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Wikitravel talk:Project

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This page is for discussing the Wikitravel:Project page. If you have general question or comments about Wikitravel, leave them in the traveler's pub.


Evan, could you add a link to this Project page from the Navigation sidebar? Jpatokal 01:52, 1 May 2006 (EDT)

does anyone have any desire to integrate the data here with with the google earth application?

Replace travellers' pub?

It seems to me that this is the logical place to discuss whatever we were discussing at the pub.

Not really. In the same way that Talk:Main Page is the place to talk about the Main Page, Wikitravel talk:Project is the place to talk about the Project page. Jpatokal 05:57, 4 May 2006 (EDT)


May i mention that we still need info on restaurants like in La Paz. I have a 250 point project due in a couple of days and would like to find something, can some one help me out? I cant go to Barnes and Noble I am just to busy so can you do me a favor and give me the 411 on restaurants?

            Thank you so much!

factbook imports needing attention?

I thought we didn't have any more factbook imports to attend to! In which case, we should probably replace the thing on this page with some other link!!! Tsandell 12:46, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

Good catch, the link is gone now. -- Ryan 13:48, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

Logo/Icon

Swept in from the Pub:

I see the new logo's been put into place, and it looks nice. But I'm still seeing ye olde globe-and-arrow icon as the favicon for the site (the little icon that shows up in the URL field, "favorites" listing, and/or title bar of better web browsers). I'd be happy to make a favicon.ico file, but obviously I can't update it on the site myself. Todd VerBeek 22:11, 18 March 2006 (EST)

If you take a look at Image:Compass star emblem coolvetica logo.png and Image:Treatment.png I think Mark has actually already created an image suitable for a favicon, but I'm not sure what the status for getting it on the site is -- rumor has it that there's an entirely new skin in the works that uses the new logos, but either Evan or Mark would probably be the only ones who could provide an update. -- Ryan 04:36, 19 March 2006 (EST)
Thanks for the reminder; I've got the new icon up now, too. You may have to load http://wikitravel.org/favicon.ico directly in your browser before it realizes that the icon has changed. --Evan 09:09, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Retaining users

Swept in from the Pub:

I've been editing and adding less information than I normally do so I've been welcoming new users instead. I've also been checking how often some users and I've noticed that many travelers seem to contribute for a month or up to three months and then seem to cease activity. Anyhow, my point, or rather my question is this: How do we retain these users? There seems to be the core devotees - Admins and then some lowly users who love WikiTravel, but even with our expansive knowledge of destinations and such we unfortunately don't know everything about Earth. We really do need to retain these users, because they offer key expertise in various regions and cities. How can we inspire them to further contribute to WikiTravel? Sapphire 20:34, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

That's a good but not simple question, because the answer depends on the average profile of Wikitravellers and we don't have a good estimation on that. Maybe we could identify a few categories:
1) People who like to travel and write about it - I guess those make up most of the "regulars" here
2) People who are into Wiki stuff - those normally are into travel/writing too, but also feel comfortable enough to plunge forward into MediaWiki templates, markup etc.
Most people in the categories above have some sort of ideal/belief in the importance of the Wikitravel project as a whole. On the other hand, there are also people who:
3) Just want to welcome visitors to their countries/cities, make some more or less extensive contributions to a couple of articles then leave;
4) Just want to promote their establishments as much as they can;
5) Are curious about the Wiki, insert a link to anywhere then leave
There are probably more, but I'd say that we're less likely to retain users in categories 4 and 5. People in categories 1, 2 and maybe 3 could be more easily retained as long as long as we are able to make them more enthusiastic about Wikitravel - the inspiration you mentioned. I guess, though, that this would require some marketing-like techniques: advertising, rewards and, of course, excellent customer service like our welcome messages :o) Ricardo (Rmx) 21:24, 3 April 2006 (EDT)
As simple a thing as it is, I think the My Talk new message notification will help somewhat because new users will notice their welcome message a little sooner. If they are welcomed, they'll feel included, if they feel included, they'll be a little more involved, so forth and so on. I guess we all need to jump even quicker on the Welcoming party bandwagon... -- Ilkirk 23:18, 3 April 2006 (EDT)
Agree that the new-message notification and similar stroking will help, but in any event, this kind of transient interest is entirely normal, not just on participation-oriented web sites but in Real Life (tm). If you could figure a way to solve this problem, you'd be so busy solving it for for-profit outfits that you wouldn't have time to post here :-), and filthy rich in the bargain. Yes, it would be nice to keep folks longer, but I wouldn't obsess about it. -- Bill-on-the-Hill 10:03, 4 April 2006 (EDT)
Great conversation here. I guess I have some quick thoughts: first, if people come here, work real hard, and then move on to other projects, I don't want to make them feel bad. I think that's part of the ebb and flow of Internet communities, and it's something we'll have to deal with naturally. That said, we do have a sharp learning curve here, and it seems a shame to lose the contributions of experienced people.
I hope that the docents project picks up steam, since I think that's a great way for people who are working on a single destination or group of destinations to stay interested. I think beefing up our watchlists with RSS and email or IM notification would be nice, too. Finally, an email newsletter might serve as a reminder for users who haven't been back in a while that we still exist and we could use their help. --Evan 10:22, 4 April 2006 (EDT)
I am new to wikitravel and maybe I belong to categorie 3... Writing in WikiTravel was big fun last weekend and I spend a lot of time doing it. It's just like if you get a new toy, you stop playing with all others and concentrate on the new one. But it is totally normal that after a while things will get balanced again. What can be done to motivate users? Ask questions. If you spend hours on an article being not sure, if anyone will ever be interested in, this is not very motivating. I think the talk page would be a good place for a list of open questions. But the Using talk pages does not stress that it is desired to ask questions there. --Flip666 09:16, 10 April 2006 (EDT)
I'm started to read and write about two months ago and my first impression was that I felt a bit overwhelmed but all the formats, frames, navigation etc. (that a good page needs!). I think the main point is that after people brought in their travel knowledge it is about getting part of the wikitravel community. The talk pages and the travellers pub are good points to discuss topics but unexperienced IT people (who are frequent help line callers at their work...) might see it as a hassle (why a { or [ or # and not a normal bracket). I still copy and paiste all codes for formats from the link in my welcome meassage and jump from maj's message in my talk to Evan. My suggestion to make life easier for newbies is:

1. Search function: Now when i write "evan" nothing about Even arrives until i click after the first hit another time below the boxes user, talk etc. People are used to google and may not allways look for destinations

2. Quickbars, codes, shortscuts: Their should be one general document with all basic codes and a short example how it looks like. If I don't have a clue of codes and download the basic codes and you don't need to go everytime you need something back to the help page.

3. Docents: Good idea

4. Feedback: Sapphire and Maj encouraged me with their feedback to continue writing. Especially if you are new here you are unsure if you are welcome and it's ok the way you do it. The welcome message helps to find around

jan 05:08 (EDT), 27 April 2006


Personally I believe that non-retaining users is probably the most serious problem for growth and development of Wikitravel. I am not sure Crossroads will help in foreseeable future with this, and already discussed on some things that contribute to small percentage of long-lasting contributors. I just shared 2 more thoughts: here and here. Does it make serious sense to link from here to other discussions we already had around Wikitravel Talk pages that may be related to the issue? --DenisYurkin 17:11, 25 November 2006 (EST)

More: let's allow--and encourage people to specify where they live/what regions they are really experts in. See Wikitravel talk:Categories#let's use categories for Babel tagging of users (please leave your comments there). --DenisYurkin 12:26, 28 November 2006 (EST)
In my case I've made a conscious decision to stop contributing. Unlike wikipedia, wikitravel is a for profit website. I don't have a problem with that, but I'm finding my contributions are ending up on spammy syndicated websites, that I don't want to have my name attached to. Rather than helping to find information, the whole site is a way of generating content to feed the founders' google adsense accounts, along with anyone else who runs a syndicated site to earn advertising revenue. While I like the idea of a user-generated community, there should be some fulldisclosure as to who runs the site, some return for the contributors, and some limits on how many crappy websites can be driven with the information created. --Holgs 10:17, 27 May 2010 (EDT)
Do you have any idea how many "crappy websites" are using Wikipedia's articles? How is that any different? No offense, but the whole point is to do this for free and let anyone copy the information. Few of us are big fans of IB and their profit motive, but at least they pay the bills. The alternative is a yearly fundraiser like Wikimedia has, and frankly I'm not sure we'd get very far taking that route. LtPowers 12:15, 27 May 2010 (EDT)

............... needing attention?!

Hey, any chance we could return the needing attention part of section tasks in progress? I thought it worked having links to a few articles that needed special attention, as it was a good way of drawing peoples efforts to things that need to be done!

For example, I've just found Morazan_(El Salvador), which someone has written in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, but I'm sure there's plenty of people that do on here, and I need to draw these people's attention to this matter. No one will ever find out about it if I just write it in the discussion page for the article! Tsandell 17:04, 14 July 2006 (EDT)

Feel free to add a link to Wikitravel:Articles needing attention. -- Ryan 17:07, 14 July 2006 (EDT)
Done- I was under the impression the Project Home was one of the pages us lowly users couldn't edit! It appears I was wrong! Also, I don't know if I was alone in doing this, but I was weeding out some of the requests for x, and the x needing attentions, so the list was being maintained...... Tsandell 17:47, 14 July 2006 (EDT)
I appreciate that you may have been trying to maintain to maintain them, but the Outlines... and Stubs... pages were a lost cause, and simply could not be maintained effectively. The just plain Wikitravel:Articles needing attention is not nearly as bad, since it never pretended to be a complete list, but rather a list of specific articles that had a specific need. - Todd VerBeek 17:57, 14 July 2006 (EDT)

CouchSurfing box

Is it ok to start some kind of template so that CouchSurfing people can easily link to their profile over there? Something like {{CouchSurfing|Guaka}}. Guaka 17:05, 13 August 2006 (EDT)

That's a great idea. What about a userbox, like Wikitravel:Babel or Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Userboxes? I think this is the kind of travel affiliation that'd be really appropriate. --Evan 12:53, 14 August 2006 (EDT)

Coat of Arms, Splurge

Is it possible to put "Coat of Arms", with picture on "Quick facts"?

What is the meaning of Splurge? Is it possible to replace it with "First clas", or "luxurious"? Is it possible to put price bracket standards for hotels and restaurants in each countries?


Place of Worship

Is it allowed to put list of place of worship on "Do" category? Churches in some countries routinely conduct service in English for tourist / expats. What are the types of place of worship allowed on Wikitravel? Is it churches, mosques, temples, synagouge, vihara or others?

The blue word "Article"

On Jakarta page, there is a blue word "article" near Play nightclub. Is this a bug or something else?

content completeness rating for countries

I propose to create a rating of content completeness for countries we have here--like this:

Greece: ██▒▒▒ (2/5)

Russia: █▒▒▒▒ (1/5)

US:     ████▒ (4/5)

UK:     ███▒▒ (3/5)

Seeing chart like this on a Project page (and even on the Main Page?) would (a) add competition drive between describing different countries; (b) can show newcomers where they're likely to find mostly detailed articles, not only stubs and outlines; (c) will drive people towards moving the slider towards "completion" for the country they can contribute.

Status system for articles is really great, but it's too difficult to get a whole picture of how mature is content on Wikitravel.

To calculate rating for country, I would simply get an average status over all articles that belong to the country (directly or through intermediary articles). At least, we can start with a simple system and see from there.

Are there any objections for implementing such a chart, or we can proceed to discussing how to implement this? --DenisYurkin 16:52, 25 November 2006 (EST)

I think getting some metrics on how well we're doing for different places is great. I don't think clogging the project home page with all 200+ country pages is the right way to do it -- maybe another page? I'm also not interested in steering readers away from incomplete sections of the site -- having people see them and add to them is the only way we'll get them completed.
Anyways, I think the smart way to do this is to put some RDF in the article status templates to get a computer-readable version of the status values. Then, we can do queries like, "what's the average status of the articles in this region, continent, or country?" We'll also need to know which articles we need that don't exist yet -- if we have 5 star articles for Russia, that doesn't mean that our coverage for Russia is complete. Probably using the Locode data from shared would give a good estimate for places we should have guides for.
Can I ask you to write this up on shared:Technical requests? It really makes it easier to keep track of this kind of thing. --Evan 17:19, 25 November 2006 (EST)
Do you recommend to reproduce my original story at shared, or to describe/link to(?) your suggestion with RDF? --DenisYurkin 17:33, 25 November 2006 (EST)
On your thoughts: of course, we need to average against total number of cities/regions in the country combined with existing articles number--not the latter per se. For a box at project home page, we can have only top 5..10 countries, with a link to a full list of countries with their ratings (sorted by rating value? within a continent?). --DenisYurkin 18:14, 25 November 2006 (EST)

Off-topic wiki question

First, I recently travelled to Italy and checked out a number of pages here during my search. I have to say that I was surprised that the quality of information available here was equal to (or better than) some of the travel books I purchased. I have no doubt that this site will become one of the leading travel resources in the next few years.

Second - and my apologies if I'm posting this question in the wrong location - I started a similar wiki in the area of Personal Finance and investing. I just started the wiki a few weeks ago and am looking for some very general advice on starting and building a wiki from some folks with experience.

I am fine with all of the technology issues, but am curious about a couple of items:

  1. Given your experience, what is the best way to start building a wiki? Is it better to build a handful of quality articles and let people become drawn by the quality or to build a "wide and shallow" structure with little content and let people start contributing?
  2. What is the best way to promote a wiki and let people know what you are trying to do? Blogs are generally easy to promote with the advent of technorati, RSS, etc. Wikis don't yet have this type of media infrastructure.
  3. If you have any other advice - positive or negative - for me I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!Clarendon 06:39, 2 March 2007 (EST)

As far as the breadth-vs-depth question, I think you need some of both. There are a lot of people who'd never dare start a new page who'll be happy to toss their tuppence in when there's an article to edit. That's why it was important for Wikitravel to have an article for every country, so that if someone wants to add info about any place on the planet, there's an article where they can put it. But you also need examples of Quality, for example putting a lot of effort into articles like Berneray or Santa Fe, even while entire countries such as Suriname and Tajikistan still have little more than basic facts. People will appreciate what you've accomplished and try bringing other articles up to that standard. - Todd VerBeek 10:31, 2 March 2007 (EST)
Thank you, this is very helpful. How did you begin promotion in the early days? How has participation grown over time? Any advice on getting the word out?Clarendon 18:33, 2 March 2007 (EST)

Vandalism

I see that there has been some self-indulgent vandalism in Orlando's Sleep section. A significant portion of content was removed (anonymously) and replaced with a new subsection on vacation rentals and now there is a listing site link there! Perhaps we may want to revise the deletions policy before this gets out of hand.

If there's a problem, it isn't policy. If someone deletes useful information, then we should restore it and explain to them why that's not welcome. If they add information that doesn't belong, then we should remove it... all according to policy. - Todd VerBeek 14:59, 17 April 2007 (EDT)

Titles for links

Here is an example of a link on the Oudtshoorn page

   * ☎ +27 (0)44 272-7410, [1]. The number one caves to visit in South Africa...

Yes, if you mouseover the [1] it tells you the link, but nowhere does it say the name of the attraction.

What is the correct standard here? I would expect to see a title, contact details & link, then a text description

Thanx Chris

Chrisboote 05:21, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

Hi Chris. The listing format is described and documented in the article on listings. As to exactly how it's supposed to look, well that's been debated over and over again, but so long as you fix listings you find to match the tags in the listings article then the listing will be consistent with whatever we decide, as we decide it. -- Mark 05:54, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

Mark I think his question was actually literally about the missing titles... for some reason the actual title wasn't showing up... the formatting seemed fine though... I purged the cache for the page and they're rendering correctly now... Chris, they should render like this:

  • Cango Caves, +27 (0)44 272-7410, [1]. The number one caves to visit in South Africa. From Oudtshoorn drive to the north. You will be there after approximately 15 minutes.

And they seem to be now. Don't know what the problem was though! – cacahuate talk 01:26, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

Do i need to show the proof to any one on wikitravel?

Do i need to provide any proof for my content that i edit for an article. Please let me know.

To provide the context here, User:Borndistinction ([2]) has been posting great big slabs of content copyrighted by the Tourism Authority of Thailand into Wikitravel. I've told him that he needs to give us (eg.) a letter of authorization from TAT for this, but he doesn't seem to believe me, so maybe somebody else could reply? Jpatokal 02:10, 5 February 2008 (EST)
shared:Copyleft#Frequently_asked_questions covers using content from other sites. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:17, 5 February 2008 (EST)
Yes, if it is copied, proof is required else it will simply be deleted on sight. shared:Copyleft states Now, the hard part: because of the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license, you are legally responsible not to put other people's copyrighted work into Wikitravel Shared without permission.. The rest of us need to be able to see that permission, therefor a letter of authorization is required. A better option is not to use copied material at all. It would be far better to have fresh new material in WT that just a copy of something that already exists. --Nick 03:21, 5 February 2008 (EST)

I'll surely provide the proof ... still on process. Thank you.--Borndistinction 04:16, 5 February 2008 (EST)

Logbook updates

Wow, no logbook update since May 27 of last year... Texugo 05:40, 13 March 2008 (EDT)


print tool like the one found at wikipedia?

Each page would have the wikitravel logo and and the URL. People would use wikitravel more, I think, if they could easily print up the sections they need.--Anonperson 08:44, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

I believe Internet Brands is working on such a thing. In any case, this sort of comment would go better at the Travellers' Pub. LtPowers 10:22, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

myvacationsto.com stealing Wikitravel content

I just found this, copied without attribution or license info: http://www.myvacationsto.com/wiki/Jakarta

I'm guessing all their content is from Wikitravel. Wasn't sure where to report it - I'll trust that someone here will take appropriate steps. --chriswaterguy 01:41, 14 June 2010 (EDT)

They claim to be operating under CC-by-sa 1.0, which would make their use of Wikitravel content legal for the time at which it was imported (three years ago). Granted, that particular page isn't very easy to find, but there it is. Attribution is a problem, however; it doesn't appear that the original authors from Wikitravel are credited anywhere, which is a violation of the license terms. With only about six edits in the last 30 days (all spam), though, I wouldn't hold much hope of any sort of action being taken. LtPowers 13:17, 14 June 2010 (EDT)

User name

Hi, looks project topics go here. Why there is + in my user name. I mean I can see it just on the top of the page, when I am logged in (Juan de+Vojníkov), while normally I am user:Juan de Vojníkov.--Juan de Vojníkov 14:28, 27 July 2010 (EDT)

No idea. Everything looks normal to me. I wouldn't worry about it. LtPowers 08:48, 28 July 2010 (EDT)


Log Book

When is the logbook going to be updated its almost a year out of date and makes it seem that wikitravel isnt as updated and worked on as much anymore, so whoever updates it please do so thanks —The preceding comment was added by Ralphzztop (talkcontribs)

Yeah, this is a wiki, so we don't have any one person who does any particular task. You can update the logbook right now, if there's something useful to say! Plunge forward! LtPowers 11:25, 27 September 2010 (EDT)
  • Well how does one actually Fix this then obviously there are more users than there was in 2009 and needs to be updated I just dont know how to do it if someone can do it then show me how they did it I would like to update it more often —The preceding comment was added by Ralphmiester (talkcontribs)

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