Wikivoyage talk:Links to DMOZ

Rationale

Why are all these DMOZ links being added to the pages? Isn't this linking to another travel web site rather than putting the info. inside Wikivoyage? And some of the content is entirely inappropriate e.g. Education and Health and some is commercial advertising e.g. Real Estate. --(WT-en) Nzpcmad 16:40, 8 Aug 2004 (EDT)

I dunno. I'm not really sure what it gains us, but I'm trying to go with the flow. -- (WT-en) Mark 17:45, 8 Aug 2004 (EDT)

Project:External links explicitly states "What to link to? External links should point to first sources (tourist offices, official Web sites, etc.); avoid linking to secondary sources like on-line travel guides, restaurant or nightlife guides, or other "secondary" sources. We should have that kind of information in Wikivoyage, not linked to from Wikivoyage." Doesn't including DMOZ directly contradict this? Also, we can link to Wikivoyage articles from Wikipedia and vice versa. You can't do this with DMOZ. You have to request that they link to Wikivoyage and it is their arbitrary decision. e.g. "Regional: North America: Canada: Quebec: Localities: M: Montreal: Travel and Tourism: Travel Guides" for the Montreal DMOZ does not include Wikivoyage. --(WT-en) Nzpcmad 18:26, 8 Aug 2004 (EDT)

Yeah, you're right. I figure this illustrates the point I've been trying to make about external links in general. Meanwhile I've been adding the DMOZ links as so to be a good sport. -- (WT-en) Mark 18:38, 8 Aug 2004 (EDT)

The discussion regarding adding DMOZ occurred in Project:External links/What to link to. Apparently, Evan forgot to modify the policy before starting to add the links :-)

As to why.... there have been comments both that we do not link to enough stuff, and counter comments that we don't want to become a web directory. Evan observed that if we just simply allow a single DMOZ link (just as we already allow Wikipedia links) that we would then be providing the traveller's with a pointer to a web directory if they need one. And then the whole issue of keeping the directory up-to-date becomes DMOZ's problem. The idea here is that there may be useful sites that are not in keeping with our link policy, but if we can point at DMOZ we might be able to avoid altering our policy to be more accepting of links. This of course doesn't cover everything (see the discussion page for more details). -- (WT-en) Colin 02:05, 9 Aug 2004 (EDT)

I don't think it's at all about linking to another travel site. Open Directory topic pages aren't specifically travel-oriented (as you pointed out), but geographically-based Web directories.

I see these links more like Project:links to Wikipedia. We're not creating an encyclopedic view of places, so we provide a twin-pages link to the equivalent encyclopedia page. Similarly, we're not providing a comprehensive Web directory for each place, so we provide a TwinPages link to an equivalent Web directory topic.

Some information in a Wikipedia page may be good to have in a Wikivoyage page. Similarly, some links in an Open Directory topic may be good to have in a Wikivoyage destination guide. In both cases, however, the purpose of the other site is very different from ours.

I don't think twin pages really fall under the external links rules.

I can disable this feature if people really want it. I mostly wanted to ease some of the tension about external links -- that we had to provide a full inventory of possible Web sites related to a destination, in case some traveler may possibly want to view that link. By deferring to a twin page, we can concentrate less on some possible theoretical traveller's needs and more on what's needed for a travel guide.

I would prefer to link to an Open Source wiki Web directory and if anyone knows one, I'd be happy to change our twin links. I do think at this point that Open Directory is the most complete directory-style site on the Web, though. --(WT-en) Evan 03:09, 9 Aug 2004 (EDT)

I could be wrong, but I don't think anybody has argued for "a full inventory of possible Web sites related to a destination", but rather a very very selective set. Likewise nobody I've heard from here thinks we should list every hotel in a given destination (that would be a directory), just a selected few in each price range.

The very problem with trying to handle outside links by handing off to DMOZ is that they *are* trying to be a comprehensive directory. This means that rather than providing good travel information we are tossing the user into a swamp of non-applicable stuff hoping they might be able to find the one gem. -- (WT-en) Mark 04:00, 9 Aug 2004 (EDT)

One of the problems is that DMOZ is actually aiming to be a directory of web sites, not of web pages or web information. Which actually means they don't carry links to some of the stuff we want to link to.

Taking Wikivoyage itself as an example, Wikivoyage is a global travel guide site, and it therefore cannot be indexed anywhere in the Regional heirarchy we are linking into. This is why, as (WT-en) Nzpcmad points out above, Wikivoyage doesn't appear in DMOZ's "Regional: North America: Canada: Quebec: Localities: M: Montreal: Travel and Tourism: Travel Guides" category, which is a category for web sites that are travel guides of Montreal only.

I personally think the whole DMOZ thing is based on a flawed concept (what people really want is a directory of information available on the web, not of web sites).

I don't have a problem with adding the DMOZ links, but in no way does it resolve the discussion on external links. There is still a need for Wikivoyage contributors to be able to add external links to the site based on their local, subjective experience. In just the same way as they add entries for hotels, bars, sights, whatever. This will no more lead WikiTravel to becoming a directory of web links any more than it will lead it to become a directory of hotels. -- (WT-en) Chris j wood 12:16, 9 Aug 2004 (EDT)

I think that's a fair assessment. The main point here is to allow us to be selective -- if we defer the responsibility for providing all possible relevant links to Open Directory, we can concentrate on what we think are appropriate links.

Anyways, what I'm hearing so far is indifference towards this idea, so I'm going to leave it in for now. --(WT-en) Evan 14:55, 9 Aug 2004 (EDT)

Personally, I'm a Wikipedia editor who was looking for a Wiki-like Web Directory, specifically because DMOZ doesn't qualify at all. They are very closed in their membership, including reducing the time before an editor is banned for being idle to a mere four months, then reinstating only a very few, seemingly those whose ideas and ideologies fit best with the leaders. This explains why they're months, or even years, behind listing submissions...something which has been getting worse since 2000 or so. I was googling for an actually open web directory, and found this talk page. Anyone here ever actually find such a critter? It would be of use for some Wikipedia articles, as well. --(WT-en) KazVorpal 21:54, 10 March 2006 (EST)

Link to Place/Travel and Tourism if available?

Suppose a DMOZ entry for a place has subdivisions. Suppose further that one of the subdivisions is Travel and Tourism. See for example dmoz.org on Panajachel, Guatemala. This entry has subdivisions Panajachel/Travel_and_Tourism/ and Panajachel/Travel_and_Tourism/Lodging. To which of these pages should the Wikivoyage article link? (WT-en) JimDeLaHunt 16:26, 25 November 2006 (EST)

It should link to the main Panajachel page. The whole point of linking out to Dmoz is to relieve the pressure to add lots of links to Wikivoyage guides, especially links that don't directly have to do with travel. So, link to the main location page. --(WT-en) Evan 17:25, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Re-evaluate

Is it time to re-consider this policy? From the discussion above, it appears there was never a strong consensus in favor of these links; it was mainly an experiment by Evan to try to mitigate calls for external links sections in our pages. LtPowers (talk) 02:55, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

DMOZ links broken

Swept in from the pub

DMOZ links (in the sidebar of most major articles) is broken because it is missing the "Regional/" prefix. Could it be please added at a code/template level? Thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:04, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that we should bother linking to DMOZ anyway. Do we have a policy on that? LtPowers (talk) 14:40, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

The policy page is here: Wikivoyage:Links to Open Directory. –sumone10154^(talk) 01:42, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

This policy says that links to DMOZ should be provided. So I guess the "Regional/" prefix should be added, either to all articles as a bot job, or in the DMOZ template itself. Which is better? Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:47, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I knew we probably had one somewhere. It may be time to revisit the policy, however; there was never a strong consensus in favor, and it was mainly an experiment by Evan to try to reduce demand for placing external links into our travel guides. Some very valid objections to DMOZ in general can be found on the talk page. LtPowers (talk) 02:54, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I think the policy should be revisited, I agree with LtPowers. I don't believe it ever worked as intended. but that said, maybe for now we could use a bot to correct the pages currently with a DMOZ and visit the policy later after we get the file link issues fixed and get out of Beta. Xltel (talk) 03:38, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Is it still possible to edit the interwiki table here? –sumone10154^(talk) 01:35, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. I think we should start to reserve the "Related sites" area in the sidebar for sister projects, if that is the path we want to take in relation to sister wiki links. After the recent removal of world66, WT Press and the potential removal of DMOZ, will there be any other sites we link to apart from WMF projects? It could be worth renaming it from "Related sites" to "Sister wikis". JamesA ^>talk 02:22, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

All of the interwiki link tables on Wikimedia (with the exception of language-specific prefixes like fr: or voy:) are taken from the m:interwiki map so likely dmoz: here has to work the same way as dmoz: elsewhere in Wikimedia (without just assuming Regional/ or anything else). Having a 'bot template these (so the target could be easily changed) is a plausible solution.

Another possibility would be to review our policy on links to Wikipedia; it currently allows links just to the same topic (usually the city-level encyclopaedia article). It should be relaxed to allow WP interwiki links for items which already have a listing here, but only as part of that venue's <listing> tag (see, do, conquer, eat, sleep, drink, rape, pillage, burn...). The listing here should contain at least one coherent sentence or paragraph in the article already describing the landmark first. That would prevent the links becoming a substitute for properly including the content in the guide. Any true external links to non-primary sources, if useful, could then be made from WP.

I've used both WP and DMOZ and do find DMOZ inflexible in that it's difficult to get registered as a user with access to add a listing to DMOZ, its registered users only have access to one category (and lose their access after a short period of inactivity, just 45 days or so without changing the directory) and a category with no user assigned basically just doesn't get updated. I don't necessarily want the DMOZ links pulled (they are valid) but they have their limitations. K7L (talk) 16:19, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Open Directory linking back to us?

Although this page talks about linking to Dmoz, we must remember that Dmoz is a web directory and we are a valid website that should be listed. After a little research, it appears some search engines like Google use Dmoz items when determining search rankings. And of course, a few hundred extra links to our articles from an external site can't hurt. As we're planning to add a lot of links to their site, I think it'd be best to contact someone higher up with our idea rather than their everyday editors. That way we can say we want to add lots of Wikivoyage links and to expect it. It should be particularly pointed out that we already have hundreds, if not thousands of Dmoz links on this site. If for some reason they refuse to add our links, I think it may be worth returning the favour, in terms of their links on our site... JamesA ^>talk 12:16, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ will normally only link to any given site once, as far as I know. They used to have a category "society - childfree - bed and breakfast" which listed B&B's niche-marketed to adults (usually the expensive place with the fragile antiquities). Not allowing a property to be in both (B&B in someplace) and (B&B for childfree adults) meant that their scrapping that category in Society/ was prerequisite to the listings appearing in the proper Regional/ section under their respective towns. Their everyday editors have no authority (they can only change listings in one narrow section of the directory, and lose their access entirely if they don't add or change at least one listing in that category in any 45-day interval) and applying for access to edit even one tiny DMOZ category takes a couple weeks to even get an answer. Predictably, many categories have no editor so new submissions of individual links and descriptions sometimes take months to be reviewed. If you manage to raise anyone at DMOZ, at most you'll get one link (under "Travel Guides") for each language. (On scrolling up, I see the same issues raised in 2004-2006. Since then, DMOZ has completely shut down the ChefMOZ restaurant listing, not sure if much else has changed.) K7L (talk) 18:46, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

You are completely right on the poor editing experience and stringent rules at DMOZ, and the lack of many active editors. While I think that DMOZ only allows one link per business, wikis like us may be a special case. A quick search of Wikipedia comes up with over 30,000 results. I assume these have all been added individually, however, as there are many more articles than that at Wikipedia. I think we'd have to personally write to the figureheads at DMOZ with our request of links being added to the larger cities, countries and towns, and if our request is denied or not responded to, we simply remove the DMOZ link, as I fail to see how they benefit the traveller. JamesA ^>talk 05:55, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

The corresponding quick search for Wikivoyage in DMOZ finds a half-dozen entries in German (but none in English). WT appears more than ninety times in DMOZ. Perhaps we should ask them to update these links to point to WV? No idea how long it would take to get anything as a response, as most of these categories do not list an active local editor. At a minimum, though, we need to be listed under all of our language versions and not just de: K7L (talk) 08:29, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Position of links

There is a suggestion at Wikivoyage talk:Inter-language links#Position of links that OD links should be placed before the inter-language links. Nurg (talk) 05:11, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ

Swept in from the pub

The RelatedSites extension is being removed in no small part due to DMOZ being closed today. That community is discussing how to continue the project with mirrors and forks springing up now but none of them are really ready to deploy nor are any of them as active as DMOZ was. We will probably need to delete Category:Articles without DMOZ links (via Wikidata). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:34, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Do we really need DMOZ or anything like it? Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:43, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@Hobbitschuster: There was discussion here a couple of years ago about it (initiated by me) with a weak resolve to keep it. Evidently, it's more popular on de.voy. I can pull up the Phabricator tickets if you really want but it's basically a done deal now. The Related Sites will just be Commons and Wikipedia which are sisters sites anyway. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:55, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

So will there be any replacement now or at any foreseeable point in the future? Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:57, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@Hobbitschuster: http://dmoztools.net/ is a static mirror, https://freemoz.org/ is a dynamic fork, and there are community discussions at a few message boards (Curlie.org, Curlz, and Resource-Zone if you want to follow up with them). I've basically told the community that I can ask WMF wikis to use the dmoztools mirror for a brief period until a dynamic fork is really going. But yes, DMOZ editors have every intention on having something going ASAP. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:22, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I've removed the wikidata dmoz function from the pagebanner template. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:05, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Efforts are underway to get DMOZ up and running again. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:13, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

The successor of dmoz is now alive and running at curlie.org, maintained by the same editor community. —The preceding comment was added by Informatox (talk • contribs)