Wikivoyage talk:Milestones

For an archived discussion about Wikitravel's milestones, see Wikivoyage talk:Archive of Wikitravel (not Wikivoyage) milestones.

New York Times

As rumored, the issue have indeed appeared in the NYT: Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Its Owner - Live by the wiki, perhaps die by the wiki.

Some minor errors here and there, but overall I think IBs PR department (if they have one at all, I have by doubts) don't seem to be doing a very good job.Sertmann 23:36, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Their words to me: "we don't care about PR." It's a good article, but doesn't mention the main reasons for community discontent, which overwhelmingly were about the absolute, total lack of investment in infrastructure upgrades, bug fixes, and feature development (the article, like the others around the net also fails to question IB's unsupportable assertion of investing millions of dollars and years of work into site development). I wish there were a way to end the talk of "38 out of 48 admins..." since the number of admins (not to mention other contributors) in support of the migration is both way more than 38 and unanimous (aside from those who haven't answered the question), and since there are way more than 48 admins from the site. --Peter ^Talk 05:43, 10 September 2012 (CEST)

I think the article is good for every outsider to get the point. If you look at Wikitravel after this weekend, everbody sees the impact of spam. Concerning the admins: Who cares if some admin remains? Look at the quality and make a guess which side will be going down. Jc8136 (talk) 14:54, 10 September 2012 (CEST)

The End - or - A New Beginning

Swept from the pub:

I'm copying Erik's latest email, since it concerns everyone:

Erik Moeller
	
9:04 PM (14 minutes ago)
		
to Wikivoyage
Hi folks,

based on the poll at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide/Launch , Stefan's
go-ahead, and the potential significant delays that we'd incur if we
deferred [*], I'm going to be bold and I'm authorizing the launch this
week as originally planned.

Here's what this will mean:

* Hans is preparing database dumps tonight. Any wiki will need to go
into read-only mode the moment dumps are being kicked off, and will
need to remain in read-only mode on the old server. WTS, SHARED,
GENERAL and ASSOC are exempt from this as they'll not be migrated
as-such. They can remain editable for purposes such as tagging content
statuses.

* We're still waiting for the registrar of wikivoyage.org to finalize
the transfer. We've aimed to accelerate this process as much as
possible, but to some extent it's ouside of our control. We hope that
the transfer will be completed tomorrow. Worst case scenario is that
the wikis under wikivoyage.org will be read-only for a few more days.
(There are technical workarounds to access the new site if this
happens, which we will post if needed.)

* Tomorrow and Wednesday we'll spend a lot of time debugging the
imports and the new site functions. A lot of things will incrementally
be fixed so don't be surprised if things are a bit bumpy at first.

* The site will be configured to use Commons as its media repository,
so any files referenced from there will work. Other files will need to
be uploaded either to Commons or to the local wiki under the non-free
content policy.

* We'll run a sitenotice that explains that the site is in beta, how
to access pages on the old server, and how to help report bugs and fix
issues.

* wikivoyage-old.org WILL WORK to access the old sites for as long as needed.

It's going to be a bit of a bumpy ride, so please bear with us.

Thanks much for your understanding and support in getting the word out.

All best,
Erik

[*] We'd have to either schedule a window into Hans' upcoming long
travel through the US and Mexico, or ensure that we've got all the
procedures reviewed and tested by Wikivoyage's other administrators.
It would be possible, but I think most people really would like to see
this project move forward without entering a long window of
uncertainty.

Expect some bumpiness in the next day or so, but we should be up and running on WMF servers in no time. There was a time when we thought this would be impossible, so try and put the difficulties and challenges and lawsuits out of your mind for a spell and just enjoy that this is finally happening ;) --Peter ^Talk 03:23, 6 November 2012 (CET)

<Huzzah!> (-: Sj (talk) 06:18, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Welcome in the Wikimedia-family

Swept from the pub:

Welcome!

Welcome in the Wikimedia-family! If I can help somewhere with files, templates, codes, bot, etc, just let me know. Greetings - Romaine (talk) 17:17, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Great news to finally be part of the Wikimedia family of sites, it's a great new start for the project :-) --Globe-trotter (talk) 18:38, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Wow! That's great! Yann (talk) 18:41, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Please allow me to add my welcome as well. We can't wait to see where this project leads! Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 19:17, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Welcome to the family, Wikivoyagians! --Church of emacs (talk) 11:44, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations from the Wikimedia Foundation Staff!

Swept in from the pub

Wikimedia Foundation staff celebrating the official launch of the new Wikivoyage with CAKE(s)!

I thought I would share my personal congrats for the many months of work to get to today and the best wishes for the many years to come. Hopefully I'll have time to poke around myself :).. Today at the office (about 2 hours ago) we had our own little party with cake to celebrate the launch and I took a nice picture, they'll all shouting Wikivoyage if you can't tell ;) . Jalexander (talk) 01:25, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Hey guys, quit snacking and help us patrol here ;)

But seriously, this has been an exciting day, and has seen enormous amounts of good content added. --Peter ^Talk 02:02, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Please tell everyone at Wikimedia THANK YOU from the community here. It was ridiculously amazing how smoothly the setup of the new site went, how simple it has been to integrate contribution history into existing accounts, how responsive you guys have been to bug reports, and how great promotion of the new site has gone. Seeing the massive volume of traffic over the past 18 hours, and more importantly the generally high quality of edits the site has been receiving, makes me more optimistic about the future of free, user-generated travel content than I've been since I began contributing way back in 2005. This has been a very good day for all involved! -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:04, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Fantastic! I totally agree with Ryan. Congratulations everyone for our successful launch day! It took a lot of preparation time, with some mundane tasks, now it's finally time to get back to writing some travel content... Except for the patrolling :-) Anyway, thanks everyone, including the WMF, for making this possible. I hope there's some cake left for us! :-) Globe-trotter (talk) 02:11, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep. What Ryan said. Thanks to everybody who has come along for the ride, and everyone here that has been so helpful. --Inas (talk) 03:16, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I'll pass along your kind words to the staff in the office. Uhm, after I patrol a bit...?  :-) Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 11:58, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Congrats to the hard working editors and senior janitors who have been with this wiki for so long now, and through some dark times. You guys and WMF well deserve each other. I'm proud of you all. -- the former OldPine, now LilHelpa (talk) 21:45, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Promising launch

Swept in from the pub

Alexa traffic statistics show an immense spike in activity for Wikivoyage in the past four days, overtaking Wikitravel around Friday. While this can largely be put down to the promotional banner on Wikipedia, it's also good to see that WV has been ahead in amount users spend on the website for some time.

Just something I felt like sharing. --SU FC 12:14, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

It's probably worth waiting a week or so before we start drawing conclusions about traffic. —Tom Morris (talk) 12:18, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

One idea is to take a selection of popular articles and see how much they have changed between both sites. 86.45.191.101 22:21, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

The average time spent on site actually declined markedly around the launch, maybe due to the changing mix of editors and readers. We're still a little higher than WT. --Avenue (talk) 22:58, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I think that's to be expected with tons of people checking the site out for the first time, rather than it being more or less just dedicated users slaving away in preparation for the launch! --Peter ^Talk 23:07, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Article count

Swept in from the pub

At 12:33, December 17, 2015 there were 26,999 Wikivoyage articles.JarrahTree (talk) 12:36, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

We may already be there. For some reason I cannot work out British Raj is not being counted. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

• Admins: 52
• Users: 2049158
• Active Users: 465
• Pages: 126898
• Articles: 27000 <---- Time to celebrate!
• Files: 899
• Edits: 2905186
• Views: Not available as $wgDisableCounters is no longer available! - Matroc (talk) 04:06, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikivoyage turns 3 on January 15

Swept in from the pub

Wikivoyage launched as a Wikimedia project on January 15, 2013. Anyone have suggestions for marking the third anniversary? I've got a Facebook post queued, and if anyone has contacts at other Wikimedia projects it might be nice to get a bit of additional promotion around this date. In addition, in the #2016 Wikivoyage Wishlist thread above someone suggested reaching out to inactive users - this might be a good time to do so, if anyone wants to craft a message that could be sent. Anything else? -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:15, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Sad, Wikipedia received all the attention today, in the form of news coverage. But anyways, Happy Birthday Wikivoyage! --Saqib (talk) 00:20, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia has earned the attention :) I didn't realize the two dates overlapped - it's a bit like having your birthday on Christmas day - but still nice to take a minute and think back on how things have improved here over the past three years. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:44, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I do hope there'll be bigger celebrations for our fifth birthday ;-) Hobbitschuster (talk) 00:50, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

We must not wait for two years. Wikivoyage entered the world on December 10, 2006. We will celebrate this anniversary on December 10, 2016, surely in Berlin -- as we did it five years ago. At that time nobody thought about becoming a Wikimedia sister. Maybe we can use this event for a better promotion. I already contacted WikimediaDE, WikimediaAT and WikimediaCH in December to plan additional campaigns. If anybody has some proposals I can contact them in this regard.

As I learned at the 2015 WikiDACH bar camp in Schwerin a lot of Wikipedians do not know anything about Wikivoyage. If Wikipedia authors and readers would be familiar with it our SEO problem would be really reduced. I proposed therefore to organize a lecture session with journey accounts at the next WikiCon conference in Germany. In spring I will organize with the Egyptian Wikimedians a lecture and a workshop in Cairo to engage them helping with the start of the Arabic Wikivoyage which is now in the incubator. --RolandUnger (talk) 10:28, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Good to hear your plans Roland Unger. Anybody thought of giving a talk or presentation on Wikivoyage during Wikimania 2016? --Saqib (talk) 12:29, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

A million edits

Swept in from the pub

Special:Diff/2000000/3000000

From November 2012 to May 2016, we've racked up a million edits. Not bad at all. :) K7L (talk) 14:57, 14 October 2016 (UTC)