Wikivoyage talk:Links from Wikipedia

Usable

I've added a note that links should only be made on Wikipedia if the Wikivoyage article is "usable" or higher. This has been a community rule-of-thumb for a long time, but it wasn't explicit here. --(WT-en) Evan 15:50, 24 March 2007 (EDT)

Problem with Wikipedia link

Moved from the Pub:

How do we handle adding a Wikipedia link to Wikivoyage when the city names are entered diffently. For instance, how would the Wikivoyage link for Coral Gables be added to the Wikipedia page Coral Gables, Florida? I added the link, but the abscence of the state on the Wikivoyage page makes the link go to the wrong page. (WT-en) MiamiDolphins3 14:46, 28 December 2008 (EST)

It works now. Just type the name of the city on Wikipedia. Even though the city is called "Coral Gables" here, put a WIkipedia link: [[WikiPedia:Coral Gables, Florida]].

MiamiDolphins is referring to links from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage, not from here to there. And I'm not sure how that wp template works. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 16:11, 28 December 2008 (EST)

Exactly. The link on Wikivoyage to Wikipedia worked fine from the beginning. The link from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage has not worked because the Wikivoyage article is named Coral Gables, not Coral Gables, Florida. This is a pretty big issue that needs resolution.(WT-en) MiamiDolphins3 18:53, 28 December 2008 (EST)

The simple solution is to create a redirect on WT for Coral Gables, Florida, pointing to our Coral Gables article; the WP article can then link to the redirect. That is about all you can do on this end, short of proposing a radical change to our whole naming scheme that probably would not fly.

There is likely more you can do on the WP end. Isn't there a way to link to a WT article with a different title? If not, could you propose one? Or just use whatever generic mechanism they have for linking to external sites? (WT-en) Pashley 21:04, 28 December 2008 (EST)

Of course there is, see Wikipedia:Template talk:Wikivoyage. The syntax is obvious: {{wikivoyage|name-on-Wikivoyage}}, so in this case you'd just add {{wikivoyage|Coral Gables}}. (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:46, 29 December 2008 (EST)

Not linking to WV articles that are Outlines

I disagree with this. I link to WP articles all the time, even when they're stubs. But certainly, Outline articles can have a substantial amount of information in them, especially when they're regional or country-level articles that haven't been advanced to Usable status just because some of the articles linked to them (such as in the "Cities" or "Other destinations" lists) are not Usable. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:27, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

There are plenty of empty or almost-empty outlines which are not useful to the traveller in their current state; a link to them in WP adds nothing of value from Wikipedia's perspective. The concern, which goes back to WT days, is that if we abuse the /* External links */ section in WP, they will start removing us as spam or advertising. WT templates have been nominated for deletion in the past; while WP is likely to cut a bit more slack for a sibling project than a for-profit external commercial site, we shouldn't abuse the privilege... especially given our current deadlocked position on linking WP from individual {{listing}}s. K7L (talk) 16:11, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Many outlines, especially regions, have substantial information in them that justify linking from WP. Powers ^(talk) 16:19, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Exactly, especially - as I pointed out - in the case of almost every country and most region (state, etc.) articles, due to the rules we have adopted about status for regional/country articles. And how many instances are there of inline linkage to Wikivoyage in Wikipedia articles? Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:47, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Ikan and Powers and have changed the wording. Nurg (talk) 02:10, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The new wording looks good to me - the point about only linking to Wikivoyage articles with useful content is sensible. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:25, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Links from Commons

What do you think about "Links from Commons"? I have started wondering whether a multilingual template like c:Template:On Wikipedia or c:Template:See also w would be helpful on categories or gallery pages about major tourist areas. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:57, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

I think links from Commons would benefit both projects (we already link to Commons), and something like c:Template:Wikispecies might be a useful model for implementing links from Commons, although I have no idea of what the process for getting a template like that approved for usage at Commons would be. Note that c:Template:Wikivoyage already exists, although it is a template that was used during the setup of Wikivoyage to note the source of files created during the initial content import. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:25, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Digging a bit further, it looks like c:Template:Sisterwikivoyage already exists, although it isn't heavily used. There should be some value in making sure that template is more widely implemented. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:32, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

It looks like that links to categories on other projects. Here's an example of it being added. The documentation is almost non-existent. I was thinking about something that linked pages rather than cats, but that might be a place to start. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

I've tried to add a few to c:Category:Netherlands. It looks correct, and presumably if I did it correctly, the change won't be reverted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:06, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

A couple of articles have been linked, eg, c:Indianapolis, Indiana. Nurg (talk) 21:36, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Help wanted: make sure your favorite article is linked FROM Wikipedia

Swept in from the pub

Shockingly, the Wikipedia Chicago article did not have a link to Wikivoyage, so I've just added one. One of the easiest and most impactful ways we have to improve Wikivoyage's ranking in search engines is to be sure that the corresponding Wikipedia article has a link to Wikivoyage. While many such links already exist, I've added dozens that were missing in recent days. If there is an article you are particularly proud of on Wikivoyage, please be sure to look at the corresponding Wikipedia article, look at the last section of that article, and if it does not have a link to Wikivoyage add one using the following syntax (using the actual Wikivoyage article name, obviously):

• {{wikivoyage|article name on Wikivoyage}}
• {{Wikivoyage-inline}}
• {{Sister project links|voy=article name on Wikivoyage}}

See also WV:Links from Wikipedia#How to link. For additional tips on improving Wikivoyage's search engine ranking see WV:SEO#How to improve an article's search ranking. -- Ryan • (talk) • 07:20, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Sometimes the Wikipedia and Wikipedia articles have different Wikidata items. They need to be merged over at Wikidata so that the Wikivoyage article will be linked and showing in the sidebar. Gizza ^(roam) 08:37, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

[Edit conflict]. Is there a tool, bot or something (or could one be created) to run through all our destination articles, follow the link to Wikipedia (where there is one), and generate a list of the WP articles that do not have a link to Wikivoyage? Even if, for starters anyway, it did only the WV articles that are at guide level. Something like the lists that @Syced: has generated at User:Syced/Syntax checks, or the lists at Category:Articles needing attention. Alternatively, could something be run on WP to generate a list of cities over a certain size that do not have a link to WV; I don't know how the population could be checked - Wikidata perhaps. Nurg (talk) 08:42, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think it would be terribly difficult to put something together that goes through all Wikivoyage mainspace articles, grabs the Wikipedia link, and then verifies that the corresponding Wikipedia article contains a link back to Wikivoyage. It probably also wouldn't be difficult to include the Wikivoyage article status in whatever report is generated. Note that this proposal wouldn't be a particularly efficient approach, and it isn't something I would personally be able to do in the immediate future, so perhaps someone else will have a better idea and/or more time available to implement it. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:41, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

A bot generated list would be good. Started doing some checking, France did not have a link! --Traveler100 (talk) 17:30, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

There are a lot of very surprising omissions in Wikipedia - in addition to updating w:Chicago I also added Wikivoyage links for w:North America and w:South America last night (the other continents were covered) - so while waiting on a bot-generated list it would be great if people could at least check a few Wikipedia articles for destinations that they know are well covered on Wikivoyage as I'm sure lots of others will need to be added. If we end up adding hundreds or even thousands of missing links it could potentially have a noticeable impact on our search ranking as incoming links from Wikipedia are heavily weighted by Google. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:48, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I would probably be able to generate a list of all the English Wikivoyage articles that don't yet have incoming links from the English Wikipedia. I will try to do that later today. After the list would be generated, I suggest we tackle this goal as a community, and each of us would make sure that a certain large portion of articles have incoming links. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 20:49, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good, everyone! Also worth noting that sometimes multiple articles on Wikipedia could link to one Wikivoyage guide, in the case of merged towns or regions. Example, both w:Echuca and w:Moama linking to Echuca-Moama. James A ▪ talk 03:28, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Okay... it's not perfect but here is the full list I made (contains 23,120 items).

A little bit of explanation ... in order to create the list I used MS Excel to do a quick automatic comparison between (1) a list of all the Engvoy mainspace articles (26,991 articles as of 12/14/2015) and (2) a list of all the Wikipedia articles that have a link to Engvoy articles (7,936 articles as of 12/14/2015). Doing this automatic comparison enabled me to quickly remove the titles which are identical in both lists (AKA articles in Wikipedia that already link to corresponding articles on Engvoy). In addition, I also removed all the disambiguation articles from the final list. By doing those things I managed to remove 3,871 items in total, and ended up with this list which includes 23,120 items. (unfortunately for us, this trick isn't perfect because the article names of Engvoy articles apparently are identical to the article names of the English Wikipedia only 50% of the times, but still, I am very happy with the end result because Excel actually managed to remove almost half of the articles linked from Wikipedia from the final list).

The question now is.... how many users are willing to work together in a collaborative effort aimed at adding links to all the corresponding articles on Wikipedia of these 23,120 articles? If there are enough volunteers, we could split the work between us. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 04:39, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! My browser froze trying to edit a list of nearly 25,000 items, so I've split it up into five smaller lists...

1. Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia/1-4,999 (100 Mile House - Darling)
2. Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia/5,000-9,999 (Darling Downs - Kerrville)
3. Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia/10,000-14,999 (Kersa - Oqaatsut)
4. Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia/15,000-19,999 (Oracle - Sydney/Macarthur)
5. Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia/20,000-23,120 (Sydney/Macquarie Park - Żywiec)

... copied it to Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia. There are some false positives, but overall it seems very helpful. I've updated a few Wikipedia articles and removed the corresponding entry from the list, and also noted a few places where the Wikipedia article had a link already. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:26, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Ryan, it would be impossible for you to go over all those items by yourself. Please help me cordinate a group effort to tackle this task collaboratively - for example, if we'll end up having 7 volunteers, we could split the work between us so that each one of us would go over ~3,300 items (and thus we would make this important task much more easy to accomplish!). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 05:50, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

I will guarantee you that I'm not going to update 3300 links, but I'll definitely go through and make sure some of the areas that I am most familiar with have been updated. I think this is a task that will be best handled in small chunks, so as people update Wikipedia articles they can then remove items from the lists and we can slowly whittle it down. -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:02, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

I doubt we'll find any Engvoy user willing to help work on thousand of articles. And unfortunately for us, no gnomes would do the work for us if we won't do it. We'll, at the very least, I am hoping the list I generated would help users like yourself to make links back to WV from the Wikipedia articles that are about the most prominent tourist destinations which don't yet have a link to WV (like the Chicago article mentioned above). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 06:07, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

How about adding the list of articles to a new (temporary) clean-up category? Has a couple of advantages: once someone has added the link at Wikipedia can edit the Wikivoyage article to remove the category template; can use the CatScan utility to filter the list against other categories such as only usable in a particular country or region. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:54, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

My concerns with using categories is that there are currently a lot of false positives in the list, and I'm not sure it would be well-received if we added 23,000 category tags to Wikipedia articles (although I'm not very familiar with the community there). -- Ryan • (talk) • 07:08, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

How about adding it as a hidden category to the Wikivoyage articles? Disadvantage is that would mean two edits but advantage is extra sort and filter possibilities. --Traveler100 (talk) 08:10, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

What method was used to create this this? Seeing too many false positives. Suggest generating list of articles that accounts for redirects (e.g. Zürich). Or a better logic (although have to admit not sure how to do this) use the Wikipedia tag on the Wikivoyage page then check if those pages on wikipedia have the vikivoyage template. --Traveler100 (talk) 08:21, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Is there any way to generate a list that includes ONLY all of the Engvoy redirect pages? if there is, I could probably use that data in MS Excel to quickly remove any redirect articles from the 23,120 items list I made. Or maybe I misunderstood the problem Traveler100 explained above? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 16:05, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Is there a way to generate a list (or create a category) of Wikipedia pages linked from Wikivoyage using the [[Wikipedia:pagename]] option? If I had such a list then I could create a bot on Wikipedia to check pages for links back to Wikivoyage and mark those not currently doing so. --Traveler100 (talk) 19:58, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Wonder if by doing all of this if it would be appropriate to check out Wikidata at the same time. Probably another can of worms? - Matroc (talk) 01:39, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Chicago

Making a subsection to keep discussion separate.

The link to Chicago from w:Chicago was removed without explanation by a Japanese IP on November 5 of this year. The same user also removed the link from w:Madrid, which I've just reinstated. Unfortunately, without diligent watchlisting, it's almost impossible to catch this sort of thing. An edit filter on Wikipedia is unlikely to be approved, given the low volume.

-- Powers ^(talk) 19:45, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Updated list

I've generated my own script and updated the list to remove Wikivoyage disambiguation pages and hopefully eliminate a number of false positives. I haven't checked it closely so will revisit tonight after work to see if things can be further narrowed down, but this new list is 19,339 items long (compared to 23,120 for the original) and can be regenerated in 1-2 minutes when needed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:59, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

One additional note - I'll update the script tonight to organize these lists based on Wikivoyage article status so that we can focus on non-outlines, which are more likely to merit a link from Wikipedia. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:15, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

That would be very helpful indeed. I agree we should mostly refrain from adding links to outline articles in bulk, as it may cost us good will over at WP. JuliasTravels (talk) 18:03, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikivoyage:Search Expedition/Missing links from Wikipedia now has lists split up by article status, with an additional list for Wikipedia articles that have broken links to Wikivoyage. Please let me know if anything seems amiss, and ping me if sufficient updates have been made that the lists need to be regenerated and updated - it only takes a couple of minutes to do so. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:46, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Copenhagen is a false positive. Is it because of the way the link is done in the subject bar at Wikipedia:Copenhagen? If so, will all articles that have that type of subj bar be false positives? PS, overall though, these lists are so useful. Nurg (talk) 09:34, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I looked at Copenhagen yesterday and wasn't quite sure what to do with it - w:Copenhagen currently links to Special:Search/Copenhagen, so I could modify the script to consider "Special:Search/Article name" as equivalent to "Article name" - does that seem like the right solution? If I made that change, is there any concern about not having a direct link to some articles? -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:32, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

I've implemented the above change to strip the "Special:Search/" from "Special:Search/Copenhagen" and re-run the scripts. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:36, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ In a very short time there has been a massive amount of progress:

Category	18-Dec	19-Dec	22-Dec	29-Dec	05-Jan	12-Jan	7-Feb	18-Feb	% Change
Star articles	31	15	10	10	7	7	7	6	81%
Guide articles	331	185	97	94	93	93	93	93	72%
Usable articles	2946	2771	2530	2118	1615	1325	982	485	84%
Outline articles	15762	15488	15434	15366	15306	15180	14978	14935	5%
Other articles	167	167	149	145	140	135	133	124	26%
Incorrect links in Wikipedia	550	264	0	1	0	0	0	0	100%

Thanks to everyone who has helped out so far - it should be interesting to see the effect this effort has on Wikivoyage search engine ranking in the coming weeks, and it should also prompt a few more visitors (and hopefully editors) from Wikipedia. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:07, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Before I start to create multiple redirects of boroughs and neighborhoods on Wikivoayge to District article then linking from Wikipdia to them, would like to have some comments and possible other suggestions about Handling city districts. --Traveler100 (talk) 10:20, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

I'll help with this, too. Ryan, if it's easy to do, then you might stop including the "outlines" in the list. They're unlikely to be acceptable at en.wp. Some of the links might survive through benign neglect, but they don't meet the formal standard in w:en:WP:SISTER (namely that links be "useful to our readers"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

What about outlineregions and outline countries though? Hobbitschuster (talk) 23:13, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I've already found many articles in the outline list that were more than qualified for inclusion in Wikipedia - many articles currently classified as outline should probably be upgraded to usable, and in the case of some region articles the article is well-developed but is kept at outline by the lack of development in the child city articles. Obviously anything that is little more than a skeleton should not be linked from Wikipedia, but that seems to be a minority of the articles in the list. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:17, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Redirect from Wikipedia

Swept in from the pub

In the Wikipedia Yonge Street article, there is the tag: {{wikivoyage|Toronto/Yonge Street|Yonge Street}}. The WikiVoyage article Toronto/Yonge Street contains #REDIRECT [[Toronto#Yonge Street]]. The WikiVoyage article Toronto contains the section heading ==Yonge Street==. When I click on the WikiVoyage icon in the Wikipedia article, I get directed to the top of the Toronto article but not to its Yonge Street section.

Could anyone offer a solution? As a last resort, I could delete the WikiVoyage icon from the Wikipedia article.

The reasons I am replacing the WikiVoyage article Toronto/Yonge Street by a redirect are here: Talk:Toronto/Yonge Street.

Thanks TheTrolleyPole (talk) 00:25, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I've noticed the same problem recently, and not just with Toronto - whenever I enter a term into the searchbox that includes a fragment identifier (#), or type a URL that includes one that's intended for a wikivoyage.org address, I'm directed to the top of the page and have to click Refresh to arrive at the appropriate section. It's probably a bug with the MediaWiki software. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 00:46, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I resolved the problem by replacing {{wikivoyage|Toronto/Yonge Street|Yonge Street}} by {{wikivoyage|Toronto#Yonge Street|Yonge Street}} in the Wikipedia article. Even within WikiVoyage the redirect works in some places but fails in others when using [[Toronto/Yonge Street|Yonge Street]]. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 20:36, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

TheTrolleyPole, what your web browser? This is a common problem in Safari. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

(Reply to WhatamIdoing): I get the problem in both IE and Chrome when I use Toronto/Yonge Street, and avoid the problem if I use Toronto#Yonge Street as a link. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 20:59, 7 January 2016 (UTC) Both seem to work in IE. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 21:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Chrome and Safari are both WebKit browsers, so they have some bugs in common. Assuming that this is one of those bugs, then the solution has to be supplied by fixing the web browser. In the meantime, Toronto#Yonge Street is the most we can do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:18, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Link templates to Wikivoyage from Wikipedia

Swept in from the pub

Many geographic articles on Wikipedia have the link template {{wikivoyage}} to point to the corresponding article here on Wikivoyage. These links increase traffic to Wikivoyage, and give us a competitive edge above "The other site". Should Wikipedia have a bot to automatize creation of these templates on Wikipedia? /Yvwv (talk) 19:43, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe that the English Wikipedia would accept such a bot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)