Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub – Travel guide at Wikivoyage

Howdy!

Yesterday, I took a quick glance over on Wikibooks and noticed that they've got several travel guides and tourism topics that might do well to be integrated into our guides over here on WV. They don't have very many and they mostly haven't been edited for awhile, so I doubt they'll be missed particularly, though I have asked for the community's thoughts here. Naturally, the guides over there don't fit our templates, but I'd be more than happy to sift through them, merge them to their analogues and create new articles as necessary.

What do you think about this? Is it worthwhile? If nothing else, it should hopefully mark out WV as the clear repository for travel guides within the WMF family.

Nick ^talk 20:07, 3 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Great find! Yes, usable info should be merged into WV, and a friendly message left on each talk page suggesting where to find a more up-to-date guide and suggesting to join. Example: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Enjoy_Tokyo/Roppongi Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikibooks in general is not very active, but I'd prefer getting their okay before mass moving stuff over, so as not to step on any toes. --Rschen7754 08:55, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Nick's message is great I think. I assume that if there's no answer in a week, the merge can be performed. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:25, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I would flag down an admin too and make sure it gets noticed - QuiteUnusual comes highly recommended. --Rschen7754 09:28, 4 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've pointed QuiteUnusual towards my post - thanks for the recommendation Rschen7754! If/when we're given the 'go-ahead', is there a more sophisticated way of moving the pages across beyond simple copy-and-paste? --Nick ^talk 00:16, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

It is possible to import entire page histories, but that will need assistance from developers and/or stewards. --Rschen7754 00:38, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Is it preferable then just to copy the contents, linking to the remaining page history over on WB in the summary? --Nick ^talk 00:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think an import might still be a better option. Probably best to see what the result is at en.wikibooks and go from there. --Rschen7754 02:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Can't admins use Special:Import too? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 19:33, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

For direct imports, in theory, but no upload sources have been defined, so the tool doesn't work. --Rschen7754 19:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

A request on bugzilla should be able to get them added, if this will help in the future; it would just need a list of acceptable import sources. (If that goes ahead, I would suggest 'pedia as well as 'books, as the ability to just import templates and modules can be useful.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 15:11, 6 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

That's correct, though I think we may need local consensus for this. --Rschen7754 07:11, 7 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've nominated the pages to be moved here. --Nick ^talk 22:56, 5 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've made the completely unilateral call that this is the only book of Wikibooks' tourism category that we don't want - am I right? It doesn't seem to fit our remit really; I think it sits better in its current home. --Nick ^talk 04:38, 6 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

It looks like our request will probably receive consensus soon, however, we've not yet decided where to put each book. I would suggest that both b:Hiking_in_the_Canadian_Rockies and b:Teaching Assistant in France Survival Guide could both survive as separate articles, whilst the rest should probably be merged with existing articles. Despite this, all of the nominated books would require some editing as they're split over several pages. With that in mind, I'd be happy for the books to be moved first to my userspace (making the job easier for whichever steward moves the pages) where they can be 'voyage-ified' and/or have their content distributed to existing pages. For attribution purposes, the pages could then be moved to Article name/Wikibooks. I'd be happy to undertake the bulk of this work myself. Is this acceptable? --Nick ^talk

Request for import submitted here. --Nick ^talk 22:51, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Import proposal

I propose that we have enwikipedia, meta, and enwikibooks added to the list of import sources at Special:Import. This section is for documenting that there is consensus to do this.

Note: this only gives us the technical ability to do imports, even if we rarely use the feature; it gives us the ability to do it just in case we ever need it again. --Rschen7754 03:58, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

• Support, as proposer. --Rschen7754 03:58, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
• Support, since I can not work out why ever we wouldn't want to maximise our future choices. --118.93nzp (talk) 04:36, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

It seems perfectly intuitive to support this, but first, I'd like someone to explain what the possible down side of this could be, because I don't see a down side. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Support - A very useful tool, particularly when dealing with the above. --Nick ^talk 14:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

The only possible drawback that I can imagine is the possibility of overzealous importing. Pretty weak, though. Powers ^(talk) 16:29, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

It is an admin-only tool, by the way - that should have been mentioned, my bad. --Rschen7754 23:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

• Support. If there is no harm and a clear benefit then let's make this happen. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:31, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
• Note that the import was now done, but this may be helpful for the future (though not such a high priority). --Rschen7754 23:50, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I would still be keen to see this happen! Please feel free to edit any of the imported articles:

• User:Nicholasjf21/Guide_to_Electrical_Equipment_for_Travelers
• User:Nicholasjf21/Hiking_in_the_Canadian_Rockies
• User:Nicholasjf21/Colico
• User:Nicholasjf21/London
• User:Nicholasjf21/South_East_Queensland
• User:Nicholasjf21/Teaching_Assistant_in_France_Survival_Guide
• User:Nicholasjf21/Texas_State_Travel_Guide
• User:Nicholasjf21/Enjoy_Tokyo

--Nick ^talk 00:08, 10 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

This is now bugzilla:63095. --Rschen7754 06:18, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

And now live at Special:Import. --Rschen7754 23:19, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry guys for bringing this up very early but 1st April is approaching so I thought of presenting an idea. I think having Wikipedia as DotM will attract many Wikipedians. --Saqib (talk) 13:29, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Why not? ϒpsilon (talk) 19:00, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I like this idea a lot. You might want to move this discussion to the Pub so that it gets a wider audience. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:02, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

At first I didn't thought this is important but per Ryan above, I've moved this discussion to pub. I think the best way to select our April Fool's article through voting as we did last year so I'm creating a table below, please feel free to add suggestions and add your name next to those you support. --Saqib (talk) 19:43, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I too like the idea of doing Wikipedia - do you mind if I add some things to your mock-up? --Nick ^talk 19:46, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Why not Nick. Plunge forward please. --Saqib (talk) 19:54, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I added another article suggestion for the April day to the table - maybe not as good as WP but certainly more absurd... ϒpsilon (talk) 20:21, 4 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Might want to look at Wikivoyage_talk:Joke_articles#Nominees for last year's runners-up, which appear to be w:Gotham City, w:Springfield (The Simpsons), w:Valhalla and maybe w:Wonderland or w:South Park. K7L (talk) 15:41, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

A Smurf village might also be an idea? K7L (talk) 16:05, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

@K7L: No doubt, many good ideas were nominated last year for the April Fool article and we've plenty of good option to choose one from them this year but I would say let's not lose the opportunity and select "Wikipedia" over those brilliant fictional destinations. No doubt, having an article on one of those fantasy lands might be more fun than having an article on boring Wikipedia but having an article on Wikipedia may be very beneficial for WV because the article can attract many Wikipedians to WV. What do you think? --Saqib (talk) 17:40, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think I agree with Saqib - this could be a fun and novel (in every sense) way of attracting more users across from WP, whilst continuing our tradition of joke articles. --Nick ^talk 22:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

We're a week out from April Fool's Day, so if anyone wants something other than Saqib's suggestion of Wikipedia, speak up soon, otherwise let's move forward with that one. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:30, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

What can we do on WP on 1 Apr to attract attention to the article? Nurg (talk) 06:37, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

A message on social networking website such as Twitter and FB. Also, Wikipedia's next Signpost is going to publish in a day or two. We can ask the editor to write some about our April DotM. What else? --Saqib (talk) 11:09, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Last Signpost in fact included thoughts about April Fool's Day articles ...on WP. ϒpsilon (talk) 21:28, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

April Fool's article proposals

I've been working on the guide for Thurmont for a few days now and I think I've got it into a usable state. I wanted some feedback on it though. What could I change? Where have I deviated from the MOS? What do I need to do to get this to Guide status instead of a Usable status? I'm going to go talk to some people at the town hall a little bit later to see if they have any suggestions for things I may have missed or things that I ought to remove since they know the town a lot better than me. Zellfaze (talk) 16:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your contributions. I would say focus on expanding the description of listings. --Saqib (talk) 17:07, 17 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

If you are in Thurmont you can take some nice photos and upload them to Commons, there ain't many [1] now to illustrate the article. Jjtkk (talk) 21:06, 17 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Zellfaze! You should add an intro or "Understand" section explaining the atmosphere of the city, a bit of history, a brief geography explanation (for instance: historical center along the river and new town West of it and park on the East side), and what people like about this place. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:22, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

We increased the range for Nearby on Wikivoyage to make it more useful. The range is now 20km. Be sure to check out Special:Nearby ! Feedback welcomed! Jdlrobson (talk) 00:45, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I was unaware that this service existed. What was the old range? Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:05, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I have mw:Beta Features/Nearby Pages enabled in my special:preferences, it doesn't even have a chance in Hull of finding Ottawa. The same issue appears with other twin settlements like Prescott-Ogdensburg. A note on the talk page indicates it was recently broken, but it seems it never worked properly. Will the radius be changed on it too? K7L (talk) 01:38, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yep, the nearby pages beta feature is currently broken but it will be fixed on Thursday and should show locations within 20km. Whether is sufficient or not (the previous range was 10km) will remain to be seen.. Let us know if you think the range needs to be tweaked any further. Jdlrobson (talk) 03:07, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Given that what counts here on WV are city/town articles, and given the fact that the majority of cities are more than 20 km apart in most parts of the world, I'm not sure this feature will be very useful for us unless the range is set considerably higher, say 80 or 100km. Texugo (talk) 11:11, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Maybe "find the five closest points" would make more sense than an arbitrary distance. A 100km radius in New York City would likely return Westchester, half of New Jersey and part of Connecticut. A 100km radius from Watertown (New York) would find Thousand Islands but miss Syracuse (New York) 73 miles away. A 100km radius around Port Menier, Anticosti would likely pick up nothing but static as Anticosti is 175km of provincial parkland. K7L (talk) 14:44, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

You're right, 20 km is too short in most cases, but the distance that is considered "nearby" is very relative to what region you're in. Limiting it to the 5-10 closest articles instead of by distance is an excellent idea if it's doable! Texugo (talk) 14:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

User:Texugo, User:K7L this seems like a good idea. I've started this thread on our mobile mailing list to see if we can tweak this even further. Jdlrobson (talk) 17:43, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Alternative: Dynamic Map

The "Destinations" layer (button: Destinations) of dynamic map shows according to the language versions all articles 150 to 1500 km around. The markers linked with the articles (examples: en.WV 150km, ru.WV 1500km. - Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:24, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm not opposed to merging or deleting them, but I'd like the text at Wikivoyage:Itineraries to be elaborated to clarify where the boundary lies between itineraries that are allowable and those that are too personalized.

The reason I'm concerned is that I eventually plan on writing several itineraries for self-guided architectural walking tours of various Buffalo neighborhoods, which seems to me to be in a gray area: neither the fact that many buildings of great architectural distinction are located in Buffalo nor that architecture buffs constitute a large and growing proportion of visitors to the area are in dispute, and the material I envision including is probably too specialized to include in Buffalo or any of the district articles. But the selection of which points of interest to include is, to some degree, a matter of personal taste.

I'm posting this in the pub rather than at Wikivoyage talk:Votes for deletion because this touches on a larger policy issue rather than any individual article that's nominated, or at Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries as the discussion would likely languish in obscurity indefinitely if placed on as low-traffic a page as that one.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:06, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I suspect the main concern is that One day in Buffalo isn't created in a format that merely duplicates info in the main Buffalo articles. There are plenty of this sort of itinerary that were started but never finished. If the article isn't duplicative of the city guide, and you actually intend to finish it sometime this year, it is valid. K7L (talk) 20:13, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries#Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article contains a very lengthy discussion about why the itinerary criteria was tightened. There have already been questions raised about how to more clearly allow good articles like Loop Art Tour or Along the Magnificent Mile while discouraging random "X in Y days" articles, so suggestions for policy clarifications and improvements would be useful. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:14, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Oh Lord. That's one mess of a discussion. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 12:38, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It would be fantastic to have some place comparable the former WT Extra to move such personal itineraries. Even if they are unsuitable for Wikivoyage per the above discussion, I've personally found "X days in Y" like itineraries useful more than once. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:09, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I haven't read up on those discussions yet, but I quite agree with Ypsilon. For the average traveller a well-constructed highlights tour for a day is more likely to be useful than a tour only about art in the public space, or something else specific. To me the concept that a more general sights tour is per se more "personal" than any selection of art, architecture etc is a misconception. A good "one day in.." is more than just another listing of things you can find in the article, it also provides a logical walking route and/or public transport route. I used One day in Bangkok just last autumn. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:54, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think that we should encourage one day tours of huge cities. The way our guides are structured it is sometimes hard to find the wood for the trees, so it is good to have a plan for either a one day visit or the first day of a longer stay. To make these easier to find they should be called <placename> in one day. In some cities it may be appropriate to have more than one route in the same article, but they should be self-contained one day routes - I see less value in more days in a city, but one or two weeks in a country can also be useful. It looks like we are only wanting the sort of routes where the local council has already put up signposts and written a leaflet, where we have little to add. AlasdairW (talk) 23:38, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

(undent) I'd favour some sort of exception that allows both the one-day-in type of itinerary and things like Shanghai for the first-timer at least for large complex cities, perhaps only the ones with districts. Such things would clearly not be much use for small places, but a pretty good case can be made when the main article or set of them is large; Alasdair is right about woods & trees above. Pashley (talk) 23:57, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

If we could come up with very clear guidelines for such itineraries then they could be a useful addition, but the problem we've faced in the past is that no one agrees on what "X time in Y location" should include, so we get tons of incomplete articles that duplicate the main articles, and which then need to be cleaned up later. In my mind, a better solution would be something akin to Wikivoyage talk:Geographical hierarchy#Weak regions, where our region and huge city articles become essentially highlight summaries of the child city/district articles - in such a scenario, a visitor reading Hong Kong would get a few paragraphs on each district that would be useful in planning a 1-2 day trip, and could then drill down into the Hong Kong/New Territories article once he narrows the focus of the trip to specific areas. However we proceed, I think organization of our guides needs to be a key consideration, and I don't think that re-opening the floodgates to "X time in Y location" articles is the best solution. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:28, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe we should work that out over time - let us focus working on a few "One day in Bangkok makes a hard man humble" articles and see how it pans out - what type of content did we have to remove, what to keep off limits and what rules of a thumb can we draw from that experience. Atm, I really really really don't see how "One day in X" are bad for WV, except for the fact that some are incomplete. But then, let's just complete them! PrinceGloria (talk) 05:43, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

PS. I never saw a "flood" of those, much like anything, they have not seen nearly enough contributions. I wouldn't worry about more being created. I find them EXTREMELY useful as a traveller.

See Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries#Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article for a list of twelve such articles that were created in a single week, leading to the current guidance against "X location in Y time" articles. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:57, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

That was two years ago! I wish we had that level of content creation today... PrinceGloria (talk) 06:26, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think all of us accept that "x days in Y" can be good articles: Three days in Singapore is one I think everyone agrees is a good itinerary article. The issue is what criteria we can use to avoid articles like A weekend on Block Island that are totally unnecessary. If you haven't done so already, please read through some of the previous discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries, particularly starting with the "Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article" section. If you can offer a good set of criteria that will enable us to distinguish between good "x days in Y" articles and those that should be deleted, and that set of criteria is different from the one currently in use, please do! Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Block Island is a good illustration of why we should put the place name first. A weekend on Block Island is currently up for deletion. 3 Days in Block Island has already been merged into Block Island. I suspect that editors of each article were not aware of the other, but would have been if we had insisted on Block Island in a weekend and Block Island in 3 days.

I think that "city in a day" articles only become useful for huge cities with districts, or perhaps cities with more than 50 see and do listings. Maybe city itineraries should be discussed on the city talk page before creation. One day in Hong Kong is the sort of article that could usefully be developed, as it manages to show a good cross-section of the city visiting 3 districts, which I don't think somebody reading our 8 articles on Hong Kong would think of. AlasdairW (talk) 23:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Proposed criteria for good "Y in X days" articles

1. Precise sequence of POIs to visit
2. Transportation between POIs described in detail (which bus to take, which streets to walk)
3. Timing given per each part of itinerary
4. More than one option for the above possible, as long as it is still legible
5. Not duplication (or contradiction!) of general descriptions of the main city or district articles, this should be an utilitarian article

Your thoughts? PrinceGloria (talk) 20:19, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Adding OpenStreetMap I'd like to bring three things to the community's attention. The first is most important: I'd like to think that OpenStreetMap is a good enough resource to include in the sidebar. It's also worthwhile for this free/open content community to support other such communities. The wikivoyage-ev map links don't work for me (presently at my parents' house using Firefox 28.x on Windows 8) but I can go to OSM's site and see things there.

As smaller issues, I'd like to suggest that we consider renaming references to the "Open Directory Project" as "DMOZ" per this discussion on en.wp. It's not incumbent upon en.voy to always do what en.wp does but it's worth being consistent between sister projects.

Finally, a small technical note: Pages which have Wikitravel histories have a small bug with generating links to history pages. Cf. https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Policies with https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory . The latter has Wikitravel history and in the footer at the bottom of the page, there is a link to the non-existent "https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory/w/index.php%3Ftitle%3DWikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory%26action%3Dhistory". What actually exists is "https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage:Links_to_Open_Directory&action=history". Should I submit this to bugzilla or can someone here fix this?

Thanks for your feedback. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:18, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It looks like the credit extension changed and is now using MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits instead of MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work, and that the syntax is slightly different. I've made a few technical tweaks to get the history links correct again. For the record, since this is a touchy legal area, I made no changes beyond what was necessary to restore the existing functionality and did not touch the content at all. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:56, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the small technical update, Wrh2.

Justin: Both your add OpenStreetMap to the sidebar and re-name to DMOZ proposals have obvious merit, Justin and I would support them both. --118.93nzp (talk) 03:42, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I suspect mw:Extension:RelatedSites hard-codes the sidebar links into one of the server configuration files, so it'd be necessary to open a bugzilla: item to get these fixed. K7L (talk) 04:02, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage-ev map

Quote User:Koavf: "The wikivoyage-ev map links don't work for me ..." - The Wikivoyage-ev map is linked directly to OpenStreetMap, but also displays all the markers of Wikivoyage articles. What is wrong? Do you use a proxy server, which disguised your web address (known blocking reason)? What happens when you click this link? -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:07, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

"The connection has timed out. The server at maps.wikivoyage-ev.org is taking too long to respond." I've been getting that message from all wikivoyage-ev links for several weeks now. If I use the URLs that start with tools.wmflabs.org/wikivoyage/w then it works. –Thatotherperson^talkcontribs 06:27, 22 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I have changed all web requests to "//tools.wmflabs.org/wikivoyage/w/" (example). I hope the problem is solved now. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 04:34, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

@Mey2008: For what it's worth, I'm on a different machine now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

With the WV.ev server there are problems depending of the browsers settings. Only http is supported, not https. The tools server supports both protocols. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:12, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Apparently the footer on articles derived from WT has been altered. Rather than an explicit mention of and link to Wikitravel, the test reads as follows:

"This article is partly based on Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 Licensed work from other websites. Details of contributors can be found in the article history."

Was anyone else aware of this? Did WMF Legal do that or was it one of us? I follow on my watchlist most if not all of the important project pages listed at Wikivoyage:Administrator's handbook#Watchlist, but I don't recall this ever having been mentioned. Apologies if I missed it.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 13:22, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I am aware of it from seeing it, and of course think it is an excellent change. Congratulations and thank you to whoever did it. Pashley (talk) 13:34, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Doc James did it about 10 days ago. The relevant page is MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits, formerly MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work. Powers ^(talk) 14:40, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes and WT is watching per Talk:Longsheng Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:51, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

(edit conflict) I've noticed the footer has changed a couple of times for a little over a week. Jmh apparently tried it out on Longsheng first and if you read both threads there he unfortunately made a well known long time contributor very angry. :D ϒpsilon (talk) 14:55, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Does Wikivoyage have procedures for dealing with legal threats? I'm asking this because for reference Wikipedia currently has a policy on dealing with legal threats that might tell us how to handle these situations, and whether they might be unwanted for our reusers. I'm not sure of the exact reasoning behind such a policy, but I believe it's due to the fact the reader who prints out the article as PDF might be wary of doing so for fear he would be copying copyright-violating content and breaking the law. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 22:09, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage:No real world threats. K7L (talk) 23:33, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Can anyone clarify what the user's beef was? Now that page histories have been merged, I can't see what the user was seeing. Powers ^(talk) 02:15, 22 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Assuming you are talking about the problem at Talk:Longsheng, sure. If you look at the current history page of Longsheng, look at the last five of the edits made on March 11. Those are all that were showing before, and the rest were at the history page of the redirect at Longsheng, China (which is pointed to by the first edit summary of those 5 edits). The user was claiming that the pointer given by Jmh649 in his edit summary was not sufficient. I didn't necessarily agree that it was insufficient, but I merged the histories anyway, as that seemed to be the best way to shut down the complaining/trolling. Texugo (talk) 02:59, 22 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I find it at best impolite that this change was done in a unilateral manner for all language versions, and they were not even informed of the change. I am sure that many people in other languages still scratch their heads to understand what to do with the red link to the history page, let alone absolutely weird translations. Finally, I really do not understand why this whole action was necessary, because the old credit message at MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work could be rewritten in every possible way. The problem was on the legal side, and this problem is hardly resolved=( --Alexander (talk) 00:29, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The change message for the commit that caused the behavior to change states "Raised on https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/About_MediaWiki:Creditssource-source-work/ksh". In case there is any confusion, this was not done at the behest of English Wikivoyage and appears to have been done to address translation problems rather than anything related to SEO or legal concerns. See the second comment under #Proposed related site external links and small technical issue above for an explanation of what needs to be changed to work with the new formatting. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:15, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe what Alex was referring to is the wholesale removal of attribution from the footer-- not any single specific edit that was made. That would be a mere quibble. Rather, the removal of proper attribution from not only the Longsheng page, but apparently the bulk of wikiVoyage, seems to violate both the terms of the sharing license as well as the spirit of the sharing idea, and therefore puts the whole of wikimedia-- including Wikipedia itself-- at risk of being found in violation of copyright. This is a poor precedent for this offshoot/fork site to set. Further, it appears to have been done not only without explicit approval from the legal arm of the wiki foundation, but directly in the face of their implied advice to very specifically not do so, and rather concentrate on creating distinct content. These google tricks are I'm certain a joyous distraction. But some of you are wandering into dangerous territory and taking the rest of you with them. Restore the links. Your page history attribution is insufficient (it does not even name real contributors, since someone named "WT-Alex" exists on neither website. In your zeal to remove attribution to the site that gave you all your data, you seem to have forgotten that in doing so you are cheating millions of Wiki contributors out of their copyright by applying technically shoddy and legally unsound methods. Change it back and move along with the rest of your agenda. —The preceding comment was added by HK britt (talk • contribs)

Attribution goes on the history page, just like it always has for all types of contributions. As far as I know, there is zero reason, legal or otherwise, why WT should get special treatment with a link on the actual article page. Clicking on any user in that history preceded by a WT- will give you an explanation who that user is on WT, so that is covered. As must as you would like to believe so, we are not cheating anyone. I also am nearly 100% convinced you a troll employed by IB. Texugo (talk) 19:11, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

HK, it isn't particularly smart to threaten the organization that develops MediaWiki. ϒpsilon (talk) 19:40, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

errr, what threat? You may rather refer to the foundation's top lawyer's advice to concentrate on content and dispense with the google trickery. The implication that it will have legal consequences is his, not mine: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage/Lounge&diff=prev&oldid=5866452

That's a stretch of context. There is no Google trickery here. Can you show us where the license legally requires any type of attribution whatsoever to be included on the same page as the work? If not, please stop trolling. Texugo (talk) 20:42, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

HK's claims are ridiculous. Edits we imported are attributed exactly the same as they are on WT, with the addition of the signifier "(WT-en)" to distinguish users who have not merged their edits with a WMF account. The "WT-Alex" example is a straw man; the actual username would be "(WT-en) Alex". The only thing that was removed in the recent change was the link to the WT version of the article, which is useless and not required because we credit each contributor by edit. Powers ^(talk) 01:56, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Exactly what matters is attributing the actual authors. WT is not the author of anything. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:30, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Let’s see if I have the timeline correct.

1. User “HK britt” drops in on the Longsheng page to complain (admittedly, coarsely) that not only has the page footer attribution to his (her?) original work (presumably via an IP edit) imported from Wikitravel been removed systematically, but also the proposed new form of attribution was also removed (the page history listed only 5 revisions, instead of the dozens of actual edits since 2007 by various writers who contributed to the Wikitravel article).

2. This accusation was found to be true by Texugo, and though he did not agree that it needed to be there at all (why?), he went ahead and restored the page history, which had been removed by Doc James as an “experiment” (note to Doc James and others: maybe don’t play with removing attribution as an “experiment” from now on – this is people’s actual work you’re removing the credit for).

3. After calming down and pointing out on the Pub exactly why the brouhaha, HK britt is accused of making “real world threats,” goes ahead and denies making any such threats, and is promptly subjected to the kangaroo court of a quick userban for making threats which I’ll be darned if I can find (a threat, remember, is a statement of one’s intent to harm another in some way – I see no such statement by HK britt), and summarily kicked off the site.

Now, I am not sure if you can see the effect of all this to an outsider, but having had my run-ins with absolutely insane administrators here (not a threat! Calm down!), one could easily read this as: dare to question an admin here, get pig-piled on by all the rest with a trumped-up charge and get booted from the site. If your aim is to attract editors, you’re doing one heck of a bang up job fellows.

A secondary effect is that it’s embarrassingly clear you want the name “Wikitravel” scrubbed from every orifice here. Understandable. But as long as you let zealots like Doc James run roughshod and do whatever they want, as britt pointed out, you run certain risks as a community (not a threat! Calm down!). Remember how you all got started here. You copied the entirety of Wikitravel and renamed it Wikivoyage (yes, I know the Italians and German were already here). You may not like it, but you will owe that debt to those Wikitravelers until the last word of their writing is gone from Wikivoyage, and at the current pace that is going to be a very, very long time coming. It’s why Google barely gives you a glance. And even if washing the evil “wikitravel” name from this site ends up helping your google rank (it won’t – it’s about content, as the wm legal team pointed out), you’re doing it at the cost of betraying the very thing you propose to hold so dear: sharing content freely and attributing it to its authors.

Perhaps in some technical sense there was a way for a non-Wiki expert to visit the Longsheng page and actually locate, after many clicks, the authors of that content. Maybe they can decipher exactly what “(WT-en) Salbastarfrog” is supposed to mean, even though at present there is no way to find an actual link to the Wikitravel site through the page history/fake username rabbit hole you’ve created. Maybe this is technically sufficient for the CC/SA license to apply (a lawyer will surely answer that at some point). But is this why you came here? To be so full of bitterness at where you came from that you’re willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in making your “new start” and burn your content creators along with IB?

What a horrible precedent. What a rotten attitude. When you allow the bitterest among you to make such unilateral, vindictive, sweeping changes, you are all tarnished. I’m glad I no longer edit here. You who are complicit ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You have some soul searching to do.SpendrupsForAll (talk) 01:10, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

You're on extremely thin ice yourself, Spendrups (examples: 1, 2, 3), so I would strongly recommend if you want to remain here that you think long and hard before spouting off your nonsense on a contentious issue like this. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:55, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The fact is however that HK Britt's behavior was unacceptably aggressive, and continued even when calmly engaged by the WV community. Their complaint about WT attribution was not the reason they were banned. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:31, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

None of your claims are accurate, Spendrups, and I don't even see any reason to dignify your trolling with a point-by-point rebuttal, though it's easy to mention that "You copied the entirety of Wikitravel and renamed it Wikivoyage" is a ridiculous description of a fork, and that the rest of your logic derives from this (intentionally?) distorted viewpoint. Either use your account here for constructive edits and cease trolling, or you are likely to be the next person nominated for a user ban in short order, as you are wasting our time. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:33, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

We seem to have managed the worst of both worlds.

Most of our pages still carry the legally unnecessary HTML hyperlink to Wikitravel's main page which boosts Wikitravel's Search Engine organic results.

If this wasn't bad enough, at the foot of most of our guides we also still have another legally unnecessary HTML hyperlink to a Wikitravel article with a similar title.

However, the legally required attribution is now defective in there being a defective (ie red) link at the foot of most of our articles to its history which ever so slightly saps our own Search Engine organic results.

When you add to this the fact that we preserve a less than optimal article naming scheme and almost all of the old H2 section titles used at the site we forked from, it's no wonder that most important search engines still regard us as an inferior johnny-come-lately imitation of Wikitravel and assign us a dupe penalty! --118.93nzp (talk) 20:13, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It is not clear to me what you are talking about. I just checked two articles — small city Xiamen & big city Shanghai — and neither shows the problems you describe. Neither links to WT and both have working links to a history that shows contributions made on WT. Pashley (talk) 20:36, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I enclose a current screenshot of the foot of the Shanghai article to try and make things clearer... --118.93nzp (talk) 21:23, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've had a look at Shanghai as well and I see what Pashley describes. Is it possible that you're somehow viewing a cached version of the page, 118.93nzp? --Nick ^talk 21:36, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

You're right, Nick and Pashley! I've just been to a colleague's machine and now I see a (much better, from the SEO perspective) shortened sentence: "This article is partly based on Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 Licensed work from other websites. Details of contributors can be found in the article history." Thank you Doc James and Ryan! This is great news to start my week!

Now if we can just change those H2 section headers and article naming scheme, our organic search engine results should improve by leaps and bounds... --118.93nzp (talk) 21:44, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Show it works and you will have my support. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:09, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I would advise fellow Wikivoyagers not to encourage 118's forum shopping by engaging him in any way on discussions of this nature. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 09:41, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I just spent a good amount of time entering all the information to add a sleep listing and when I clicked Submit I got:

Error: API returned error code "badtoken": Invalid token

and all the information I entered was lost. Gee, thanks. What's the deal? I try and help the site and this is how I'm rewarded? At the very least, if the listing is not accepted, it should leave you in the listing editor so everything is not lost. —The preceding comment was added by TokyoJimu (talk • contribs) 05:09, 24 March 2014‎ (UTC)Reply

@Unknown user **: This error occurs when URL could not be detected correctly [2]. What article do you want to edit? -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2014 (UTC) ** Please sign your post by appending four tildes (~~~~)Reply

This has also happened to me a number of times. Usually when taking too much time, there is a timeout. So if you go for coffee while editing a listing, better save it, even if it is incomplete, and then click "edit" again. Not losing input would be a nice enhancement indeed. Nicolas1981 (talk) 07:37, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Having worked on other wikis, timeouts were an issue and the above suggestion to save is great... My motto was "Save and Save Often". In addition, I have often written small data input GUI programs for Windows to gather basic information and write output files to my desktop (I think something external for starting various listings could be accomplished fairly easily) ... simple copy and paste to a Wiki article page and complete editorial work later. I also run MediaWiki on my desktop and use that for basic page creation as well - again copy and paste - edit later. It was also not uncommon to actually dump a wiki and rebuild it onto a USB stick and work from that... (This would entail quite a bit of work to accomplish something like that with Wikivoyage)... Matroc (talk) 15:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC) Cheers!Reply

Hi! Could some administrator change the links on MediaWiki:Common.js from http://upload.wikimedia.org to //upload.wikimedia.org (i.e. protocol-relative url), so that if users visit Wikivoyage in HTTPS, they won't get a "mixed content" error. Thanks! Chmarkine (talk) 00:00, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

  Done -- WOSlinker (talk) 00:13, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Dear travellers,

I got us an HTTPS LAMP server that looks more stable than the last one:

• https://voyage.wmflabs.org
• https://voyage.wmflabs.org/poimap2/poimap2.php

I hope that will solve the mixed-content problems that plagued dynamic maps until now :-)

I guess my PoiMap2 Github repo at https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/PoiMap2 is not up-to-date anymore. Could you please fork and send me a pull request? Or point me to a more up-to-date Git repo? Thanks!

Nicolas1981 (talk) 15:49, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm seeing an error with the generic Listing icon. See here on the old server there's three green hexaflowers on the west side of town, then switch to the new server and the icons no longer load.
Thatotherperson^talkcontribs 01:34, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, the PHP source code is not up-to-date.

So, if I understand correctly, the last thing to do to get rid of the mixed-content problem is to install an OSM tiles server on voyage.wmflabs.org? Am I right? Does anyone have experience with this? Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:06, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

An own tile server for OSM Mapnik tiles is not a solution. We need tiles for all 10+ different layers. But not all providers offer data dumps as OSM (Planet.osm). Mixed content is inevitable. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 06:11, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I don't think we absolutely need to serve ALL layers as HTTPS, but at least the default layer, so that external visitors can enjoy the map instead of staring at a white rectangle. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:55, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I tested extensively on real hardware and could find no errors. Example: Debian 6.0/FF 28/https/not logged in [3]. Sometimes the cause is also due to specific settings (browser, proxy, virus scanners). Do other users have similar problems? Nevertheless, I will revise the scripts in terms of map tiles under https. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 09:12, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It should also be checked, whether in the personal common.js is still a trial version of mapframe.js. This needs to be deleted because it is no longer compatible. The old version caused a white map window. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 13:43, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

As you pointed out, it was a problem with my common.js indeed! So an HTTPS tiles server is not absolutely needed right now :-) Thanks a lot! Nicolas1981 (talk) 15:38, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

All Mapquest and Mapnik layers now use tiles that are offered under https. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 16:21, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

In Japan, HEART BARRIER finds and classifies restaurants/etc that are accessible to wheelchairs, gathering data about its slopes width/steepness/etc. That could be useful. In the future we could to try to have at least one wheelchair-accessible restaurant in each article (where such a place exist at all), or something in this spirit. Meanwhile, how about an article that gathers such efforts, for example HEART BARRIER in Japan, XYZ in another country, etc? Do you know any similar classification efforts in other countries? Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:16, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

In Germany there is the Wheelmap.org. Wheelmap.org is an initiative of SOZIALHELDEN e.V., a German non-profit association. All relevant OpenstreetMap POI's are registered in a dynamic map and classified, for all countries worldwide. The POI's are color-coded. Not yet reviewed (gray) POI may be classified online. -- Joachim Mey2008 (talk) 05:41, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Do we have any articles about traveling for those in wheelchairs or with other handicaps that affect travel, such as blind travel? I actually think it would be useful to have an icon or (Wheelchair accessible)=Accessible/Not Accessible/Limited Access/Partial Access/(whatever we deem most useful) as part of the information to fill in along with the other information (price, lat/long, hours, etc). It would definitely put our site above most others for handicap travelers. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 05:48, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I find Travellers with disabilities, which is a barely-begun outline, and Disabled travel in South Africa, which is quite a lot better. I certainly support any such article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:06, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

What are the current 3-5 most popular travel websites online specializing in presenting user-generated information and reviews of travel destinations? (I'm specifically referring to websites such as TripAdvisor.com that contain information, reviews and ratings about sites and businesses that can help travelers better assess ahead of time what the most popular and successful local attractions, hotels, pubs, restaurants, etc are within a certain area/town/city.) ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 17:53, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yelp dot com comes to my mind. And orbitz dot com (just hotels). ϒpsilon (talk) 18:10, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

TripAdvisor and Wikitravel are the top two AFAIK, though Yelp might be up there too; not everyone considers it a travel site, since its listings are not limited to travelers' amenities and locals seem to be the primary users. Powers ^(talk) 23:42, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

This is the list by Alexa [4] Tripadvisor is way ahead of all others. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:11, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The subcategory for travel guides might be more useful: [5]. Powers ^(talk) 23:14, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hello! First I want to apologize for throwing this out nearly last minute. I needed to be absolutely certain I could commit the time. Anyway, I have put up a proposal at m:Grants:IEG/Promoting Wikivoyage. It is to promote Wikivoyage to the US and State Chamber of Commerces. Hopefully that can then be replicated in other countries. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 19:51, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

You may want to look at Tourism Bureau Expedition and welcome, tourism professionals; local CVB's (convention and visitors bureaux) are well-placed to provide info and correct factual errors as they represent "boots on the ground" in every destination community, but at the same time a raw dump of existing CVB material could easily turn an entire destination page into a flood of promotional hype. Certainly Wikivoyage has identified a need to encourage CVB's to contribute constructively to the project - anything from removing listings when venues close their doors to fact-checking to linking to us once a usable/guide article exists for their respective destinations - but we have a limited number of people to pursue this initiative. *(CVB's may be separate entities from chambers of commerce in some communities.) K7L (talk) 02:41, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I would suggest you develop the "Measures of success" paragraph with measurable and verifiable goals. How about adding:

• Establish dialog with at least 50 contacts, non-negative answer from at least 10. Verified by CCing all emails or logging GoToMeeting sessions.
• Have at least 5 contacts produce content on Wikivoyage, with at least 2 having more than 5 commits or more than 1kilobyte of added text. Verified by establishing username identity in above-mentioned email conversations.

Good luck! Even if the grant does not succeed, it sounds like a very interesting thing to do :-) I will try to contact the CVBs of destinations I grew up in. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:50, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the ideas! These both will work great and give me a jumping off point for developing some of the weak sections. Thanks!--Tbennert (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps a better metric would be factual accuracy, or the number of destinations actually improved from outline to usable or guide? Even Sodom and Gomorrah meets the one kilobyte test, although it contains enough marketing hype and outdated info to be worthless (except as a hypothetical example of what not to do). Conversely, fixing incorrect information in articles and removing venues which have closed doesn't necessarily lengthen a piece like fr:Lac-Mégantic. The Lac-Mégantic updates were useful to the traveller to determine what's still open after last summer's train wreck; at one point, worried visitors watching the destruction of the downtown on news broadcasts were cancelling trips to provincial parks twenty or thirty miles (30-50km) away. Quality, not quantity... please?

That said, our current coverage is very uneven in spots. New York (state) has solid coverage of Buffalo, Rochester and the Finger Lakes (where we have local users who've put in a massive effort), variable coverage of the middle of the state (Massena redlinked, Rome was started but never completed...), then extensive again in NYC. Keeping what information we have up-to-date is also a huge concern. CVB's in places our users haven't visited, where we have no one local, could fill a few gaps by contributing constructively to spot key destinations we've missed. K7L (talk) 13:00, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping those less traveled locations will be well served by the plan. I haven't quite figured out the mechanics, but I was hoping to do a special email for locations that are redlinks or just a name with sections.

Your concern for quality is understood. I've cleaned up plenty of promotional pages over the years. Honestly I think most of these groups will be quite comfortable following the format given. Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I created this category the other day because I noticed that something, presumably mediawiki itself, was populating it. However, I don't fully understand what's going on. For example:

• Prague shows up on the list. I copied the text of the article and tried to put it in a new test page in my user space, and apparently what is triggering the filter is the text "airport-shuttle(dot)com". However, a) the full text of the link is http://www.prague-airport-shuttle(dot)com, which is apparently a legitimate link and which should not be triggering a spamfilter with only part of its main domain name anwyay, and b) the text "airport-shuttle(dot)com" doesn't even appear at Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist in the first place, so I don't know why it's triggering the filter
• Glen Canyon National Recreation Area did contain a link which was listed at Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist. It appeared to be an actually valid listing under our external link guidelines, so I removed it from the blacklist, but the article still appears in the category anyway.

Anyone have more insight as to how this works? Texugo (talk) 15:04, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Answered part of the first point above: "airport-shuttle(dot)com" is listed on meta's blacklist, but it still raises the question, why is it triggering the filter with only a partial match, and what can we do about it? Texugo (talk) 15:12, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The first section of Wikivoyage:Spam filter has a bit more information about how all of the blacklists and whitelists work together, but updates to make things clearer would probably be useful. As to the airport shuttle link, all of the blacklist patterns are regular expressions, so the pattern just has to match something in the text, even if it's only a part of the full URL. If we need to override a Mediawiki blacklist entry we should be able to do so with MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:25, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Is this new feature something that spiders through our articles only periodically? Is that why I can't get Glen Canyon National Recreation Area out of the category? and why the category has gradually grown from a couple of listings when I created it to 16 now? Texugo (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure how the maintenance categories are generated - I know some of them are batch jobs that run at infrequent intervals, but maybe someone else can provide some insight. Have you tried re-editing the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area article so that it is re-parsed? And as a side note, the URL in question for that article is from a business that spammed a significant number of articles - see MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#invertsports dot com. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:09, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

We could also ask to have the entry removed from the global blacklist (unlikely, as it was probably added due to a specific incidence of spamming), or have the "good" link added to the global whitelist (more likely, but not certain as they may question the propriety of any airport shuttle URL). Powers ^(talk) 17:47, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've gotten two requests for user renames lately that I'm not sure what to do with since we don't really have any guidelines on the subject. After reading through w:Wikipedia:Changing username I'd suggest that we create a page similar to w:Wikipedia:Changing username/Simple that reflects the following:

1. Any rename request must acknowledge having read something we create that will be similar to w:Wikipedia:Changing username#Must read, so that it is clear the user understands caveats and downsides of a rename.
2. If the target user name is not registered on Wikivoyage and does not have edits on any other WMF wiki, then a rename can be done.
3. If the target user name is registered on Wikivoyage or has edits on any other WMF wiki, then a rename will only be done if the user can prove that they own both accounts.

Thoughts and suggestions? The third point above might be too restrictive in cases where someone is trying to deal with global username conflicts, but I'm not sure how we can safely allow renames here when the desired username is already in use, so someone who knows more and can make a suggestion please comment. I can draft a policy page for further comment if there is general agreement that the above makes sense. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:05, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Keep in mind that sometimes people request renames that do not understand English well; they have edits here because of Wikidata, or removing deleted images, or something of the like. In regards to the latter, there is usurpation (renaming the offending account to something like OldName (usurped)), but if that user has edits already, it becomes problematic. --Rschen7754 19:27, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The problem with renaming users when there might be a global conflict is that I don't understand issues around global usernames, so I'm unwilling to personally perform a rename when there is a global conflict barring clear guidance on when doing so is OK. However, that means that users attempting to resolve global username conflicts cannot do so on Wikivoyage until we come up with such guidance. Ideally such conflicts could be handled entirely from meta, but since they aren't, can someone provide a pointer to documentation (or write something up here) on when and how a global conflict can be addressed so that we can draft local guidelines? I'm never going to "usurp" a username unless there is a clear process for ensuring that the usurped user is actually obsolete, for example. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:55, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

User:Wrh2 You may want to ask around on Meta (m:Rename practices may be helpful), but from what I know, the general guideline for usurping is that they have 0 edits anywhere, on any wiki (which can be checked with Special:CentralAuth). The requester is responsible for running Special:MergeAccount to merge their accounts back together. Also, renames of accounts where there are close to 100,000 edits (counting imported) will likely crash the database and should not be done. Rschen7754 20:20, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Please see Wikivoyage:Changing username for a proposed draft. I've added "See also" links to meta at the bottom of the new page for individuals who need to resolve global conflicts. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:52, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

@LtPowers: for feedback, since he's the only other active bureaucrat. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

So we'd do a rename even if the target account has edits here? Powers ^(talk) 00:11, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I don't think that it is technically possible to rename an account using an existing username (the target account would have to be renamed first), but if I've written something into the rename policy page that seems to indicate otherwise please update the draft policy page to make this point clear. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:25, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I imagined a much cleaner process like simply the policy page and then the request page, followed by archives. I don't think we need extra subpages for "open" and "closed" requests. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 00:34, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The process is simple - see Wikivoyage:Changing username#Instructions. The user clicks on a link, fills in three fields, and the request is initiated. It's the same thing that's done on Wikipedia. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:11, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Any further comment on the Wikivoyage:Changing username page? At the moment our process for renaming users is completely ad-hoc, so if there are no further comments, and since it's better to have some guidance for users seeking a rename rather than nothing at all (as we currently do), I'd like to remove the "draft" notice from the page and start asking anyone with a rename request to follow the instructions on that page. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:32, 9 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

  Done -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:43, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Historically speaking, before the merge with Wikimedia Foundation servers, has the Wikivoyage community ever saw a need to rename user accounts? Was it ever done on an ad hoc basis, where users were aware of the bureaucrat technical capabilities and contacted one individually/privately? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 00:28, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Rename requests have historically been handled on an ad-hoc basis. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:11, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Friends, it's been a long time coming, but it's with great pride that I announce the completion of the fifth of the seven Buffalo district articles. Even more so than the others, my work on the West Side article was truly a labor of love, it being the neighborhood where I live and my favorite one in the city.

If any of you would like to look the article over and give me your feedback, that would be most appreciated.

Special thanks go out to User:Reemler for help with scouting and note-taking.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 09:31, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I must praise your tireless work. Your Buffalo articles are very comprehensive and in detail. Well done and keep it up! --Saqib (talk) 21:12, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thank you, Saqib. :-D -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 07:12, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

That's a beautiful article, almost overwhelming in the amount of information you've provided. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:49, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It's a great article, just like the other Buffalo articles you've been working on. Few articles have so detailed listing descriptions. I'd like a few more pictures here and there - the middle third has no pictures at all - and coordinates for the POIs, but on the whole you've done a magnificent job, Andre! ϒpsilon (talk) 18:53, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Ikan and ϒpsilon.

Regarding Ypsilon's specific comments, I intend to add more photographs beginning in about a month or so, when the weather improves. One of my intentions in my work on the Buffalo articles is to rebut any misconceptions readers may have that it's always cold and snowy here. But, given the unusually harsh winter Buffalo (along with much of the rest of the U.S.) has had, it wouldn't have been good to add photographs in tandem with my writing of the article. Most of the pictures that are in the article were taken from my personal archives, and I did include a few winter scenes (i.e. Horsefeathers Market) so there would be a representative mix. Coordinates for the POIs, in Buffalo/West Side and all the other district articles, are also forthcoming.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:53, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I am publishing wikistats reports for February. I noticed some numbers for English Wikivoyage are significantly lower than before. A small reduction is normal, as Wikistats always regenerates all data from scratch from the latest dump, and some bad articles will have been deleted from the dumps. This time there is a rather big discrepancy. Compare columns A and C in first table at new report and old report. Both dropped significantly in newest release. Has there been a major cleanup? Erik Zachte (talk) 15:48, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Empty articles which were just a {{smallcity skeleton}} and an attribution link to WT (with no actual content) were deleted, without prejudice to creation of actual articles for these places in future, to lose the WT attribution for SEO purposes. This is effectively a one-time operation as there are no plans to import empty skeletons from other travel wikis in future. See Wikivoyage talk:Deletion policy#Summary K7L (talk) 16:05, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Ah, Thanks Erik Zachte (talk) 16:10, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

In a number of the articles, in the Buy, Eat and Drink sections there are listings for large chain stores and restaurants such as Walmart, McDonald's, Starbucks, ASDA, Sainsubrys, Tesco, etc. Just wondering if there is a need for these since they are quite commons, so most places won't be too far from one, is there much point in including them or would it be better to only list places that make the place more unique? Here's a couple of example articles, Rock Springs, Hyde, Tamworth (England), Chelmsford (Massachusetts), but there are plenty more. —The preceding comment was added by WOSlinker (talk • contribs)

See Wikivoyage:Listings#Boring places for the official guidance. For very small towns with only a handful of businesses I'll usually leave the chain restaurants in place since those are the only options, but for towns with several options available it is generally best to remove the chain listings and just include a line of text that mentions they can be found. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:47, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

We don't need full {{listing}}s describing these places because each location of a franchise is interchangeable, but a passing mention may be in order if they're the local boarding point for an intercity bus or the only wi-fi hotspot in a small village. If there's a cluster of these in one location (often a motorway offramp), then list the whole group as one ("Various fast-food chains, including McDonald's, Wendy's, Harvey's, KFC and Piza Pizza, are available at the highway 41 offramp, southbound") with no detail. The country-level article likely already explains any differences between Wendy's and McDo, so no need to repeat these. The bulk of our text should go to describing what's unique about a town; the traveller doesn't visit a place just to see the "Stagecoach PLC" terminal or the "Holiday Inn Express" but if they're needed as infrastructure to get the visitor to something unique they want to see, their presence is tolerable. Even a petrol station might be worth a "buy" listing if it's the last fuel for 180km or so (which is rare, but happens). K7L (talk) 16:58, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Might be worth having a clearout. I'll have a look at time point. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:52, 30 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

The criteria are different for overseas locations where these places are rarer. In China, for example, we generally do not list the ubiquitous McDonald's and KFC, but we do mention the Burger King in Jinjiang and in many cities we cover the European supermarkets that many expats consider essential — British Tesco, French Carrefour and especially German Metro. Pashley (talk) 21:37, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Tesco and Carrefour are basically Chinese supermarkets and stock very few imported products. I don't think listing those is any more relevant for expats/travelers than local ones. I agree that in China it is relevant to list supermarkets that do offer a significant amount of imported products such as 'City Super' and 'Ole'. Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:53, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

T minus 3 hours till midnight UTC. Is it ready to go? Do we have a banner?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:02, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

One hour left. Should we just call off April Fool's this year and slot in Xiamen? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:10, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Aren't you aware of Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub#April Fool's day article 2014? --Saqib (talk) 23:25, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

To Saqib: Yes I am. My question is, is the article finished and do we have a DotM banner for it that can go up on the Main Page. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:44, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Oh okay. Yes, I think article is finished but it would be great if you give it a quick view for copyediting please and yes, a DotM banner is definitely required and since, we're running out of time, please feel free to look out for a appropriate banner. On the other hand, I don't think we need to that put that banner in the archives though. --Saqib (talk) 23:54, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Looks like someone did a copy-paste move of Wikivoyage:Joke articles/Wikipedia to Wikipedia? That breaks attribution. K7L (talk) 00:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, Andrew did that and that strikes me too. I'm not sure why he removed the useful shortcut leading to Wikivoyage:Cooperating with Wikipedia and instead replaced it with our April Fool article and without attributions. I think we should keep our Wikipedia page as shortcut for something useful rather than replacing it with an joke article. Anyway, I've fixed everything now and lets travel to Wikipedia!--Saqib (talk) 00:33, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, my mistake. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:30, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Is there a way to add coordinates for POIs other than as part of a listing template?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 21:27, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Possibly use template PoiMap2? Not sure if this is what you are looking for - Matroc (talk) 22:17, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe {{marker}} is what you're looking for. Texugo (talk) 23:15, 31 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, marker is very useful: {{marker|type=listing|name=Tegernsee Station|lat=47.71384|long=11.757204}} 1 Tegernsee Station Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:25, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The New York Public Library has just released its map collection under Creative Commons. Since our mid Atlantic state articles get a lot of editing, it may be interesting to see if some of the images could be used for historical context. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:16, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Is it just me, or did the font of our headers change to something more like Times New Roman? Texugo (talk) 18:57, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

See #Changes to the default site typography coming soon. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:15, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Oh, missed that. I have to say, I'm not a fan so far. Texugo (talk) 19:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Just takes getting use to I guess, body text is also slightly different (lose approximately 10-14 chars per line, thus a few more turnovers). Matroc (talk) 05:48, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Could be changed back by adding some css code in Mediawiki:Common.css if you want. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've asked a question at Mediawiki about personal css changes. Hopefully it will be answered before the dung hits the fan when the change is rolled out on WP. Nurg (talk) 09:22, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The size difference I might be able get used to (though I'd prefer if it were reverted), but I think it looks ridiculously amateurish to have the body text in a typical sans serif font and the headers in a drastically more formal-looking serif one. It's a very poor aesthetic choice which completely contradicts standard typesetting wisdom and makes our content look bloggish. When I see something like in the above thread, where it has "New York Public Library" in the header, followed by the same text in a different font in the first line of the body text, it just serves to highlight what jarring contrast there is between the two fonts. I flatly dismiss any claim that this change provides any necessary improvement in readability, and I would definitely support changing the header font back to match the body text. This is so ugly that someone on meta even suggested it could be an April Fool's joke. Texugo (talk) 11:19, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Geez, and not only that, but now I noticed that while the page titles (H1) and H2 headers appear in the new serif font, all the H3 and H4 headers (of which we have many) still appear in the normal sans serif font like the body text, so now we have mixed header fonts as well (see the sample subheaders I've added above). This whole thing is horrid, very poorly thought out. Texugo (talk) 11:57, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've added a small change to MediaWiki:Vector.css. Let me know if it fixes the headers. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:18, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It does indeed fix the headers. I do hope nobody objects. Now we need to discuss whether we want to accept having this font size change pressed on us as well. Texugo (talk) 12:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The new font for the headers didn't/doesn't disturb me very much. But to be honest the supersized font looks obscene. First I thought something was wrong with my browser... ϒpsilon (talk) 13:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The font changes also seem to have affected the way the listing markers display: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ,5 . They now show the numbers very close to the bottom edge of the box, while they were more centered before. Texugo (talk) 18:22, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Ouch. And what might our Greek colleagues think about the Y letter (Ypsilon) looking like a hand operated well pump? :/ ϒpsilon (talk) 19:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Just for the record, I concur with the above - I'm not a fan of the changes. --Nick ^talk 19:24, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I suggest to revert all changes by adding this patch to Mediawiki:Vector.css. The new style is absolutely terrible. I don't know who proposed it, but I am itching to eliminate this person from the Wikimedia community. --Alexander (talk) 22:41, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We may want to wait a week or so to see if any fixes are applied to the core software before we add too many local workarounds that would then need to be rolled back - there seem to be enough concerns about the change that I would expect significant efforts to address them for all projects. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'd encourage everyone to add your voices to the clamor at mw:Talk:Typography_refresh#serif_vs_sans_serif or one of the other threads on that page. Texugo (talk) 11:49, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've reverted the change to Vector.css. We have to give this time to settle before we start tinkering with a new feature. Powers ^(talk) 14:49, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

For those interested in why a serif font was chosen, there is some reasoning here. Essentially, serif doesn't work well at smallish font sizes on screens, so sans-serif is used for body text... leading to the use of serif for header text for contrast. The usual typographical standard of serifs being used for body text doesn't apply because computer screens are different than printed text. Powers ^(talk) 14:56, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

That does not explain it to me. Who decided that it just wasn't enough to have headers already in different sizes, in bold, and with a separator line under them, that there was this burning need for even more contrast, a need so great that it was worth sacrificing our aesthetic harmony to get it? I think it's trying to fix something that was never broken, and that the result is that headers now stand out too much, in an undesirable way, like sore thumbs. Texugo (talk) 15:00, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I agree with Powers that we shouldn't make site-wide reversions of the changes at this time. If anyone dislikes aspects of the changes and isn't bothered with trying to get used to them, you can go to personal Preferences and change your custom Vector CSS. For example, to revert the body text size:

#bodyContent {
	font-size: 0.8em !important;
}

Nurg (talk) 23:18, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I didn't see anyone clamoring for these changes on this site. How about a reversion on this site, regardless of what other Mediawiki sites look like? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:44, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry to be late to the conversation, I had a lot of Village Pumps to check. First off, thanks to any Wikivoyagers who might have tried the beta feature and/or given us feedback over the last five months. In terms of local overrides: I would agree with Nurg and Powers. Design changes always take time to get used to. Since we spent a lot of time testing these, gathering feedback from editors across all Wikimedia communities, and iterating, my only request is to let Wikivoyage as a whole try out the defaults for a little bit before making any site-wide change. If individual people don't like the change, you can of course opt-out. Let me know if you have any more questions, like why we chose serif headings etc. Steven (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for coming by, Steven. I don't recall seeing an announcement about this proposed change before it happened. I would request that in the future, when major Wikimedia-wide changes that will affect this site are under consideration, that someone please come to the Travellers' Pub while discussion is ongoing and inform us about them. That's happened at various times, but I don't think it happened this time. Another alternative would be to change other Wikis and not this one, if that's feasible. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:23, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Or, people could be proactive and pay attention to this sort of thing... by signing up for m:Global message delivery/Targets/Tech ambassadors. Simply put, there are over 750 Wikimedia wikis, and it just simply isn't possible to make WMF staff go to every single wiki. --Rschen7754 04:02, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I am emphatically with User:Texugo above, "it looks ridiculously amateurish to have the body text in a typical sans serif font and the headers in a drastically more formal-looking serif one. It's a very poor aesthetic choice which completely contradicts standard typesetting wisdom". The change strikes me as quite obviously absurd. Pashley (talk) 00:31, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The new design should be an optional feature, and the old design should be used by default until all formatting issues are settled. The "opt-out" option that you suggest does not bring interline spacings back to normal. Please, provide us with a css-file that removes all changes compared to March 31. Then we may discuss which features of the new style make sense, but so far this new style is only plain ignorance of the community. --Alexander (talk) 07:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The header font, at least, is even not something I am willing to try to "get used to", and hiding it with my personal css is not the answer - I am embarrassed that that's how we are now presenting our guides to the world and I want it reverted. This whole initiative is screwing up something that wasn't broken, with no prior community consensus that there was a need. I fully support the suggestion of reverting everything to how it was on March 31 until/unless there is any local consensus for change. Texugo (talk) 11:14, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

While I would agree that there are some issues with the typography refresh, I think some of the comments that this was somehow implemented without notification are out of line. The "beta" link that appears next to everyone's account preferences on every page has offered the typography refresh for several months, and there have been a few automated pub notifications alerting everyone that this change was coming. As User:Rschen7754 notes, it is impossible to interact individually with hundreds of wikis, so it is at least partially up to us to track global changes and weigh in before they are announced.

As to reverting things now, I strongly suggest we wait at least a short while for the major issues to be addressed before we try to "fix" the perceived shortcomings, since any time we create a Wikivoyage-specific customization that is one more thing that can interact badly with future upgrades, requiring extra work for us or causing us to miss out on new features. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:30, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I feel kind of like Arthur Dent being told he should have known his house would be demolished, since the demolition order for his home has been publicly available on file for months in a forgotten corner in the cellar of city hall. It just seems absurd that a change this big was not explicitly brought to our attention. Texugo (talk) 15:46, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Feedback was first requested for the typography feature in November: Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub/2013 (additional)#Introducting Beta Features, and it has been discussed further on mailing lists and at meta. I agree that it would have been nice to have another notification about the typography changes prior to the one at the end of March, but to require local engagement would make it impossible to make global changes since doing so would require individual discussions on 700 different wikis.

Going forward, it would probably be good if people enabled the "beta" features to get advance notice when these types of changes are being tested, in which case you will automatically see them as soon as they are proposed for inclusion, giving you the chance to provide immediate feedback. If desired we can probably also set up a page that has pointers to places that people should monitor in order to keep track of global changes - would that be useful? -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It is not our job to follow all technical developments across all Wikimedia projects. It is the job of the developers (and some of them are paid money, by the way) to make sure that their developments make sense and do not ruin existing content. Typography would be a perfect add-on if it is an option, but the unsolicited change in the default appearance of all wikis is very annoying. --Alexander (talk) 20:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

See also w:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Font size and style for a discussion about the typography changes on Wikipedia. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:54, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I did actually turn on beta features when that was posted in the pub in November (and turned it right back off again when I saw what the typography did to the titles), but there was no indication that they weren't just features in development to be offered as options, when this one was in fact a set of fundamental changes to the global defaults that affected every page we have. Plenty of people in that wikipedia thread seem to feel the same way. Texugo (talk) 17:27, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm not aware of any beta features that are being considered only as future options; if they were going to be optional, they wouldn't need to go through the beta test system. (The whole point of the beta test system is so that people can turn it on and off easily; if a feature is going to be an option in preferences, it can already be turned on and off easily.)

I certainly have some quibbles with some of the details of the new design but it's certainly not bad enough to take the drastic step of completely divorcing our design from that of other wikis. I am a bit concerned (if Steven is still reading) that the typography was chosen with an eye toward Wikipedia policies and style (neutrality, formality, reliability) rather than taking into account that other projects have different needs. Powers ^(talk) 18:17, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I don't know why keeping our design aligned with other wikis would be a concern. We've already veered way off that path with banners and horizontal TOCs, etc., and the font of our mainspace article titles is thus already unaffected by the changes. (And please please please don't suggest ruining our article titles with a serif font!) At any rate, we wouldn't be the only ones, as various versions of WP have already reverted. Texugo (talk) 18:41, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Consensus is one of the core policies of this wiki. There was no consensus to change fonts and other style issues. Therefore, all these changes must be reverted and discussed. --Alexander (talk) 20:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

This was done by WMF, and was a technical decision outside of the purview of the consensus of this wiki. --Rschen7754 21:16, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

They are breaking their own policies, and it is their problem, but I don't see why Wikivoyage should support this. --Alexander (talk) 21:31, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

They are not. This kind of hyperbole is not helping your case. If we want to deviate from the default typography, that's what would require consensus. Powers ^(talk) 23:14, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

What kind of policy justifies unilateral site-wide changes that were neither adequately announced nor properly discussed (via an RfC, for example)? --Alexander (talk) 21:14, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The policy of "The WMF runs the servers and can do whatever they want". --Rschen7754 23:14, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Not to mention the fact that it was adequately announced and properly discussed. Powers ^(talk) 01:00, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

This confirms my statement that the change was done against existing policies and was not supported by the community. --Alexander (talk) 06:25, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It does? How? Powers ^(talk) 00:14, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

If "The WMF runs the servers and can do whatever they want" is the official policy, that would be really funny. I am tempted to go to Meta and ask when and how this policy was approved. --Alexander (talk) 06:03, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

As far as I'm aware, there's no community policy on any wiki that governs the default look-and-feel of the Mediawiki software. This was not a policy change at all. Powers ^(talk) 19:51, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We at the Hebrew Wikivoyage added the banners to all our articles a while ago but we haven't hidden all page titles from the top of the articles yet. Technically, how would this be done exactly? (I tried to do this by changing vector.css and common.css but it seems that this should be done in a different way). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We had to do it with Javascript, which isn't elegant but seemed to be the only option due to technical limitations. See MediaWiki:Common.js, specifically:

$(".topbanner").closest(".mw-body").children(".firstHeading").hide();

-- Ryan • (talk) • 15:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I added this code to Heb Voy and it does now hide all page titles from articles, nevertheless, it seems to me that this process is slightly longer at Heb Voy - meaning, you can see the page title on the top of each article for about 1.5 seconds before it is completly hidden - while in the Eng Voy articles, for me it seems the page titles be hidden immediately. (see an example of this delay for yourself at the article for Paris in Heb Voy) Any suggestions for how to reduce this delay? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 16:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Try moving the new code to the top of MediaWiki:Common.js - if it runs faster, that means that something else in your Javascript is running slowly and causing everything after it to run later in the page loading process. If you can figure out what is running slowly, you can defer the slow code by surrounding it with:

$(document).ready(function(e) {
    // put slow code here
});

If the problem isn't due to other code running slowly then further debugging would be needed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:43, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

On second thought, it seems to me now that this same problem actually exists both in Heb Voy and Eng Voy (it take more or less the same amount of time to hide the page title from the Eng Voy article of Paris as it does for the Heb Voy article for Paris). To me it seems now that this problem is caused by the fact that before the server works on hiding the page title it actually first works on loading the panoramic image of the banner - and therefore, in the instances in when images larger in size and details are loaded, the server take an additional second or 1.5 seconds to load the image before it goes ahead and works on hiding the page title from the top of the article. Ideally, in order to solve the problem, we need to get the server to first hide the page title from the top of the article before the server goes ahead and works on loading the panoramic image of the banner. Any ideas on how to achieve this? (I tried moving the new code to the top of MediaWiki:Common.js but it didn't change anything, probably because it is defined somewhere else that the panoramic image would load beforehand.) ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Just a note from some old wiki tidbits from ages ago (may or may not apply): Matroc (talk) 00:07, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

1. To hide an article title on a single page can use a template to do so:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="display:none">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span>}}

1. To hide all article titles, I have edited Common.css (many years ago on a personal wiki):

body.page-No_page_title h1.firstHeading { display:none; }

Of course mediawiki code has change since quite a bit and the above may not work correctly. —The preceding comment was added by Matroc (talk • contribs)

Unfortunately DISPLAYTITLE can no longer be used to hide the page title - see Wikivoyage talk:Banner Expedition/archive#Not inhibiting title. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:14, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The site is for travellers in general, so it should include migrants though of course tourists are the most important group served and business travellers likely come second.

Here is an interesting graphic, Where everyone in the world is migrating—in one gorgeous chart. Pashley (talk) 14:05, 3 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Stack Exchange has a new QA site for expatriates (that is distinct from their Travel QA site) Andrewssi2 (talk) 04:34, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Is there some reasonably easy way to get a list of articles whose development levels differ across language versions?

For example, I'm an English speaker with reasonable French. I would not try translating into French, but I'd be interested in improving English WV based on the French version. Any article where the F version is, say, two levels higher on the none-outline-usable-guide-star scale than the E version would be worth looking at. Pashley (talk) 15:09, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The only thing we have are articles manually tagged with {{translate|fr}} at Category:Articles needing translation from French or another similar category. I suppose it would be theoretically possible to build a bot which compares articles based on the criteria you gave and inserts the appropriate {{translate}} tag, but I don't know how to write such a script. Texugo (talk) 15:15, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

This may be possible with Wikidata badges, should they ever get it done... --Rschen7754 04:52, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Pashley, I recommend using this link in order to more easily find the articles in Fr Voy which are the largest in size. in most cases these articles would be the ones the French Wikivoyage community invested most efforts on through the years. In addition, I recommend check out the few French Wikivoyage Star status articles, as well as the few French Wikivoyage Guide status articles. Good luck. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 05:37, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Over the last month or so I have created 39 new alternative banners to existing ones used in various prominent city articles on Eng Voy. I created these banners from exisitng photos on Wikicommons first and foremost for use in the parallel articles on the Hebrew Wikivoyage. In most instances these new alternative banners feature panoramic photographs of cityscapes (and yes, I know not everyone here want cityscape banners to be used in the city articles), as we in the Hebrew Wikivoyage tend to prefer cityscape panoramic banners to panoramic banners of flowers, bushes, fishes, or other individual objects which are not necessarily unique to a certain place and do not necessarily help the travelers get an idea of how the destinations they plan on traveling to actually look like (we usually add the photos of important individual objects to the relevant segments in the articles instead).

Please participate in the following 39 discussions and indicate in each of the discussions whether you prefer the existing banners or the new suggested banners.

ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 04:40, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I looked at all banners of destinations I know, but none of the suggestions were an improvement. --FredTC (talk) 19:54, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Excuse me but I find this kind of shopping around quite disgusting and counter-productive. If you don't like a banner, make a better one, start a discussion in the talk page, see where it goes. It is not a "vote", it is a discussion. If you want voting, try Eurovision.

Secondly, if you believe you have superb banner-making skills and want to put them to good use, look around for articles to go without a banner, of which we still have shiploads.

If you just want to be appreciated, do note that this is a collaborative project and not a talent contest. Appreciation comes in the form of having created a better, more complete, more useful, more frequently visited and used, and also nicer to look at, site. Mediawiki sites, even those with well-developed badge/barnstar and whatnot systems, are some of the worst places to go to if you want to shine and receive massive expressions of awe and appreciation. This is the uttermost opposite of X-Factor.

If you want the kind of appreciation Wikivoyage can provide you with, start with articles that need help the most, as this is where making a meaningful and visible impact is the easiest. The appreciation you can provide yourself with looking at an article that started out as neglected, outdated stub and is now a full-blown guide is the best thing ever. Or at least the best thing on Wikivoyage. PrinceGloria (talk) 20:36, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I actually thought that this was a healthy way to promote collaboration between language versions. Even if none of the new banners are used here, it's interesting to see what other languages prefer, and it's at least worth discussing the possibility of changing to a potentially better banner. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:48, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I don't understand what the down side is. And some of the new banners are a major improvement (while others are not). Let 100 flowers bloom. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:54, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We've had those banners suggested in the talk pages for some time now and they have generated instantenous reactions, though some not favourable for the user who posted. I fail to see why this needs to be brought to the attention at the pub, I am seeing this kind of discussions quite often (i.e. suggestion of a new banner, also from other language versions). The fact that the user refers to their preference regarding panoramas and refers to a "vote" made me think they perhaps want to shop for "votes" for their proposals, which I find counterproductive.

I also believe that while diversity and multiple choices are always better, we may want to direct our attention to more creative issues. There was a fair share of discussions in the talk pages, why do we need to encourage more participation in bulk? If somebody is particularly keen on or knowledgeable about Leeds, they will probably have had the article on their watchlist and have or will see the discussion about its banner. If somebody isn't, why bother them. It is a local issue, not a global one, and not a pressing one requiring more attention from the community. The French and Italians are also using different banners oftentimes. PrinceGloria (talk) 21:40, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, and we had a bunch of beautiful banners from French Wikivoyage proposed some time ago. I found your tone unnecessarily hostile. I don't see it as harmful that this notice was posted here, and I also don't see it as harmful that ויקיג'אנקי has pride in their banners or that they posted about their philosophy of what makes a good banner to them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:46, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I see nothing wrong with ויקיג'אנקי's actions here. Even if in most of these cases I preferred the existing banner to what was proposed, it's nice to see other options presented and have these pleasant little discussions about what we look for in a good banner. No harm done, and I think we're a stronger community for it. PerryPlanet (talk) 22:47, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I agree that it is a worthwhile exercise to see alternative banners. ויקיג'אנקי made some suggestions and if it helps improve one English destination article then that is great.

It does actually raise another question. Since the Hebrew site apparently doesn't use Wikidata as the reference to banners it means all changes have to be suggested in this manner. If it was the French site then basically our banners would change with no discussion (or even change notification), and this is true vice versa. Has anyone considered how we work with other language sites that use Wikidata for banner references? Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:43, 6 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

First of all I want to apologize if anyone was offended becuase I did not choose the right words (I chose to use the word "vote" instead of "discussion" or "consensus based discussion"). English is not my primary language and therefore occasionally I may end up formulating sentences which do not take into account different nuances and sensitivities.

I must also clarify that contrary to what someone suggested above, in addition to these 39 alternate banners I created, over time I have also created many banners for articles ​​which have no banners at all (both in Heb Voy and Eng Voy). In the future I definitely plan to also help create even more banners for articles that don't have any banners. Either way, I have made many banners in the past and I'll continue to make many more in the future (first and foremost for usage in Heb Voy), and in my opinion no harm is done by having the Eng Voy community (and maybe also other Wikivoyage communities) discuss using some of these alternative banners here as well. On the contrary - I believe that permitting discussions of this kind help us improve the quality of our articles over time.

I will also note that I have noticed that many of the users in Eng Voy whom have created banners in the past tend to be very proud of to their creations, and some of them I believe might even assume that their banners would continue to be used in the Eng Voy articles forever. In practice, Wikivoyage banners​​, as well as any of the other elements appearing in the articles, are open to discussion at any time now and in the future, and of course in the future instances in which specific new alternative banners would actually end up being favored by a majority of community members in a discussion, existing banners might very well end up being changed based on the new consensus reached. Based on my experience with Wiki culture, most likely, in 5 years, or 10 years or 20 years from now, most of the banners currently used in Eng Voy would probably end up being replaced by more much more successful and spectacular panoramic photos, whether you like it or not (this would most likely happen when the En Voy community would become much larger and diverse).

Regarding the original note I added above, in which I invited the Eng Voy community to take part in the current 39 discussions being held over these alternative banners... I chose to post this invite here mainly because this practice is widely acceptable in many wikis as it promotes fairness and it help us make sure that the final decision actually corresponds to the prevailing opinion amongst the Eng Voy community.

Anyway, I am glad that so far at least some of the alternative banners I created have gained support/consensus of the community and would probably end up being used in Eng Voy as well.

Finally, regarding Andrewssi2 last question about the instances in which foreign wikis would use Wikidata to display banners - I can confirm here that we in Heb Voy community do display banners according to what is defined in Wikidata by default, NEVERTHELESS, in the instances in which we rather display other alternative banners than what is defined in Wikidata - all we need to do is edit the banner code of a specific article in Heb Voy and specify that a different banner would be used there, and as a result, that article only doesn't use the banner which is associated with that article in Wikidata. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 05:17, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi ויקיג'אנקי, you took the initiative to help improve WV and I personally don't think you need to explain yourself at all. Many thanks again for the alternative banner suggestions. Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:44, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

This is at least the second time you offered a lot of alternative banners. Last time, you presented some great ones, too, and this time, you waited for more people to pass judgment on them, so I think that's great, and I know that most of us will welcome you whenever you come again with more banners for us to look at. And we'll look forward even more to pagebanners for articles that have none. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:12, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think the pub is a nice place to get opinions, because some destinations may not generate conversation if it is left to the talk page. Plus, since users who make banners are all proud of their work, discussion is probably better than plunging forward to replace everyone else's banners with one's own. That way no toes are stepped on. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:22, 7 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I just found this guide to adding a business listing to WV on Commons - has it been made by one of our number and is it worth promoting? --Nick ^talk 23:17, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Looks great to me! Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:52, 5 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Some feedback: It looks very compact (I guess it's hard to fill everything on a single sheet of paper), but it seems to contains most useful information. The map could be made smaller. The design could use more branding, and maybe a single sentence introducing the concept of Wikivoyage. To gain a bit of space for a more graphical title, you could skip the URL or at least "http://". The second page (editing in wikicode) can be skipped by those who want a single page, I guess. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:44, 8 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikimedia users (Meta included) are being forced to log out and log-in again due to a vulnerability discovered in the OpenSSL implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols.

Wikimedia Foundation servers have been affected, and had their OpenSSL version updated earlier today; as a precautionary measure, all user session tokens will be reset — which causes the loss of session and forces users to log-in again using new, secure tokens.

Wikimedia Foundation also recommends that users change the passwords they use to log-in to wikis. Read more. Jalexander (talk) 23:47, 8 April 2014 (UTC) (Many thanks to Odder for writing the text I stole here)Reply

Is this list accurate or useful? What do you think? Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:41, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It doesn't seem to have any facts behind it at all. Taking precautions in places like Mexico, Pakistan and Yemen is always a good thing, but I doubt specific to the cities mentioned. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:32, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It might be worth checking if top ones at w:List of cities by murder rate have warnings here.

We have links to several indexes of danger level at Retiring_abroad#Information_sources, under "statistics and indexes". Pashley (talk) 12:51, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Also worth noting that the danger experienced by a tourist taking precautions and a resident who has to live in the city are likely to be markedly different. Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:59, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Agree with Andrewssi2. I'm not sure I trust that article much, because this much I know for sure: it's overtly alarmist and an extreme exaggeration to make the grand generalization that "[Brazil's] most populated areas are not places you want to hang out in". Texugo (talk) 13:22, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It's surprising that Kabul, Baghdad, Grozny and Damascus are missing from the list. However the cities on the list and the parts of the world they're located in aren't exactly famous for their safety either. ϒpsilon (talk) 20:03, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm living in world's most dangerous megacity but fortunately never felt I'm unsafe here so yes, safety concerns are definitely different for a resident and a visitor. --Saqib (talk) 20:21, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

A more telling ranking might be one which doesn't count the ones where the victims are acquaintances of their attackers. Texugo (talk) 20:55, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Just in, official data from the UN on the matter: https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html

And some analysis by the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21600713-un-offers-some-hints-how-avoid-being-bumped-dicing-death

Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:29, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Looks like something's gone wrong in the Tools menu in the left column. &lt;wikibase-dataitem&gt; Nurg (talk) 10:39, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Also at the bottom of the other languages links. Nurg (talk) 10:40, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It seems that something huge has gone wrong at Wikidata — all of the edit/add/save/cancel buttons there are broken. Look at wikidata:Q16503 for example. Texugo (talk) 11:18, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Ok, they have fixed it now. Wikidata:Project chat#All labels are broken. Nurg (talk) 20:05, 10 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

RfC please I am opening up a proper RfC for an issue that I mentioned briefly in a prior post. The Open Directory Project has officially branded itself as "DMOZ" (which is a name it has always used and is more popular). I have requested a page move at en.wp and similar changes at Wikidata and the Commons. For better or worse, English is the predominant language of the WMF projects and Wikipedia the predominant project, so I started there as a means of gaining traction across projects and languages for consistent branding of this site. This seems pretty non-controversial to me and others expressed support. What does the community think? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:22, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Should we be linking to ODP? It seems nearly impossible to get listings added or updated there. K7L (talk) 01:27, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

@K7L: Why not? Even if it's not easy to get listings there, DMOZ can be a good resource for readers. At some point, a person might want more info than a travel guide would offer, so where should we direct them (if anywhere)? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:51, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Spoke with one of the founders of DMOZ a while ago. He stated that the project was mostly dead and that we at Wikipedia should not link to it. I am not a big fan of long lists of external links within articles and it is better than anything else out there. I guess the question is should the WMF start one? No strong feelings around the term DMOZ. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:27, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

If the link is kept, it seems sensible to rename it as suggested. Nurg (talk) 05:06, 19 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

RfC please I am opening up a proper RfC for an issue that I mentioned briefly in a prior post. I think that OpenStreetMap is a good resource to include in the sidebar for a few reasons. First off, it is an open project, like Wikimedia and the ODP/DMOZ (which is the other project linked in the sidebar). On an abstract level, it's good for us to support one another. On a more practical one, OSM provides the kind of in-depth data that would be inappropriate for a travel guide but very useful for someone getting into the nitty-gritty of a city. Furthermore, it generally has high-quality content, although it's uneven—just like our WMF projects. Does anyone else think that OSM rates as a good enough and useful enough project to direct travelers to once they're done with travel guides from us? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:25, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We already integrate OSM information rather prominently, {{geo}}, {{mapframe}}, {{listing}}, {{marker}}, special:mapsources. How does your proposal differ? K7L (talk) 01:22, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

@K7L: These other templates simply include OSM amongst other map services. I am proposing two things make OSM stand out from (e.g.) Google Maps: OSM has a number of high-quality options that other map services lack and it's an open project. As an open project of our own, we should encourage support of other such open projects. This is precisely why Wikitravel linked to DMOZ and Wikipedia in the first place. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:56, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Not true. Take a look at Oswego#Get around; the German 'Wikivoyage eV' users have put a fine effort into integrating OSM maps to appear directly in Wikivoyage with our points of interest marked. OSM isn't being treated as just another map service like the (proprietary) Google Maps. K7L (talk) 13:24, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Most destination articles have a link to a full screen OpenStreetMap map - an icon on the right just above the banner. However I expect that many readers don't take this in, or notice that it is OpenStreetMap. It might be good to duplicate this as a link in the Related Sites group on the left. AlasdairW (talk) 14:35, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I would love to see a map in every article. Could a bot do this? Also support the adding of an OpenStreet Map link in the sidebar. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:19, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage:Categories has been tagged as needing updating for 9 months now. Are there any volunteers familiar with the topic that could bring it up to date? Nurg (talk) 22:16, 11 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I have no idea what's going on with Categories. We have extant categories in wide use for which no extant policy exists that permits their use, and absolutely zero apparent interest in updating policy to allow it. Powers ^(talk) 17:47, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage:Technical infrastructure policy has been tagged for over a year. Nurg (talk) 01:06, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It appears for some searches such as "Cranbrook Travel Guide" one need to click on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 195 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." Not sure what if anything can be done about this. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:04, 12 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

In my experience, pages that have been "omitted very similar to the ones already displayed" are almost always websites whose content is completely or almost completely identical to other websites, i.e. TheFreeDictionary Encyclopedia vs. Wikipedia. Google probably has an algorithm that detects identical text, so the answer seems to lie in the fact that Wikivoyage's Cranbrook article must be essentially the same as Wikitravel's. Thus, there are two possible answers: 1) this problem will gradually solve itself, both through development of Wikivoyage and the degradation of Wikitravel through unchecked spamming and touting, and 2) I hesitate to bring this up given the identity of the past proponents of this idea, but perhaps altering section headers, etc. would be of assistance. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:48, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps the text itself needs to be reworded a little and updated periodically to distinguish WV from competing products? We've already changed two of the section headers ("Connect" and "Go next") but descriptive text can get stale if it hasn't been edited in a long while. K7L (talk) 12:05, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I noticed a recent edit has basically copied and pasted a great deal of content out of Wikipedia. I thought this was not within WV policy, however scanning through the guidance I can't see anything specifically against doing so. Can anyone else point me to the guidelines around this, should they exist? Andrewssi2 (talk) 14:55, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Here you go: Wikipedia#Sharing content ϒpsilon (talk) 15:12, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, that link states “Copy-pasting blocks of text from Wikipedia is very much discouraged, and will often be reverted”

Does that mean the edit that I highlighted should be removed? Andrewssi2 15:40, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hmm. A few months back Saqib expanded some Pakistani article with text from WP, but he modified the text sufficiently and therefore it hadn't to be removed. I'll notify editor of the article and hopefully he'll comment or at least read this discussion and does something to his copypasted content. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:55, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Note, though, that the issue is not copyright infringement; the two sites have identical CC-by-SA licenses so legally we can copy as much as we like and WP can do the same to us. The question is whether the text serves out goals as a travel guide. Material that is useful in an encyclopedia entry quite often becomes useless clutter in a travel guide context.

I put a note on the editor's talk page asking him or her to look here. Pashley (talk) 16:18, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Pashley. Although my linking to his page in my last comment produced that red box in the upper right corner when he is logged in. ϒpsilon (talk) 16:23, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm back! Thank you for patience, Pashley! And thank you for everybody to trying clear this theme! I hope my work/copy " serves out goals as a travel guide", and I hope those are a allways enough "modified". With respect - Globetrotter19 (talk) 17:00, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I have serious doubts about this and many similar edits. They are rather useless for a travel guide, because travel guide should fascinate the reader and motivate him/her to travel. What we have instead is a long list of something that is very difficult to read because of the awkward language and/or irrelevant information. This article is a sublime example of how a travel guide should not look like. Feel excited? Will not even bother to scroll through it? Then keep in mind that there are at least hundred more churches stored in the sub-district articles. In fact, we had to go through all these lists for Moscow and found an astonishing number of mistakes that come from both Wikipedia and the author. For example, some churches are mentioned twice under slightly different names. This shows very clearly that the edit was more of a copy-paste nature than a thoughtful and creative writing that Wikivoyage needs.

This actually goes back to a more general problem that travel guides should be written by people with travel experience and by people with personal experience of a destination, or at least with some basic understanding of the region. But we are on a wiki, where everyone is free to edit, so we are doomed to see many articles turning into copy-paste garbage. I don't know what kind of a guideline could help here... --Alexander (talk) 18:11, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Even if there are no specific guidelines about Wikipedia copypasta that are enshrined in written policy, it bears remembering that this is what got the Telstra vandal userbanned. I'd say the de facto policy that we've been going by is that copy-pasting from Wikipedia is effectively prohibited unless there's a pretty damn convincing argument otherwise. Also, to add a point that's been overlooked: if you absolutely must copy-paste content from Wikipedia or any other copyleft source, it still has to be attributed (cf. the "BY" part of "CC-BY-SA"). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:38, 13 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The content provided by Globetrotter19 was intended (I believe) to provide some good context to the city.

However we should bear in mind that some Wikipedians do ask the question 'Why Wikivoyage?', and the wholesale copying of content may make us look like an encyclopedic wannabe rather than a serious travel guide.

That is not to say we shouldn't source some content from WikiPedia articles, but we should at least rewrite them in a travel orientated manner that is more concise. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:05, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

To Andrewssi2: Agreed. What I was arguing against in my comment was copy-pasting large swaths of unedited Wikipedia content wholesale, which, even if legally defensible when properly attributed, does indeed make us look like a cheap knockoff of Wikipedia. That's to be avoided, and I think it might even be good to codify that in policy. However, I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with an author who merely adds content that is ultimately sourced from Wikipedia, but recontextualized and put into his own words. There is, after all, some degree of overlap between what's appropriate for Wikipedia and what's appropriate for Wikivoyage, and no one "owns" facts in any way that's applicable to intellectual property law. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 01:36, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Great, I agree it would be good to codify somehow. Wikipedia#Sharing content is ambiguous in that it only says that copying content 'may' be reverted, but does not indicate under what circumstances or criteria. Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:05, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

De facto, I'd suspect that users stumbling across Wikivoyage already have Wikipedia (as many of them found us from Wikipedia) and WV as a duplicate of WP serves no purpose. We need to distinguish ourselves from other wikis by offering something that Wikipedia is w:WP:NOT - for instance, a "how to" instruction or a travel guide. WP is a good source for the history of a place (and we might want a brief summary for use by travellers who print our articles for packing in carry-on baggage), but if we're not adding value beyond the WP writeup then why bother? K7L (talk) 12:05, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It seems that we are in violent agreement. Shall we take it to Wikivoyage talk:Cooperating with Wikipedia in order to distill our thoughts, or is there a better policy article for this? Andrewssi2 (talk) 12:24, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Started here Andrewssi2 (talk) 00:38, 15 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hey all,

This is a reminder that Media Viewer will be enabled by default for all logged-in users on English Wikivoyage this Thursday, 17 April. There will be an option to disable Media Viewer in your preferences. If you'd like to try out Media Viewer now you can turn it on in your Beta Features or by using it on the demo page on mediawiki.org. Please contact me if you have any questions. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

What, if anything, should WV do with this? It is not at all difficult to think of places where various media files would be interesting or useful supplements to our guides, though I cannot think of anywhere they are essential. Nor is it hard to see that there could be various problems, though I cannot see any that look insurmountable.

Previous discussion rejected the idea of linking to media files. I'd be in favour of allowing some links. Rule one should be link only to files on Commons; no local uploads and no external links to media files. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Other opinions? Pashley (talk) 20:19, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

You seem to be interpreting it to mean exclusively non-image media files, but it changes the way images are displayed when clicked on as well. I don't think it necessarily has any implications for our policy on non-image media files. It's just a visualization feature. Texugo (talk) 20:26, 14 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

According to mw:Extension:Wikibase Client#Other projects sidebar, Wikimedia is working on the Wikidata extension to allow it to be used to generate links to sibling projects in much the same way as Wikidata currently generates inter-language links within a project. The links would appear in a section of MediaWiki:Sidebar with title MediaWiki:wikibase-otherprojects.

For instance, wikidata:Q2078515 links to s:fr:Appel du 18 juin and a French Wikipédia article on the same topic. The Wikidata extension automatically puts "Autres projets - Wikipedia" into the sidebar of the Wikisource page without adding any codes to that page's wiki text. Contrast this with our current 'kludge' of an extension, mw:extension:RelatedSites, where every stray [[wikipedia: or [[commons: link gets moved to the sidebar (often unintentionally) as if it were a language and the rest of the siblings have no sidebar links.

The catch? This is still limited to one link per project from any page and it does require one line to be added to a server configuration file:

$wgWBSettings['otherProjectsLinks'] => array( 'enwiki', 'enwikinews', 'enwikiquote', 'commonswiki' );

There's a bit of discussion on m:Requests for comment/Interproject links interface but I'd presume that, if we want to use this, we should determine which wikis we want to appear so that a bugzilla: ticket may be opened. I'd suggest:

• all Wikivoyage languages (as already exists)
• all English-language versions of all Wikimedia sibling projects (Wikipedia, Wikinews and the like)
• commons:, meta:, mw:
• English-language DMOZ (if available).

Comments? K7L (talk) 16:24, 16 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

There appears to be a related conversation on Wikidata: Wikidata:Wikidata:Project chat#Sidebar links between projects powered by Wikidata now possible - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:56, 16 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Well, some languages versions are already taking Wikipedia and Commons links from Wikidata, although the display of these links is still interfaced by the Extension:RelatedSites. Of course, it would be great to get rid of this extension. However, it is important that Commons links are set to categories instead of pages. Otherwise, many useful links will be lost. --Alexander (talk) 17:10, 16 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think we should be generous and include many links. It is great to have Commons links and links to various Wikipedias for instance. Also, doing so might increase the probability that these sites start to link to us in the future. Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:18, 17 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Speaking of DMOZ, I have put together a mapping of most Wikivoyage pages to their corresponding DMOZ urls that might be helpful. Unknown (talk) 07:07, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

@Unknown: Interesting! Is it available online? It is extracted from the Wikivoyage dump I guess? Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:17, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I've made it available here. It maps 27187/47623 of the Wikivoyage pages from the dump, at varying degrees of specificity. Certainly that could be improved with some manual inspection, as this was done with a pretty simple algorithm. Unknown (talk) 17:34, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Mediawiki:Wikimedia-copyright: Could a local sysop please update the license title to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License? It is currently like this: "Attribution/Share-Alike". See the official website here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ . Also see m:MediaWiki talk:Wikimedia-copyright. Thanks, Glaisher (talk) 08:40, 17 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Done! --Nick ^talk 10:08, 17 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It appears is going to be Wikimania for 2015. Travel Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:56, 21 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for information and congratulations to Wikimedia México for winning the bid to host Wikimania 2015 in the City of Palace, Mexico City. We'll definitely look into preparing a special guidebook for attractions and things to do near the venue of the Wikimania 2015 (similar to Wikimania 2014 London Guidebook) when times comes. --Saqib (talk) 19:45, 21 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sidebar change Per bugzilla:64027. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:52, 22 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I looked at the bug and I'm not sure what we're changing. Powers ^(talk) 13:47, 22 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The bug appears to be a request to change a configuration file on the server. That's something WMF's sysadmin would need to do. K7L (talk) 14:15, 22 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Bug Change references in the sidebar from "Open Directory" to "DMOZ". —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:20, 27 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yes, that's the title of the bug. The question is what are we, as admins, supposed to be changing? As K7L indicated, this looks like a configuration file change, which admins don't have access to AFAIK. Powers ^(talk) 18:47, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry I misread Bugzilla. That's embarrassing. I apologize. Feel free to sweep this from the Pub. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:10, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

...has there been an uptick lately in activity from non-regular contributors? As ever, I'm hopeful that Wikivoyage is gaining momentum. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:14, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Could be, and I can't disagree. Powers ^(talk) 13:25, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've noticed this too - are things starting to look up for WV? Has anyone got any reliable statistics on site views? --Nick ^talk 18:07, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The other day I had the pleasure to welcome someone who's first edits to WT were in 2003 and who's even been an admin there to WV. Pretty cool, right? :) ϒpsilon (talk) 18:18, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

That's great to see! We need more people like that! It might also be worth considering how we can hold on to some of the people who are editing and get them to become more involved. --Nick ^talk 18:28, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

If you're wondering how to get them more involved, a simple message on their talk page would be a good start. Show them some extra Wikilove, and thank them for their contributions! New users like to see enthusiasm and encouragement from the more experienced users. Edge3 (talk) 02:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

To Edge3: q.v. User talk:007contributor. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Great! Just in case this wasn't clear, I'm not saying that Wikivoyagers do a bad job of welcoming new users. I was just making a simple suggestion, in case anyone needed the advice. :) Edge3 (talk) 03:44, 25 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi all,

I just converted Wikivoyage to several formats:

• OxygenGuide, the offline Wikivoyage, just a collection of HTML files streamlined to be viewed easily on mobile devices.
• Listings as OBF, ready to be imported into the Android offline GPS/navigation app OsmAnd.
• Listings as OSM, ready to be imported into your OpenStreetMap server.
• Listings as CSV, for mashups, data reuse, error spotting, or just to have fun exploring the data.

If there is enough interest I will set up my scripts on Labs, so that these 4 files get refreshed automatically every 2 weeks. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:23, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe it is an absolutely necessary thing, but the next step would be some sort of communication with OsmAnd developers. I tried to import one of your earlier OBF files into my OsmAnd installiation and realized that the POIs are simply merged with thousands of POIs already existing in OSM. Then it is not possible to use or at least highlight Wikivoyage-specific POIs. Any ideas about that?

You may also be interested in interfacing Wikivoyage with MapsWithMe, which is an alternative to OsmAnd. --Alexander (talk) 05:22, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

There are approximately 80 or so entries with embedded tabs, in most cases users may have tried to do some formatting (Discovered while converting file to tab delimited file)... ie. Manchester/Downtown - Trinity Brewhouse... Am testing a few ideas I have and will pass on anything else I find - Matroc (talk) 05:54, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've removed the tabs from the articles, so next time the listings file is generated, it will be fine. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:19, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks - I fixed a few articles that contained \\'s or , as data as well. Matroc (talk) 07:30, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe I may have found a minor conversion issue -- The correct html code for no break space found in an article is converted to html code for an ampersand followed by nbsp; in the .csv file -- (1070 times) - example see Aarau, under sleep entry for Aarau-West. (Hopefully I am incorrect and not hallucinating!) Matroc (talk) 04:25, 25 April 2014 (UTC) ... same for ndash.Reply

Hi Matroc! Not sure to understand the problem, could you please copy paste here what appears in the wiki, in the CSV, and what should appear in the CSV? Thanks a lot! By the way, the code for generating the CSV does not do anything special about ampersands etc. Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:58, 27 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hey Nicolas - Rather than fill up Travellers' Pub with my verbage - I have created a section on my talk page for further discussion. Matroc (talk) 03:57, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I was just editing at Ordos City, and I noticed that the Mongolian name of the city displays only little boxes. If I look at the Wikipedia page, the same text displays just fine, so it's not a matter of my computer missing the fonts. What gives? Texugo (talk) 12:50, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I got boxes both here and on WP, with current version of either Firefox on Chrome for Ubuntu Linux. Adding the "unifont" package (plane 0 unicode fonts) solved the problem. Pashley (talk) 13:11, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Why would I get boxes here and not on Wikipedia? If their display method is more robust than ours, perhaps we should adopt it. Texugo (talk) 13:19, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia uses w:Template:MongolUnicode to display Mongolian script. It takes the Unicode characters (which you and I see as boxes) and (somehow; I didn't look at the code) renders them in what seems to be a browser-neutral way. You might want to ask at the template talk page or w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Mongols for assistance. Powers ^(talk) 13:46, 24 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Wikipeople. I've been poking around at your pages a bit and I've noticed that there are a lot of dead links. What's the general community feeling on that? I'm looking at this from the perspective of a DMOZ editor where there's a lot of emphasis on removing non-functioning links, but maybe that's not such an issue here -- I can see that a particular restaurant or B&B might stop having a website but still be a functioning business, and maybe you're more interested in erring on the side of providing the maximum amount of information that a user should then validate. If that's not the case, is there any interest in putting together some sort of bot to maintain the links? Unknown (talk) 07:01, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Quite often a dead link just means that the web page's structure has changed or it has moved to another domain (e.g. they've got themselves proper web pages instead of the small, sometimes ad supported space many ISP's offer free of charge). If I encounter a dead link I usually google the establishment to see if it still exists. ϒpsilon (talk) 08:31, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Having better links would increase the search engine ranking for the site. I think however this should be something that is corrected manually. Would it be possible to create a category of pages that have broken external links on them, similar to the broken image links category? --Traveler100 (talk) 11:08, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Searches for places bring a link for more info on Wikitravel, for instance: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=london — it'd be a good way to drive some traffic to persuade them to link to Wikivoyage instead.JimKillock (talk) 17:30, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think it would be good to make DuckDuckGo aware that this is an issue of interest to many. You can make suggestions to DuckDuckGo here. I believe we should make sure they get many messages suggesting the change in a short period. PrinceGloria (talk) 20:05, 26 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I created a thread about this at https://duck.co/forum/thread/5688/use-wikivoyage feel free to add comments there too. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:24, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I found my way here from Openstreetmap, experimenting with linking OSM objects to wikidata, then finally starting to contribute to wikipedia. I'm contributing to several language versions both here on WV as on WP. So this got me thinking. I added a restaurant to an itinerary, the next step is to add it to a locality guide about the region in this same WV, then do the same across, say 6 language versions. And we have all those details duplicated once again in Openstreetmap, of course. Copy/pasting is easy, no problem there. The problems start when some of those details, like say opening hours change. Who is going to hunt down all instances of where that detail was mentioned? To me, the obvious solution is to store all of it in Wikidata and then refer to the properties, although I'm not entirely sure how that needs to be done and if it's even possible technically, since the Q-item is not the Q-item of the article itself. This first question is of course, do we want to do it?--Polyglot (talk) 08:28, 27 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Polyglot, welcome to Wikivoyage! Wikidata Q-items do not need to match a particular article anywhere, so no problem with that. Actually, we need people to work towards implementing the models and tools that will make this whole centralization possible. See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Sister_projects#Wikivoyage https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Wikidata_Expedition We will also need to modify the listing editor to get the data from Wikidata if the listing is defined by a Wikidata Q-item. Nothing impossible to achieve, but quite a lot of work, so you are very welcome to join the effort :-) Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 14:19, 27 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Template:Ping:Nicolas1981, I tried, but I can't make it work. Please have a look at my last change on Andorra--Polyglot (talk) 17:54, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Polygot! Unfortunately for now it seems that article Andorra only has access to properties from Wikidata item Q228 (Andorra). Someone need to investigate how a wiki page can go through links to find all hotels linked from Q228 (and first find how to link a hotel from Q228). Still quite a bit of work remaining indeed... Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:29, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Link scraper There is a thread on DMOZ's forums (membership required) where a user has taken their regional link ontology and our RDF breadcrumbs and used some computing magic to find links on our pages that are dead or which are redundant to DMOZ. The forum is supposed to be for internal use only but I think it's okay to quote since they are interested in cross-collaboration:

Well, I've been doing a little playing with the data and I've got something worth looking at, although it's not what I think the final product could eventually become. It's a browser of DMOZ topics that maps to the related Wikivoyage links, broken down by their page and categories. For example Vancouver (Wikivoyage has several neighbourhood pages as well, which were also identified cleanly):

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/British_Columbia/Localities/V/Vancouver

or all the localities that I could automatically identify in New Brunswick:

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/New_Brunswick/Localities

Lots of stuff to mine pretty easily. I could also use the categorization that Wikivoyage does to suggest topical categories inside the locality -- I don't know if it's that important.

Thinking about things from the other direction, I see this cat:

http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage.cgi?browse_wikivoyage=1&cat=Regional/North_America/Canada/New_Brunswick/Localities/Plaster_Rock

contains 13 sites not listed in DMOZ, but 6 of them are dead. I think there's a certain amount of possible value to be had for the Wikivoyage project. They are not a specialized link directory, but DMOZ is -- which is why we have a well developed QC system sweeping the directory clean. Right now from what I've seen, just using my own QC tools, Wikivoyage has an incredibly large number of dead links. If there were a database of links that are listed in both sites, maybe we could find a way to have their editors being notified when we are removing links on our side.

One obvious thing to do from the link mining perspective would be to filter dead links, but I thought it was useful to show them for illustrative purposes right now.

Interestingly, this is a segment of the DMOZ ecosystem that could benefit the Wikivoyage project that they might not want to internally develop due to their open source licensing system, since open sourcing the heuristics would let spammers easily circumvent them when buying expired domains. Maybe less of an issue for them since they are all nofollow links.

This could be extended to all the other languages of Wikivoyage of course. I just did English first to see if there was any interest, and because I'm more fluent in it.

On another note, I see the number of Wikivoyage listings in DMOZ has grown to 20 http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=wikivoyage.org .

Useful? Does anyone want to work back and forth with DMOZians when it comes to links on these pages and links to these pages? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:39, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Interesting! A first thing is that we could really benefit from getting a list of all our dead links. Dynamic sharing of information (via wikidata?) would be even better. Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:04, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

The links that were posted above had a layer of authentication that prevented them from being viewed by anyone other than DMOZ editors -- I've made a public version of the browser and updated the links. That's just the mapping of ontologies, but I do have a database of broken links (from your XML dump, not live) that I will put online in a bit. Unknown (talk) 15:10, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

This is a [list of dead links on Wikivoyage], which is 29305/171536 = ~17% of links. Some of these will be transient errors of course, and it's based on the XML dump which may be slightly out of date. There are also around 10,000 probable errors or things that should be corrected that aren't listed here because they're more fuzzy (extremely tiny pages, weird redirects, etc). I'm not sure what the best thing to do with this data is. It's a pretty big list, obviously -- if there were constant maintenance going on thena single page listing errors would probably be sufficient but maybe this is too much for one page? Might be better to break it into more manageable chunks, or maybe mention them on the individual talk pages? I could also make this into a more searchable system if there were some interest in that. Any ideas welcome! Unknown (talk) 00:51, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks a lot for the list! I fixed a few ones, and realized that trying to fix links takes too much time, it is probably better to just remove the 29305 broken URLs... could anyone write a script to do that? Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:24, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

I fixed a handful of broken links in Culver City and Yellowstone National Park, but also came across a few false positives that would make me hesitant about using an automated script to remove them all. Additionally, manual removal might allow us to identify (and remove) some closed listings. Can we promote this list for a while (perhaps via Wikivoyage:Cleanup and other means) and see how much manual cleanup is done over the next couple of weeks before considering automated options? -- Ryan • (talk) • 06:12, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

I certainly didn't intend to automatically remove everything on this list :) This was definitely for manual inspection. If we wanted to do an automated solution, we'd want to put dead links into a queue and see if they come back within a week or two to make sure they weren't transient errors, and we'd want to have special handling for different cases. In DMOZ once we identify a link as properly dead we don't even delete them then either, but instead we throw them into a secondary queue where editors go and hunt down a replacement since there is often a good reason, like a business changing names, getting a new domain name, or whatever. Which is why I was thinking that some means of directly collaborating between the two projects would be a good idea, as the link scanner I put the Wikivoyage links through is not nearly as well developed as the ones running at DMOZ, and also because are constantly fixing our links and it would make sense to get the value of that work propagated out to other open projects like this. Ideally, when Wikivoyagers find replacements those replacements would be sent in the other direction to improve DMOZ as well. Using Wikidata to do this dynamically sounded like an interesting idea. Either way, I'm happy to continue generating these reports from the WV XML dumps on an ongoing basis if they are helpful here. Unknown (talk) 15:03, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

I thought the list came from the same multi-step checking engine as DMOZ. If it is only a one-time check, then deleting URLs would be premature indeed. But if a link has been consistently down, I would be in favour of just deleting this link (and keeping the listing). Unlike DMOZ, we don't absolutely need URLs. Unlike DMOZ, we have a relatively high number of people who actually travel to that destination, these people are the best for the task of adding correct URLs later or removing the listing altogether if it has disappeared in real life. Anyway, looking forward to collaborating with DMOZ on this! Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:15, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

A comment that a new user made on Talk:Fairport (New York) has gotten me thinking. He said "No one visits Fairport based on a flowery or lighthearted description in WikiVoyage. At best, WikiVoyage points out a place to eat to someone already visiting."

Do you think this is true? For reference, Fairport is a village (the article also covers the surrounding town) several miles outside of Rochester, NY. It's a second-ring suburb and a very nice canalside community with a bunch of nice shops and some decent restaurants.

What do you all think? Should articles on destinations like this one take a just-the-facts-ma'am approach to letting travelers know where to find some grub once they're in town, or should we treat every article as a way to highlight what makes a destination worth going to, using vibrant language as an enticement?

-- Powers ^(talk) 23:06, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage:Tone covers this topic, and I agree with that guideline - we shouldn't be "selling" a destination, but we should write about it in a lively and interesting way. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:29, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think we have reached consensus to be vibrant and lively. I don't think that is what is at issue here. I think we need to take particular care when we're dealing with a suburb or town that is nice enough, but wouldn't normally be considered a destination that you'd go out of your way for, that we make that apparent in our descriptions. --Inas (talk) 23:35, 28 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think if the users find that the actual place doesn't meet the hype, they will be upset with Wikivoyage for misleading them. Honesty is the best policy, I think, even if that means pointing out that a place has no particular tourism value. Unknown (talk) 01:38, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Certainly. People still go to places that aren't on the tourist map, to visit family, on business, or even to get well off the tourist trail and experience the everyday life of the locals. I think Wikivoyage can be more useful in these circumstances, because there may not be a tourist guide, or web pages about such places. But our lede should make it obvious the nature of the location, and not make it out to be a major tourist attraction or must-see, it it isn't. --Inas (talk) 01:01, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think all of our articles should be written with the traveler in mind; specifically the type of traveler that a particular destination will be of the most interest. A town famous for pottery, for example, will not be everyone's "must-see" however, there are many people who such a town could be of a high priority. Most places in the world would not warrant a trip by themselves, but travelers don't have to be stationary, so these small towns DO have opportunities to attract people visiting bigger attractions in the area. In Fairport's case, it seems reasonable that someone visiting Rochester could be convinced to make the trip if there is something of interest to them. If daytrippers are the type of travelers that it attracts, it can be written with them in mind. I can say for sure that sites along/related to the Erie Canal actually have quite a draw, particularly among elderly Americans.

With that said, what the heck is up with the "See" section? That heading isn't supposed to be interpreted literally. That should be blanked or replaced with some actual sites. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:14, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Well, I don't think it's fair to say I was 'misrepresenting' the destination. Primarily, I wanted to convey that Fairport is a aspirational model for many of the other canalside communities in the region (and possibly even throughout the state). I can see how my previous wording ("Located on the historic Erie Canal, Fairport today is what every old canalside village aspires to be. With its historic character, modern amenities, and friendly atmosphere, it's no wonder Money magazine named it one of the 100 best places to live in the country.") may be construed as too flowery, but I feel the basic message has been lost with recent revisions. I would welcome advice on how to fix my wording so that it does not run afoul of our tone policy. Powers ^(talk) 17:32, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with a certain degree of "selling" the destination you're writing about. Certainly we should avoid opening the floodgates to an unchecked tidal wave of CVB-style destination touting, but frankly I think that short of eschewing a lively tone for a dry and boring one (that IMO is totally unsuitable for a travel guide), to a certain degree there's really no way to avoid it. To me, the question of whether lively language crosses the line into touting is totally a matter of degree, and a sharp distinction should be drawn between text that is both flowery and substantive (as Powers' original text at Fairport was) on the one hand, and meaningless fluff on the other hand. In my opinion, determinations should be made on a case-by-case basis rather than relying on a comprehensive list of dos and don'ts, and we should acknowledge that each individual participant in a discussion is going to have a different subjective opinion as to where to draw that line. In fact, I would go so far as to say that aside from avoiding blatant touting, this may be a case where it's not necessary for Wikivoyage to have a single solitary standard. Every writer has a different style, and I for one enjoy the diversity of styles between articles. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:32, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

To be clear regarding Fairport (New York), my personal opinion is that Powers' original text was fine as is. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 19:32, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

We should share our excitement about the destinations we cover :) while being fair. In general travel is something fun, something people do because they enjoy it (at least people who are reading travel brochures and travel guides before going). Therefore we should keep a positive and lively tone and highlight the (few?) things that make each destination interesting and special — without outrightly lying or exaggerating things, of course.

If e.g. a commuter just wants to look for a new restaurant to go to after his monthly meeting in the city, he shouldn't be disturbed by the presence of some "touting" text. ϒpsilon (talk) 20:22, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

It's an interesting point of discussion, and please no one take offence. After reading the earlier version of Fairport (New York), guide, it is attractive, well written, and I would add it to my itinerary, next time I'm over that way. I really would spend a night there, I like canals, boat trips, and the atmosphere sounds good. I'm imagining having my morning cappucino on the tow path overlooking the canal, and having a good mexican feed for dinner. I know it isn't a major centre, and I wouldn't spend a week there. So, have I been misled? Am I going to some unknown random town, with no visitor facilities, that noone in their right mind would go out of their way to see? If so, then we have a problem, we need a better description. If not, then I don't see a problem. It's targetted about right. --Inas (talk) 02:24, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think you've pegged it pretty well, actually. (And that's gratifying to me.) Powers ^(talk) 15:00, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think it's fine to write about a destination positively so long as it is also done fairly. In the case of the Fairport description above, if the town really is an attraction mainly for tourists interested in canal history or small northeastern towns, it would be helpful if the description made it clear who the target audience is supposed to be. If I understand correctly, we're not suggesting that the average traveler make a special effort to visit this town, but in its current form the description strays a bit into promotion by giving a one-sided account of what to expect, without providing any indication that the town may not be a side-trip that everyone would want to make. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:21, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Honestly, doesn't the mere fact of searching for/clicking on a destination imply that the reader takes a certain degree of interest in it? I would venture to guess that the vast majority of Wikivoyage readers don't just poke around the site blindly; they already have an idea where they want to go and probably already know a thing or two about the destinations they search for. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:30, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

There is a broader discussion to be had about using Wikivoyage as a travel planning tool, but I disagree that we can assume anyone reading an article is taking an interest in the place - instead, I think anyone planning a trip will click on the articles for towns and regions along their route looking for things that sound interesting, and we should quickly provide them enough information to decide whether a place is worth researching further. For that type of person (and with a trip coming up, I'm using Wikivoyage in exactly this way), the description should honestly answer the question "what should a traveler expect to find at a destination"? For a great example, see San Francisco/Civic Center-Tenderloin - the description for that article is interesting, but honestly describes the district in a way that gives visitors a realistic sense of what to expect. A visitor planning a trip to San Francisco has an overview that tells them about the cultural attractions without glossing over the rough aspects of the neighborhood, and thus has enough information to know whether he wants to continue reading without in any way being misled by a description that attempts to "sell" the district by only emphasizing the positive aspects of the area. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:30, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I agree that we should broach the broader discussion in some forum, and I'd describe the broader question as whether and to what extent we want to emphasize the undesirable vs. the desirable aspects of a given place. I'm wondering, for example, given what the new pagebanner on the Buffalo page looks like, what an honest pagebanner for Newark (New Jersey) would look like. Should it portray the fetid waters and industrial wastelands that many people see on a shuttle bus from Newark Airport, or should it show one or more of the pretty buildings downtown, or the cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park? This is not a theoretical question: There is as yet no pagebanner for Newark (New Jersey). Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:59, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Pagebanners are ideally both beautiful and honest; how much beauty is sacrificed for the sake of honesty and vice versa is a subjective decision that can be made by the author but can also be questioned by consensus. Also, in the case of Buffalo that Ikan cites, sometimes not everyone agrees whether certain aspects of a destination are desirable or undesirable. As I pointed out in Talk:Buffalo: unlike (presumably) Newark's brownfields, the fact that Buffalo boasts the largest collection of grain elevators in the world which are now being redeveloped is a point of pride to locals, and an argument can certainly be made that they're of interest to visitors (especially to the particular genre of visitor that is already seeking out Buffalo as a destination). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:46, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Our guides should always be positive. There is nothing more obnoxious than a guide that tells you destinations and places are not worthwhile. If a place is of limited interest, we should be able to say WHO that limited crowd might be and let people decide for themselves if a place is 'stupid' or not worth their time.

In the case of page banners, we should ALWAYS make them attractive. The page banners really are a part of the overall article tone. We should not use them as a means to poke fun at destinations. Choosing "fetid waters" as a banner would be offensive. If the only thing to see or do in a destination is reel at fetid water, then the article shouldn't even exist. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 06:00, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

ChubbyWimbus, you seem to be looking at this in a more black-and-white way than I am. No one is seriously suggesting using an image of fetid waters as a pagebanner, and as for myself, when I wrote about "sacrificing beauty for honesty" I did not intend to say that it would ever be appropriate to choose a completely ugly banner for the sake of honesty. The truth of the matter is that tourist attractions are rarely ugly; when they are, in the case (arguably) of Buffalo's new pagebanner, on the "beauty-vs.-honesty" spectrum I'm saying it's okay to nudge the scale slightly to one side or the other. You can certainly choose a pagebanner that's less beautiful than an alternative - but still beautiful - if it's a more accurate representation of the destination's identity, especially as it's written in the text of the article (cf. "the page banners really are a part of the overall article tone").

This, of course, leaves aside the whole question of who judges what's beautiful. I personally think the new pagebanner is incredibly beautiful, and at Talk:Buffalo opinions are running 50/50 60/40 in favor of the new banner. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 06:20, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think it does in the end come down to your last point about WHO is judging the 'beauty' and/or 'honesty' of the image. I tend to agree that the new Buffalo image is both more beautiful and honest while some people see industrial buildings and automatically think "ugly". I don't see it as even being a "nudge" towards compromising beauty for honesty, unless the purpose of choosing the industrial area actually WAS to portray the city's "bad side", which I know is not the case. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 06:22, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think I agree with your point of view on this, ChubbyWimbus: "There is nothing more obnoxious than a guide that tells you destinations and places are not worthwhile. If a place is of limited interest, we should be able to say WHO that limited crowd might be and let people decide for themselves if a place is 'stupid' or not worth their time." That said, there is an argument to be made that if a place is nondescript-looking, an honest portrayal of that place would be to have a nondescript-looking pagebanner. I'm not advocating such a line of thinking, but it's worthwhile, even if only as a Devil's advocate argument to push back at. I do have another point, though, which is that some places may need to be covered only because they are places one needs to travel through to get from one interesting place to another. I'm thinking, for example, of Poggibonsi. I can't think of anyone who's considered that town a worthwhile place to visit during a trip to Tuscany (I remember it being really nondescript, in a region with such beauty), but you have to change buses there to get from Siena or Florence to San Gimignano, so it's worth covering for that reason and should have an article, if anyone wants to list good places to have some food and drink while waiting for the next bus. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:19, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

All good points. I'd remark that we often have a very boring lede to many of our articles. Often it's xxx is a city in yyy province. Perhaps we appeal to our writers to indicate the potential appeal of places of less renown in the lede, especially since the breadcrumb is there anyway.

• xxx is nothing more than a bus station. Arrive, try the tacos, and leave on the next convenient form of transport.
• xxx may not be on the tourist trail, but it contains some of the most well preserved roman ruins on the European continent that you won't find on any map.
• xxx is a dormitory suburb, but well worth the trip for pomologist travellers, with the oldest kumquat in the northwest.

--Inas (talk) 08:52, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

A final word from me about banners: by comparison with pagebanners, IMO we should be a lot more reluctant to sacrifice beauty for "honesty" in the case of DotM/OtBP/FTT banners. The Main Page should be all about eye candy, or more specifically, using a really nice image to entice readers to click on a destination that they may or may not have been interested in to begin with. With pagebanners, by searching for/clicking on the article the reader has already established a degree of interest in getting to know the destination, which is where a greater emphasis on accuracy comes into play. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 09:37, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Agreed on that, but that would tend to point to the idea that perhaps boringness and ugliness should be criteria in judging whether a place should be featured on the front page. Right now, neither criterion is considered valid. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:45, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Even if the place is nondescript, there are still ways to be honest without sounding offensive or patronizing to those who might actually want to visit. In Inas' descriptions, I personally don't like the first one labelling an entire destination as a "bus station" and advises the traveler to leave ASAP. I'd prefer a "Most travelers" approach in that case, so that those the tone isn't so patronizing to the few travelers who may actually be planning to stay a little longer. I often visit towns and places within towns that make people say, "WHY??", but if I want to go to a 'boring' place, I will. It would be fine to see a travel guide to point out that it's not a major tourist city, to mention that most short-term travelers will probably find nearby X city to be of greater interest, etc. but travel guides are very unpleasant reads when the tone (or actual words) suggest no one should visit. When the public says "nay" and it's just you and your travel guide, it's quite lonely when the travel guide also turns on you. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:42, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Saying the place is a bus station is only valid if it is, in fact, a bus station. I don't want to be patronising or misleading in the other direction either. See the guide I wrote to Marla, reasonable? --Inas (talk) 03:27, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Seems reasonable to me. And ChubbyWimbus, I agree with your points, too, which as usual, you expressed eloquently. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:31, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'd been waiting for months for the snow to go away so that I could photograph the new pagebanner I'd had in mind for Buffalo. Today I finally did, and I could not be happier with the results. So I can't resist blowing my own horn here at the Pub about it. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:45, 29 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Congratulations! It's a great photo. Edge3 (talk) 00:25, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Nice! Jjtkk (talk) 14:03, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

What is when admin(s) say, stop your work on this site, then 2 months happened nothing. Thereafter let a message "this project makes me very unhappy and stops me from contributing actively."? - - - Globetrotter19 (talk) 11:48, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I don't quite understand what you are talking about. Could you explain a little more? Texugo (talk) 11:53, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think they stopped contributing waiting for Moscow subdivision. That still hasn't happened. Stalled? --Inas (talk) 12:25, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yep. You are right Inas! - - - Globetrotter19 (talk) 15:37, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Constructive comments are always welcome! Active participation is welcome too. But if you propose a completely weird way of splitting Moscow into North, East, West and South without even taking care of Kremlin, which is exactly in the middle, then please, come up with a better suggestion or wait until other people do it, although this may take long-long time. If you check the Russian article, you will see that we have done a lot of work on the article about Kremlin and Kitay-Gorod, and we basically did it from scratch because your long lists of everything turned out to contain many mistakes, let alone very poor descriptions that are hardly suitable for a travel guide. We also discussed how to describe details without losing generality and feasibility for a first-time visitor, which you have lost the moment you added 100+ churches. Altogether, we are trying to make a good guide to Moscow. This really takes time. --Alexander (talk) 18:15, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for answering. And O.K. You have right Alex, I completly forget the Russian article.

P.S. I wish good work for all contributors and I'm excited waiting how splitting Moscow districts. - - Globetrotter19 (talk) 23:15, 30 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Adding links I think it would be helpful to include more links in the sidebar to Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon, or Yelp! Does anyone else think these would be useful? I can easily imagine travelers trying to find this info. I think that hotel booking sites would also be useful but they are quite likely to be non-neutral. User-generated sites like restaurant reviews are (ostensibly) more fair-minded like this guide strives to be. Thoughts? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:37, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yelp and Tripadvisor would probably make more sense as links within listing tags since we would want to point to individual businesses rather than city pages, but while I would be in favor of allowing links to a select number of such sites, I suspect any proposal to add such links will require discussion participants to don flame-proof clothing... -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:43, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

User-generated content or not, I think it's an open question how the WMF would react to us linking to commercial sites in that way. If there's a precedent for such a thing, I'm not aware of it. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:02, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Note that the foregoing is not intended as a reflection of my own (as yet nonexistent) opinion on the matter. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 05:03, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yelp's reliability is very spotty. For example, I've found that they are useful only for names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the East Village, and that both the positive and negative ratings in that neighborhood are so out of kilter as to make the mind reel. And I don't recall them having much coverage of cities in Germany and found them spotty there, too. By contrast, they were much more reliable, it seemed, in California and Hawaii. They also have a buggy, not so user-friendly site. What this boils down to is, no, I don't want to link to them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:50, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Doesn't What not to link to explicitly say we shouldn't link to competing travel guides? ϒpsilon (talk) 16:01, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yup. Powers ^(talk) 17:55, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

If I go to https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page# I see the banner "Welcome to Wikivoyage! Help us to improve our travel guides by contributing to an article today!" It is however not dismissible and very prominent in the UI. Can we please remove this or at very least make it possible to be dismissed? Jdlrobson (talk) 21:50, 1 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Clicking [dismiss] does not dismiss it indeed. I created this bug report: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64737 Does it describe the problem correctly? Thanks for reporting the problem! Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:59, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

Would be great to also show how the banner k

is setup. Is it a CentralNotice or a Sitenotice or something else? Maybe hide it via Mobile.CSS in the meantime - it's not the best experience ! Jdlrobson (talk) 15:02, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

The mobile Main Page starts with this list:

   Africa
   Antarctica
   Asia
   Europe
   North America
   Oceania
   South America
   Itineraries
   Phrasebooks
   Travel topics
   Other destinations

1) I would be in favour of moving Antarctica into Other destinations, which already contains much more travelled places like Caribbean. Sorry if this has already been discussed somewhere, I could not find. Actually, I could not even find where is the wikicode for this.

2) The spacing between "South America" and "Itineraries" is not visually rendered, which is a pity because it makes the list a bit daunting with 11 same-level items.

3) I suggest moving Other destinations just after "South America"

Actually, how about something like this:

   Africa
   Asia
   Europe
   North America, South America, Caribbean
   Oceania
   
   Other destinations
   Itineraries
   Phrasebooks
   Travel topics

Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:30, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

1) would leave no way to reach Antarctica except through Other Destinations; the only other article for which that's true is Space. Powers ^(talk) 14:31, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Reply

English Wikipedia has a persuasive user who thinks that "A state-by-state guide of helmet laws, lane splitting laws, etc doesn't belong on Wikiepdia; there is a draft article for this on WikiTravel where this kind of how-to advice is appropriate." [6] As I am very glad to see this place continuing many contents from Wikitravel, I would like to ask about starting a traffic law project to collect information on topics like the safety belts, right turn on red, overtaking, etc. However, when considering Wikivoyage:The traveller comes first and Wikivoyage:Goals and non-goals, legal guides to fight traffic violations seem to fit Wikibooks much better while not normally relevant to travelers. Please advise so cross-wiki coordination and cooperation will be much better. Thanks.--Jusjih (talk) 05:43, 3 May 2014 (UTC)Reply