby Buffalo article (User:AndreCarrotflower/Buffalo), with links to all four district articles that have been completed thus far. It will go live in mainspace, supplanting the current Buffalo, within a week or two.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:12, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Pagebanners

Now that pagebanners are standard on this site, shall a customized pagebanner be a requirement or at least a criterion for judging the suitability of a page for a DotM or OtBP feature? I vote yes on this, at least as a criterion. What do you all think? Ikan Kekek (talk) 13:18, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I would agree - yes, as a criterion. --Nick ^talk 13:36, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, as a sort of weak requirement. It is fine to nominate a page that lacks a custom banner, but one should be added before it is featured. Pashley (talk) 14:25, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

What Pashley said. A criteria for featuring, but not for nomination. James A ▪ talk 14:31, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

In this context, I look at pagebanners essentially the same way I look at maps: it's definitely better to have one than not to, and it's points in favor of any nominee if they have one. But as far as the hard-and-fast rules are concerned, we don't absolutely require nominees to have maps, and I don't think we ought to require them to have banners either. Frankly, I feel that if we're too restrictive on the question of what a feature article needs to have, we shrink the pool of eligible articles and we reduce - rather than enhance - the quality of the feature. This is doubly true when the restrictions are in regard to things that don't directly have to do with the actual information contained in the article.

I'm still a little groggy from the morning, and I'm not entirely clear what distinction is being drawn by "requirement" vs. "criterion". So if my comment is essentially the same as the above, I apologize. :)

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:06, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I think we're all basically in agreement so far. I agree that the lack of a customized pagebanner shouldn't make it against the rules to nominate an article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:04, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

We follow the same process for creating a DotM Main Page banner too—sounds good. --Peter ^Talk 19:11, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

I added the standard pagebanner for the page but don't want to add unilateral a picture for this page. I think the picture should show either the (parts/entire) world or our Dotm logo. What are your ideas? jan (talk) 12:53, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

And, speaking of pagebanners...

I notice that we've added a pagebanner to Wikivoyage:Destination of the month candidates. I was actually wondering when/if the new TOC was going to be applied to project pages rather than just articles. My concern is that the way the page is formatted now, each banner is treated as its own section in the TOC (i.e. the entries in between the "Upcoming" and "Nominations for Destination of the month" sections) which makes it look confusing, especially to newbies. Can this be addressed? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 13:23, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Well the obvious solution would be to change Template:Banner to not use header formatting on the contents of the banners, or at least to reduce the header level to h3 (===). LtPowers (talk) 14:27, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I understand. Forgive my naïveté; my strong suit is hammering out prose. As far as wikiformatting, I know what I need to know to update dotm and not a whole lot else. :) -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:40, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, rather than "obvious", I should have said "simplest on its face, but perhaps hiding unintended consequences". LtPowers (talk) 16:15, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Cross-Wikivoyage nomination Travemünde

Mates,

i talked with User:Tine, who is a German WV admin, about a possible cross-WV nomination of Travemünde. Tine agreed that this is an interesting idea. She will discuss it with the German crew and plunge forward it. As far as i know this would be the first cross-WV nomination. It will be for summer 2014, so there is loads of time to sort out the details but we need a slot between June-August 2014. This is also the time for the ten year celebration since we started Dotm. Any objections/considerations? jan (talk) 10:04, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Why would the German Wikivoyage feature an article written in English? LtPowers (talk) 15:15, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

LtP: no WV de would feature Travemünde in German and we in English. Two articles one destination. jan (talk) 19:10, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

What is special about Travemünde that it deserves a multi-site feature? LtPowers (talk) 19:52, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Its the only aticle so far where threre has been sufficient interest to work on a cross wiki feature by the two communities as far as i know. Travemünde is very popular for Germans, Scandics etc. and i guess it will be hard to find another article to start a cross-wiki feature in the near term. jan (talk) 20:03, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

A cross-wiki DotM sounds cool and I've noticed you doing a great work on Travemünde. However how would it sound to pick an article about some better known destination either in the German-speaking world (e.g. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, Mosel Valley, Dresden, Zürich..?) or somewhere else? Travemünde on the other hand would be a good OtBP candidate... ϒpsilon (talk) 21:36, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I would need more convincing before I could get behind this. Fine and dandy that Travemünde is the only article that's complete enough to merit featured article status in both English and German. That doesn't answer what I feel is the most important question, which is what is served by having a cross-language promotion to begin with? What kind of promotional advantage would we gain? The number of people who both a) are bilingual in English and German AND b) know about the English-language Wikivoyage but are unaware that a German one exists, or vice versa, seems to me to be too small a demographic to justify such a thing. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 22:08, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a nice thought, but I'm not sure that it would be of great benefit to either project. I personally think it's good that each language features different destinations and, without any disrespect to the people of Travemünde, it is perhaps not the most prominent settlement on the global stage. If we were to do this future in I think we would be better to reserve this privilege (?) for cities that are hosting events of global importance (e.g. the Olympics) and hence would be of interest to the readers of each language version. You've done some really good work with the article, but I'm not sure that this is necessarily the way to promote it. --Nick ^talk 23:50, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

@Ypsilon: The bigger articles have proofed so far difficult because either or their article lacked guide level. I could check but my main issue is that we should start with an article with not so big ambitions. I tried in the last years to bring up some German articles (because after the WT/WV split in 2006 most of the Germans left) but i was difficult to get interest for. I think it would be good to get the communities a bit into the cross-wiki work. If people are willing to start something bigger, i'm willing to help but history tells if the ambition is to big we will fail

@Andre: I think the main advantage of cross wiki would be that we stop thinking of WV en as a standalone. There are other WV communities as well. The Germans last year gave as a new base. Without them it would have been difficult to start from scratch. If you see have the page banner rollout is perceived in the German WV you would wonder... I think we can ignore the others but i would prefer to get started with something inclusive. E.g. the Germans would have been happy if someone just told them that page banner is discussed. We need to engage more and if people build personal relations there will be less friction. Travemünde is a holiday destination with a bit of culture. So it is easy to get interest. If we start e.g. Berlin, we will start with districts etc. That is not really fun and will turn people of. I think we need to cross wiki to join forces in popularise WV (in all languages).

@Nick: Of course London would be cool but it is not realistic going to be happen. Both communities try to attract more users. Let us rather start small but successfull instead of failing big time. I don't care if it is Travemünde but my past experience tells me that the big targets results in loads of discussion instead of feelings of success. If you want to make a start lets have small steps. jan (talk) 19:47, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

[unindent]I think Jan makes a strong argument for considering a cross-Wikivoyage feature now and then (and we might want to do one with other language boards than German later), but I would like to take this to a more general place: Why don't we reestablish a general board for Wikivoyage like we had during the transition? That way, it will be a lot easier to coordinate on ideas like pagebanners. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:14, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

There is "a general board for Wikivoyage" called Wikivoyage Meta Lounge ;) All Projects, not only the new ones, should be present there. We can exchange ideas and help others, while we get help, too. --Timmaexx (talk) 10:27, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I strongly support the idea. Let's improve both articles and feature them one month together. -- DerFussi 04:36, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Me too. Maybe this is mostly symbolic, but it's certainly worthwhile if it helps at all to renew a sense of interlingual community and shared endeavor. We've lost that to a noticeable extent after migrating to the WMF and losing our wts/general board in the process. Meta hasn't fulfilled that role well, for reasons I guess we'll need to think hard about. --Peter ^Talk 05:00, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. Even if there isn't any major benefit to us in doing a cross-wiki feature, it certainly seems harmless enough as a friendly gesture in the spirit of cooperation with our fellow travel wiki. I don't see what we have to lose. PerryPlanet (talk) 05:20, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Re the Meta lounge - could it as simple as putting the Meta lounge in the sidebar under Get involved? And propose the same for the other WVs of course. Just making it easier to access from each wiki would help. *plug* Still biding some time before we announce the Wikivoyage:Dynamic maps Expedition there for more feedback (and we need feedback here too). -- torty3 (talk) 06:01, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and add it to the sidebar per this suggestion, and see whether anyone objects. Also, I've suggested we have a regular "meet up" (once a month?) on Meta to mention what interesting things are happening on individual language versions. --Peter ^Talk 07:57, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Great that my nomination ignited such a good discussion. To honour the spirit i will do my best to get Travemünde up to start level until we reach the showcase some point next year. Any critics are welcome! jan (talk) 11:44, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I have made a copy-editing pass, fixing some very minor infelicities in English usage. Before that, it was well-written and in good English, but obviously not by a native speaker. Pashley (talk) 13:41, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I don't understand any of the "opposition". The proposal as I read it is very simple; there is an article for a town in both the German and English language version that is ready (or will be ready) to be featured, so we can feature them on their respective language versions at the same time. Why are people discouraging this with comments like "What's so special about this town?" and "Munich would be better"? If someone here wants a "special town" to be featured across language versions then by all means choose a 'deserving' city and make it happen, but here we have people who are interested in a town across language versions that are willing to make them both featurable guides. Why is that a problem? What HARM would it do? Isn't collaboration something we've always hoped to have more of not less? ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:41, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I completely agree. Pashley (talk) 16:11, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep! And when you feel the article is ready for featuring, don't forget to support it's nomination, although there is still plenty of time till the next summer. Danapit (talk) 16:21, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

My impression was that the intent was to make a big deal out of this, thus jan's comment about a "ten year celebration". If we're going to draw significant attention to the fact that both languages are somehow coordinating to feature the same destination, it seems like the destination in question ought to have something going for it beyond the simple fact that it's available on both wikis. Furthermore, I have reservations about the precedent this would set; for example, what if other language versions also want their fair share of en.wikivoyage's collaboration attention? What if we decide that Travemunde needs to be shuffled from the agreed-upon month for scheduling reasons? LtPowers (talk) 20:32, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

LtP: i understand your points but i think the amount of cross-wiki articles between the languages is rather limited and there will always two go-betweens needed. I think if others want to engage with en too we can limit it to e.g. Two listings per year. If i think long-term it would be cool to have one day every year one article that is featured over all languages. This would have a tremendous effect and would make us more visible. Concerning the ten years: the Germans gave us a new base so i wanted to pay my respect for that. I understand if you would want to preserve it for something bigger but then it needs to be very cool. jan (talk) 20:45, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

User talk:AndreCarrotflower#O'Hare International Airport

Folks:

Jan has posed an extremely interesting question on my talk page regarding airports as featured articles. I think featuring O'Hare, as he suggested, would be a great way to draw attention to the Airport Expedition; the only question is whether it would qualify as OtBP or FTT. Your input is appreciated.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:18, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

That is a good question! Personally I think, for these purposes, airports should count as a travel topic. I've always seen OtBP as a destination: somewhere travellers would willingly visit, albeit not necessarily an obvious location. Airports don't really fit that description and, as a necessary part of many people's travelling experiences, I think they do fit well under the FTT banner. --Nick ^talk 19:26, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

My take on the issue, as copied-and-pasted from my response on my talk page:

"At first glance, it strikes me that... O'Hare... could work either as an OtBP or an FTT. For purely practical reasons (being that it's a U.S. destination), my first instinct would be that treating it as an FTT would cause the least disruption to the schedule if we're aiming for a November or December feature."

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:27, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm split on airports because a lot of (business) travellers only see the airport and a hotel but besides Tom Hanks nobody intends to stay for more then a couple of days (at least i'm fed up after 48 hours in an airport hotel). I think FTT does it more justice for the mainstream. Shall we provisionally add it to FTT? jan (talk) 19:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I would definitely agree with having it as a featured travel topic. Having it as a DoTM or OtBP would remove all meaning from those statements. No airport is a "destination" and O'Hare is as far from off the beaten path as you can get. But I would be fine with it as a featured travel topic. PerryPlanet (talk) 20:17, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I think Perry summed it up very well, and he's convinced me that it should be featured in the guise of a travel topic, even though it doesn't really fit there, either, as one airport does not a topic make. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:03, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

What, no O'Hare, Destination of the Month? Come one, come all, visit O'Hare International Airport!? In addition to its many (one) attractions, it boasts climate control, an attractive food court, and moving tracks where large immobile people with large bags form a slowly zooming line! ...O'Hare, once you arrive, you'll probably want to stay much longer than you planned! --Peter ^Talk 06:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Schedule changes for Q4 2013

As I detailed in my comments regarding User:Pashley's recent nomination of Kunming as DotM: we're in need of some DotM candidates suitable for featuring in the Northern Hemisphere winter, but Xiamen, another Chinese city, is already on the schedule for December. It's true that there's a much more limited range of featureable destinations in the months between December and March, but still, I would be uncomfortable placing two destinations in the same country so close together on the schedule.

A solution that came to my mind is to bump Xiamen up to October 2013 on the schedule, move Cairns down to December, and place Kunming on the schedule for February. A potential problem with that solution is it would place Cairns outside its "Time to feature" window, which ends in November. In my opinion, if it's only a one-month difference, surely it's a minor issue. But in light of some previous discussions on this page regarding ignoring the "Time to feature" suggestions, I thought it would be best in this instance not to go about reorganizing the schedule unilaterally.

Thoughts?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:46, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I nominated both Xiamen & Kunming and would like to see more Destinations from Asia generally and China in particular get featured, but I agree we don't want these two too close together.

I am not sure about moving Cairns. It is in tropical Northern Australia. I think most of the domestic tourism is in Aussie winter, people escaping colder cities further South. I'm not sure when the season is for non-Aussie tourists or whether it is a good place to go in summer. Any Aussies care to comment? Pashley (talk) 00:09, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

December 1st, when Cairns would be placed on the Main Page per my suggestion, is not exactly the deepest depths of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, so it stands to reason that Northern Australia wouldn't yet have reached the blistering height of its summer either. It's an imperfect solution, to be sure, but the most important thing IMO is to get rid of the ?s in the DotM column of the schedule. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:44, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

New Proposal: China is the most populous country in the world. I don't think there's really a problem with featuring cities in China in both December and February. Nevertheless, I would suggest that we switch Oakland and Xiamen, so that Chinese cities are instead featured in November and February. Surely, we don't need more of a buffer than that, and it's not a problem to feature Oakland in December - on the contrary, that also has the advantage of leaving more time between two American cities, a factor that, oddly, no-one seems to have considered. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:23, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

To say the least, I am extremely skeptical about Oakland as DotM in December. Though you, Ikan, in your nomination blurb, said that you "believe" that Oakland's climate is "passable" the whole year round, according to Wikipedia the average high temperature there in December is only 58°F/14°C, overnight lows drop down to 48°F/7°C, and most troubling of all, one out of every three days is rainy, with 4½ inches/113mm of rain falling that month. I, for one, would not want to visit Oakland under those circumstances, especially if one of the selling points as described in the article is that it's been characterized as having the best climate in the USA.

I continue to be a strong supporter of Oakland as DotM because it is a wonderfully written article, but "Time to feature" absolutely needs to be revised, at a minimum to Mar-Nov. Meanwhile, in the case of Cairns, I think that as a seaside resort it's far more excusable to recommend people go there when it's maybe a touch too hot, because there are ample opportunities to cool off at any given time, than to recommend they go to Oakland when it's chilly and damp. And anyway, in Cairns' case, 88°F/31°C isn't so hot as to be absolutely unbearable, and December is only a slightly rainier-than-average month there.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:24, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Why do you think it's a problem to feature two articles about China in December and February, but not a problem to feature two US articles in September and November? I find that a strange double standard. I doubt that Kunming and Xiamen are any more similar (and probably less so, as witness the use of different "dialects") than Madison and Oakland. So what, really, is the problem here? (Parenthetically, 4.44 inches of rain in an entire month is no big deal, and I do indeed think that an average temperature of 58°F with lows of 48°F is damn good for December in the United States. But that's really a side issue. The real issue is, what really is the problem with scheduling, and why does it apply to Chinese and not American cities?) Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:53, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm reminded of the remarks I made here (timestamped 04:08, 17 June 2013). The reason for the double standard is that, in point of fact, all countries can't be treated equally. China may be a more populous and diverse country than the U.S., but the relevance of that fact is middling compared to the relevance of the fact that the United States is a far more popular tourist destination than China, therefore we have far better coverage of the U.S. than of China, therefore we have more guide-or-better articles on the U.S. than on China, therefore we have had far more U.S. destinations than Chinese ones nominated for featured-article status. Now Pashley has been making an effort to diversify our offerings by highlighting locations that tend to be underrepresented on the Main Page, and he ought to be commended for doing so, but the fact remains that as much as it would be great if we were dealing with a level playing field at the present time, we're actually not. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:13, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good explanation of why it would, therefore, be a problem to feature two Chinese cities in December and February. Why is that a problem? It would be much better to keep the schedule as is than to contort it out of what seems like a misplaced fear to me. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:21, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

In general, we should avoid featuring destinations from any one country with that kind of frequency. We've been featuring articles on U.S. destinations extremely often these past few months out of sheer necessity - we had a pretty huge backlog of feature-ready U.S. destinations by March, so when the snow stopped flying in the U.S. we had to clear it out. The mere fact that we were compelled to do something we really shouldn't do doesn't mean we ought to do it again with a different country. We may not be able to be as diverse as we like, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do the best we can. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:28, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't think any of this justifies featuring Cairns when the average temperature (if I understood you correctly) is 88 F. That is not a preferable time to visit and seems a lot more problematic to me than featuring Oakland in December, though I know you disagree on this. However, when would you plan on featuring Mumbai, given sufficient support? What destination are you projecting for January? Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:48, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

OK, I see from the Wikipedia article that it's the average high temperature that's 31.4 C/88.5 F, not the average overall temperature. The average low in Cairns in December is 23.4 C/74.1 F, which is not bad. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:51, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

(multiple edit conflicts) In taking another look at your proposal, Ikan, I think I can support it (though I still prefer my own). I think the more important thing is, going forward, I'd like to see us do a better job emphasizing geographic diversity in selecting articles to nominate for DotM. The backlog of U.S. destinations that we had earlier this year was formidable, and it was a challenge arranging the schedule so they were evenly spaced and we avoided monotony.

Also, regarding your question about Mumbai, my plan was to slot it in for January, with Kunming following in February.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:01, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

It sounds like the ideal solution is to find more good DotM candidates from underrepresented countries. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:27, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I said "any" time when I nominated Kunming, but the middle of N hemisphere winter is not the best time. I was there in February a few years back and there was frost some nights. I'm Canadian & was not much bothered, but someone who comes from another climate and/or is expecting a tropical holiday might be. Also, the cheap hotels generally do not have heat in the rooms, though they do have excellent duvets. Moreover, many travellers use Kunming as a base to start on the Yunnan tourist trail and the main towns on it are at higher altitude so colder than Kunming. Shangrila, at 3200 m vs Kunming's 2000, was well below freezing some nights in February.

Xiamen winters are far milder, see Xiamen#Climate, so it might make more sense for winter months. Pashley (talk) 03:33, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Wait, a little bit of frost makes a location not worth visiting? =) I'm especially surprised to see a Buffalonian complaining of 58-degree highs in winter. LtPowers (talk) 17:15, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

The solution to that problem is simple: transpose Xiamen and Kunming on the schedule. All that's required are a few more support votes for Kunming, and to fast-track the DotM banner creation process. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 18:13, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Former DotM/Former OtBP/Former FTT title icons

...belong on former DotM's, OtBP's and FTT's.

To put it another way, after this most recent rotation, I should have placed the Former OtBP icon on Soltau myself, rather than seeing the big green check-mark staring at me when I went to update the article.

We have the proper procedure spelled out for us in black and white on the DotM page. Let's follow it.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 02:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Clarence and Oakland

They're quite dissimilar and in opposite parts of the US. Is it a problem that their features will overlap on the main page? Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:39, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I imagine not. Madison and Chicago skyline guide are both on the main page as I write this, and those two cities are far more similar to each other than Clarence and Oakland. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 14:50, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

A problem is too much said, but on Talk:Main Page there did seem to be a shared wish to try and get diversity on the main page as much as possible, especially trying to avoid situations like the current one. I for one think we should try to not have 2 US destinations at once. I suppose for anyone familiar with the US they're probably "dissimilar" and so on, for me it's all just America ;-) JuliasTravels (talk) 16:12, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

The backlog of US destinations we faced over the course of this summer has eased up a lot, but I still think we really don't have the luxury of doing what JuliasTravels suggests at the current time.

Furthermore, I'm fully in favor of a more diverse range of featured articles to put on the Main Page, and I argued vociferously as much in past discussions - but I think it needs to be made clear that the reality we're facing is that Wikivoyage's guide-or-better articles tend to be concentrated in relatively few areas of the world, the USA being one of them. Until we improve our coverage in underrepresented areas, which I feel is the real underlying issue, we'll only get so far in trying to diversify the Main Page.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 16:23, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Anything listed at Star articles that has not already been featured is a good candidate. Pashley (talk) 19:56, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

London/Hampstead for OtBP

Ikan recently nominated London/Hampstead for OtBP, with the caveat that "the London article was featured in July/August, 2012", mitigated by the fact that "by next June, almost 2 years will have passed since then". This was likely in response to the cautious note Peter struck on Chicago/Far Northwest Side's nomination for OtBP, where he characterized the general consensus as being that district articles can be featured only when "the huge city has already been featured a while ago, and when the district has a character sufficiently distinct from the rest of the city." I also remember there being an even bigger brouhaha when we featured New Orleans/Lower 9th Ward as OtBP.

I think the current policy regarding the featuring of district articles is unnecessarily restrictive. I understand the desire for a greater range of destinations on the Main Page - I myself have argued vociferously for more diversity - but I think we need to balance that goal with a policy of putting up as few obstacles as possible to well-written articles being featured. And anyway, our policy forbids the duplication of content between articles except in special cases, so it wouldn't be simply a case of "re-running" a featured article again - and even if it were, we've already done that several times anyway, and at one point were seriously considering doing it again.

I would like to propose that Guide-or-better district articles should be eligible to be featured anytime, before or after the parent article, and no matter how distinct the district's identity is from the city itself, provided they're not too close together on the schedule. I think we should aim for an absolute minimum of nine months, and preferably a year or more, between Huge City and district or between two districts of the same Huge City.

Also, what about Guide-or-better district articles where the Huge City is Usable or worse? (Do any exist?)

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:02, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

The time frame seems reasonable to me. I'd say we should try for at least a year, if possible, between a city article and a district article or between two district articles from the same city, but 9 months isn't horrible. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:14, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I would object to this modification. It essentially gives cities that happen to have enough content to have districts a double shot (if not more) at the main page. I would find it very strange to feature Chicago and then 12 months later feature Chicago/Loop, with many of the same attractions and highlights. LtPowers (talk) 18:53, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

What time frame is there according to current policy? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:15, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

First off, I don't even know if I'd use the word "policy" to describe something so ephemeral and improvised. The only places I've been able to find anything approaching a guideline for what we should do about single-district featured destinations (correct me if I'm wrong) are this thread, the nomination debate for Chicago/Far Northwest Side, and Wikivoyage talk:Destination of the month candidates#Single district as destination?. The consensus seems to be that the spacing should be a considerable, but indefinite, length of time.

Frankly, the timeframe issue is of secondary importance to me - I'd certainly be willing to hear out anyone who said nine months or a year is too soon. More offensive to me is the necessity of running the Huge City article before the district article (again, what happens when the Huge City isn't Guide or better? Does that automatically exclude all its districts from consideration even if they're Guide or better?) and the proviso that the district in question has to be sufficiently distinct in character from the Huge City in general. Those I see as unnecessary restrictions that might serve to bar otherwise deserving, even excellent, articles from exposure to a wider audience.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:00, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you, Andre. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:53, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't care so much about the time frame or the order of operations, but I strongly oppose allowing heavily districted cities to be featured multiple times, absent the extenuating circumstance of a truly unique or off-the-beaten-path district. District articles are subsidiary to huge city articles, not really unique destinations in their own right. LtPowers (talk) 14:54, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, for example, how dissimilar are Rochester (New York), Pittsburgh and Buffalo? All three of these places are mid-sized American industrial cities that share the same regional culture and are in close geographic proximity to each other, and they're all either past DotMs or almost-certain future ones. I would wager that they have more in common with each other than, say, Manhattan/Financial District, Brooklyn/Coney Island and Brighton Beach, and Staten Island.

More importantly, in my opinion we absolutely should give destinations with more information more chances for Main Page exposure than those with less. "More information" tends to go hand in hand with "of more interest to travellers", and the traveller comes first. And if for now and for the foreseeable future (i.e. until we get the SEO issue fixed, if ever), the breadth of our content is going to remain essentially the same, we should jump at the chance to feature the really outstanding content we do currently have on the Main Page as much as possible, rather than running mediocre articles on places of limited interest to travelers while superior ones on popular destinations have to wait in the wings for no good reason.

It would be nice if we had the luxury to have a truly diverse Main Page, but despite the pleas of some Wikivoyagers, I remain convinced that until we see serious attention paid to the content of articles in locales like Africa, India etc., we can't justify such a policy. We'd quickly run out of articles in certain areas of the world and have a long backlog of eligible candidates in other areas. This lack of ability to gain new participants is one of many reasons why the SEO problem is so urgent, and frankly, I'm dismayed and perplexed that the WMF (judging from the thread on Meta) is dragging their feet and/or stonewalling us on the issue. You'd think if they were willing to spend so much in legal fees defending us from IB's lawsuit, they'd want to ensure the expensive new addition to the WMF family remains viable. Clearly, that's a separate issue.

Furthermore, if, hypothetically, someone else had written Buffalo and I had come along later and districted it, I, as an author, wouldn't want to have the content I added be completely ineligible for the Main Page. That may be an unwikilike attitude to take in terms of ownership of articles, but let's face it - at the current time, we authors aren't really doing what we do for the benefit of anyone outside our small club. And for regular contributors, I could see it functioning as a deterrent to districting or otherwise improving articles on cities that are past DotM's.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 17:00, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

We don't have any evidence that the WMF is stonewalling us or dragging their feet. That's an unfair accusation. Also, your comparisons (to Rust Belt cities and NYC districts/subarticles) are deeply flawed. First, Staten Island isn't a district, and Coney Island is a district in a different article than Wall Street. (NYC is a special case, an enormous city that we treat like a region rather than like a typical huge city, so it makes a very poor analogy.) But moreover, the comparisons are flawed because I'm not arguing against putting different districts up on the main page; I'm arguing that once the main city article is featured, featuring one of its districts (with a few exceptions) is redundant. The attractions covered by a district article have in all likelihood already been covered by a previous feature.

Not to get personal, but I would have a serious problem with featuring Buffalo, and then featuring Buffalo/Downtown later just because Buffalo has enough content to be districted, while Rochester can never be featured again just because I don't think the city needs to be or benefits from districting. You know as well as I that the two cities are comparable in population and tourism activity, so why treat them different for main page featuring purposes? LtPowers (talk) 17:55, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't agree with you that overall "huge city" articles and district articles from those cities are "redundant," and if they are, there's something wrong. District articles are supposed to exist precisely for the purpose of NOT duplicating information already in the article for the overall city. Individual cases could be discussed when relevant, but adopting a policy against running district articles of cities already featured seems ridiculous to me. And that's especially true when considering districts for OtBP that are peripheral to or outside of the tourist route, like Chicago/Far Northwest Side and London/Hampstead. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:41, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

So you're telling me that the Chicago article doesn't have anything in it that is covered in the Chicago/Loop article? LtPowers (talk) 20:52, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm saying that if it merely duplicates what's in the Chicago article, there's a problem. It's of course inevitable that some of what's summarized in the Chicago article will be fleshed out in the Chicago/Loop article, since the most famous sights in Chicago are on the Loop. If you see that as a reason to favor running an article about a lesser-visited neighborhood before running an article about the Loop, that's a reasonable argument, all things being equal. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:12, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

But it's the same attractions being highlighted. Yes, the Chicago article highlights more than just the Loop, and the Loop article goes into more detail, but it's still featuring the same basic sights and activities twice. That's unfair to all the other single-article destinations. LtPowers (talk) 18:16, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I get your point, and it's a fair one, but I don't see how a good rule or even guideline can be made from it. The relationship between Chicago and Chicago/Loop is quite different from the relationship between London and London/Hampstead. This seems to me to be something to leave open to case-by-case arguments. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:31, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

As I understand it, the ideal Huge City article avoids mentioning attractions at all. Not to flatter myself by calling my own work "ideal", but in the main Buffalo article, attractions mentioned specifically are limited to a brief name-check for only the most important ones, and in all cases pointedly excluding addresses, phone numbers, directions, URLs, and all other information you'd find in an actual listing. My assumption has been that Huge City articles should be designed to be quite useless to travellers by themselves, mostly functioning as a brief summary of, and portal to, the much meatier content in the district articles. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:59, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Surely not quite useless, as they include information about how to get from nearby airport(s) to the city. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:34, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Touché. But, again, that's not duplicate information either. The "Get in"/"Get around" section of a district article is limited to directions to the district itself, mostly from other parts of the same Huge City. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:24, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, or directions different from those for the city center (as in Queens/Flushing, which is rather different to get to from LaGuardia than Midtown Manhattan is). Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:49, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Travemünde for June 2014

Mates,

i discussed with our German friends https://de.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Lounge#Travem.C3.BCnde that June 2014 would be the preferred spot for the joint WV en and de OtBP/Reiseziel presentation of Travemünde. They have provisionally blocked that spot and will work on the German article to get it done by then. I know we usually only block slots for six months in advance but nominees for the summer 2014 are already plenty (e.g. City of London for Wikimania 2012 in either July/August). May i add June 2014 for the cross wiki OtbP/Reiseziel? jan (talk) 09:13, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

July, August, or September are perfectly fine months to feature a London article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:20, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

The poll on WV en for the cross wiki presentation is very positive. They have six votes in favour of Travemünde in June, so that it looks sealed. I will talk with Andre to ensure the Master of Dotm/otbp is involved but i hope the whole things gives us a boost. jan (talk) 14:15, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Quanzhou?

Request for discussion at Talk:Quanzhou#Guide.3F_OtBP.3F about whether that article should be nominated. Input invited. Pashley (talk) 17:35, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

DotM versus OtBP

I had proposed this towards the end of the discussion above (Is Africa Off the Beaten Path) but most people had stopped responding to that discussion by that time or ignored the proposal, but it has come up again in our discussions about Quanzhou about unintentional ethnocentrism in our decision-making, so I'll repost (from the Quanzhou discussion) in hopefully more clear terms than before:

Some people have cited their way of distinguishing DotM vs OtBP as 'If someone on the other side of the planet is likely to have heard of it then it's DotM' and everything else is OtBP. To me, there are many flaws to that way of thinking, because the 'other side of the world' seems to mean 'Do Europeans/Americans/Australians know it?' Naturally, Americans and Europeans are more familiar with their own geography than the rest of the world, so that would mean more features from those places and would also put into question places like Xian in spite of its seemingly obvious DotMness, because I doubt the average American/European actually knows it. Certainly if this is the basis of judgement, then indeed Quanzhou would be OtBP because Europeans and Americans definitely don't know it.

As an alternative, I much prefer a guideline of something to the effect of, "Would travelers with an interest in the area/region where this location is located be likely to visit or be familiar with it?" I think this is more reasonable and it supports diversity for us to think about what's DotM in slightly smaller regions than the global level (ex: West Africa, Middle East, etc.) or even country level (top sites of Mongolia, Botswana, etc for DotM) particularly for parts of the world where our own ethnocentrism tends to make itself visible (like Africa). If this is used as the basis of judgement, then we should ask ourselves if those who travel to and have interest in China would know it or be likely to visit (in the case of Quanzhou). ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:38, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I fully agree with your metric, but the problem is defining the scope. Anyone with an interest in Wisconsin is likely to visit Madison. Someone with an interest in the Midwest might visit Madison. Someone with an interest in the whole U.S. probably won't. LtPowers (talk) 14:29, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the metric, too. I see your point on this, LtPowers. For countries with huge populations like China and India and huge tourist industries like the US, France, and Italy, I think the metric would have to take into account a traveler's interest in a region of the country. If we restrict DotM to the 10 or so most-visited and most famous destinations in countries like that, we get into really absurd situations in which a place like Xiamen or Portland, Oregon would be "off the beaten path." I'd also propose a hard-and-fast rule that destinations with populations beyond x number can never be considered "off the beaten path." We should discuss what that number should be, but my feeling is that any city with a population of 500,000 (city only, not counting the metro area) or higher probably can't be off the beaten path, if it's over 750,000, definitely not, and if it's 200-500K, it might be in a gray area, depending on the number of visitors and its degree of connection with the rest of the world. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:02, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I wonder if the logic is a bit too simple. Somehow I think OtbT also has to do with numbers of visitors, rather than just with the size or fame compared to the region. Take the nomination for Paramaribo. It's the capital and only real city of Suriname, has 250.000 or so inhabitants and virtually everyone visiting the country will end up there sooner or later. For those reasons one might argue it should be DotM. However, Suriname as a whole is pretty off the beaten track in terms of numbers of international visitors (excl. the Dutch). How would you weigh something like that? For the record: I do think it would be etnocentric to call any huge city OtbT, even if almost no-one in the US or Europe has heard of it. But the "interest in the region" idea...I'm not sure that should be a golden rule.

One other thing we should keep in mind (I think) is what kind of destinations we will have or want to have for OtbT. It's easy to be picky, but we do want high quality articles for OtbT too. If we shift more to DotM, will we still have enough to fill OtbT? JuliasTravels (talk) 20:06, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I think the justification for making Paramaribo OtBP would be the question of whether someone who is interesting in visiting northern South America would be likely to be familiar with Paramaribo. And I'm guessing the answer is that this is questionable, as they may be more familiar with places in Colombia, Venezuela, northern Brazil, or Guyana. But while there will always be gray areas, no matter what metric we use, perhaps we could at least agree on a standard. Right now, we don't even have a loose standard, to my knowledge. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:32, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I like your metric too. My variant (somewhere above) was whether a person who knows the region would suggest the destination to a touring friend, which has pretty much the same effect. By either of those, Quanzhou would be dotM.

Size is certainly a factor, but I'm not sure about a hard and fast rule. That varies with context; I've had a Chinese student tell me he was from a small town, but when I looked the place up on the web because I'd never heard of it I found the population was 3.5 million. In the Chinese context, Nanping (half a million in the city, 2.5 for the prefecture) or Bengbu (800,000 and 3.1 million) are definitely off the beaten path. On the other hand Mount Wuyi in Nanping Prefecture is a UNESCO site and popular tourist destination; it could be DotM. Pashley (talk) 10:41, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Some places might be DotM mainly because of size. Xuzhou would be an example, not particularly well-known or much of a tourist draw but over 2.8 million in the urban area and 8.5 for the prefecture. That's just too big for OtBP.

Another thing to look at is "what links here". Places like Madison or Ningde have links from their state or province and some nearby towns, but not much else. Mount Wuyi on the other hand has links from China, from the UNESCO page, etc. Quanzhou has links from Marco Polo and Silk Road. Pashley (talk) 11:13, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow, a lot of great suggestions for consideration I think. I hadn't pinned down exactly which I preferred (regional or country), so with the Paramaribo example, it would clearly depend on which we chose. Definite DotM if our focus is the country but a strong OtBP argument if we are looking at northern South America as Ikan Kekik suggests. I like Pashleys addition of taking it beyond simply knowing the name to ask if it would generally come recommended by those who do visit.

Obviously no standard will ever eliminate debate, but these standards can definitely focus our debates and hopefully make them both more productive and the results less arbitrary. I don't mean to always picked on Hamamatsu, but to me, it's the perfect example of a DotM that was featured arbitrarily as it doesn't pass either of the standards outlined above yet somehow was made DotM when at the same time arguments were being made against the idea of DotMs for nearly the entire African continent with reasons that were never applied to Hamamatsu. Hopefully this sort of thing can be avoided after we hash out the above guidelines. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 15:06, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I've been following this discussion pretty much from the beginning, but have struggled with how to add to it. The points that have been made by previous commenters are all valid, but the challenge as I see it is to integrate them into a single coherent policy.

Based on what I've heard so far, I think the proposal put forth by JuliasTravels—judging it by the number of annual visitors—seems to be the soundest. It seems to strongly go against the notion that population figures alone are a good metric, which I think is important. For example, I have visited Lake Placid several times, and even though it's located in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, the traffic jams along Main Street and the throngs of tourists during all times of the year are frankly annoying—and certainly not indicative of a place that most travellers don't know about. Moreover, it has hosted the Winter Olympics not once but twice. If we were to feature Lake Placid and make the judgment solely by population—2,521 as of the 2010 census—it would be squarely in the OtBP column, but I don't think that any of us could realistically opine that Lake Placid, if featured, would be anything other than DotM.

ChubbyWimbus' proposed metric—"would travelers with an interest in the area/region where this location is located be likely to visit or be familiar with it?"—is a bit more defensible than simply going by population, but still far from an ideal solution. The subsequent exchange regarding Paramaribo is a perfect example why. Rather than being resolved with a definitive answer as to whether it should be DotM or OtBP, the debate continues but is now framed as a question of how to define the "area/region" applicable to Paramaribo—should we include all of northern South America or just Suriname? I think it's easy to see how ethnocentrism could still slip into the decisions we make using that model; anyone who's dead-set on seeing Paramaribo as DotM, for example, could argue vociferously that we should only factor into consideration visitors to Suriname, and vice versa.

For similar reasons, Pashley's idea—that we factor in the number of different articles that link to the nominee—is also problematic. If the hypothesis is that unintentional ethnocentrism is behind the fact that en: currently has more complete coverage of some areas of the world than others, that imbalance will necessarily carry over into the "what links here" section of the respective articles. For example, Niamey, population 1.3M, is a national capital and by far the largest city in the country, as well as a previous OtBP which, in retrospect, should probably have been a DotM. Only twelve destination articles, as well as one phrasebook, link to our article on Niamey. Meanwhile, Madison, population 240K, is a state capital and only the second-largest city in its state (and 81st in the country), and its status as DotM rather than OtBP was very controversial, as many Wikivoyagers will recall. However, 55 destination articles, one travel topic, and one airport article link to either Madison or the redirect page Madison (Wisconsin). Clearly "what links here" is not a terribly reliable indicator either.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:14, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I was not thinking so much of the number of links as of their quality and especially range. Niamey, for example, has links from at least Dakar, Burkino Faso and Mali, not just from its region and smaller towns near it. I think that can be an argument in a DotM/OtBP discussion, though of course it isn't definitive. Pashley (talk) 02:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Is it easy to find reliable figures for number of visitors for every place? I know we can find reasonably reliable population figures or estimates for the great majority of towns on Earth. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:22, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

As a latecomer to this conversation, I'd like to interject and ask if who visits a place is relevant. Many people visit Bangalore for business, but I doubt it tops anyone's list of must-see places in India, Indians included. StellarD (talk) 09:48, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't think it matters whether most of the visitors go for business, pleasure, work, study, or pilgrimage. I suspect some here will disagree with the categories of work and study because of the question of how long someone can study or work somewhere and be considered a traveler, but to me, that's a digression in this discussion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:53, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

(Indent) Just to clarify, if we were to use the model in which we chose region versus country, I would hope that we would decide here in this discussion so that it would be considered in all nominations rather than opening a discussion about the same topic for every nomination (which would mean that we didn't really choose a standard), so that if we decided that wider regions are preferred, someone wanting to feature Paramaribo as DotM would have to show that it is important enough at that level. On the flipside, if we decide that the country level is our standard, those opposed to Paramaribo DotM would then have to argue that it's not important enough in Suriname to be DotM (and they would lose that argument).

I'm strongly opposed to strictly using visitor numbers as the standard, because the end result is still biased. We don't need to see figures to know that this would mean a ton of European and American destinations, a smattering of Asia and not a heck of a lot else. Different destinations and parts of the world attract different types of people and I don't think it really matters how many people visit Vienna in comparison to Lhasa if Lhasa is up for nomination. I much prefer using a ruler that shows some appreciation for diversity. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:16, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Proposed text

Choosing whether to feature a place as Destination of the Month or Off the Beaten Path is basically a judgment call, and sometimes either choice would be OK. Several criteria go into the decision:

• population of the destination (usually available from the linked Wikipedia page if our article does not have it)
• importance as a travel destination, not just for tourism but also for business, pilgrimage or whatever
• importance as a travel hub; do most visitors to the region pass through it?
• political importance (for example whether it is a national or state capital, or a major center for a minority culture)
• historical importance (UNESCO World Heritage Sites are one indicator)
• desirability as a destination (Would you go there if you were in the region, or recommend it to a touring friend?)

A destination that is really high on any one factor is a DotM candidate. For example Surat has a population of 7.5 million, Mecca has a very important pilgrimage and Great Smoky Mountains National Park is important enough to be mentioned on both the UNESCO list and the main USA page. You can decide those cases without even looking at other factors. On the other hand, a place that is low on all factors is clearly an OtBP candidate. Where judgment, and often some discussion, are required is for destinations that do fairly well on several factors but no one thing really stands out.

Pashley (talk) 14:30, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

This looks good as a starting place for honing the discussion. I don't have any immediate comments on it but will look at other folks' comments with interest. Ikan Kekek (talk) 15:35, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

As a concrete example, consider Quanzhou which provoked the renewal of this discussion:

• population: 6 million, which Ikan says makes it DotM
• importance for travel: not a big tourist destination and a small expatriate community, which is why I originally suggested OtBP

on the other hand, it is a fairly important business center overall

there's also a hill with a monastery on the edge of town which has a major Taoist prilgrimage site and an important kung fu center

• travel hub: No, the main airports of the region are in Xiamen and Fuzhou and many travellers just zip by Q on the train without a stop.
• political importance: not a capital
• historical importance: enormous. It was a major port on the Maritime Silk Road; Marco Polo rated it the greatest port on Earth and raved about its fantastic wealth.
• desirability: I would strongly recommend it to anyone visiting Fujian.

Rethinking my original suggestion, I'd say the last two factors in particular make it a DotM candidate. Pashley (talk) 16:03, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

It's a good start, but needs some further development:

• "A destination that is really high on any one factor is a DotM candidate"—I strongly disagree that the bar should be set this low. For example, Paramaribo is a national capital, which is as high as it gets on the criterion of political importance. However, the country that it's the capital of is quite small, and Paramaribo ranks low or, at best, middling on all other criteria. Leaving aside my personal feelings regarding how to classify it, given all of this I think it would be ridiculous to say that there's absolutely no argument at all in favor of Paramaribo as OtBP rather than DotM.
• "Do most visitors to the region pass through it?"; "Would you go there if you were in the region?"—We still haven't defined "region"! Failing that, the issues I described above regarding ChubbyWimbus' approach still apply.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:15, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that it's probably better for a definite DotM candidate to be high in a couple of the listed criteria rather than only one. That would also support the finding that population alone doesn't work for some Chinese cities that are considered "small" and "unknown" in China in spite of populations over a million. A destination that rates high or gets a "Yes" in two of the above categories certainly sounds like a strong DotM candidate.

Defining "the region" at either level (slightly larger regions or countries) seems okay to me. Considering most of the world will be OtBP regardless, I don't have a problem with our DotMs being inclusive as opposed to exclusive, but my main concern here is consistency (and diversity) so I will wait for others to weigh in. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 00:09, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Hampstead, again

We currently have two London district articles nominated for featuring: City of London and London/Hampstead. My reading of consensus is that Saqib's argument in favor of featuring City of London in July 2014 to coincide with Wikimania trumps the argument for featuring Hampstead around the same time merely because it is a Star article that has, as yet, not had Main Page exposure. However, per the most recent discussion on the topic of running Huge City district articles as features, that means Hampstead likely shouldn't be placed on the Main Page until 2015 at the very earliest, and preferably 2016.

Is there precedent to slush an otherwise worthy destination purely because a scheduling snafu would require it to remain on the nominees list for an inordinate amount of time? Buffalo was recently slushed after spending two years languishing on the nominees list without being scheduled, but that was a somewhat different issue: rather than being an issue of its run coinciding with that of another close destination, I, its principal author, had expressed a preference (and continue to prefer) that Buffalo stay off the Main Page until the redlinked district articles were dealt with.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 10:44, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think it should be slushed in the sense of seeming to have been rejected for featuring. Instead, I'd propose either of two courses of action: (1) Put a note at the end of the discussion of the article, stating that it will be scheduled for a feature in 2016, or (2) archive the nom and discussion to date, noting at the end of the "slushed" discussion that the article has been approved to run in 2016. In the 2nd case (which has the virtue of saving space on the dotm noms page), it's important to at least keep this section of this talk page unarchived, so that we can easily remind ourselves to revive the nom some time in 2015, because otherwise, it's likely to be forgotten about. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:49, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Barring any objections (speak now or forever hold your peace), I'm going with option #2. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

It's probably the best route, so that we can make sure the article is still up to snuff in a couple of years. LtPowers (talk) 15:13, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Done. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:30, 16 November 2013 (UTC)