Wikivoyage/Summit/Archive/2013-07

July 2013

en

Last month saw much work done on the Wikivoyage:Banner Expedition, which aims to place first default and then custom pagebanner table of contents on all mainspace articles. A few nice examples of custom banners include Scotland, Chicago skyline guide, Northern Lights, and Seattle/Fremont.

We also have been hard at work on the Wikivoyage:Dynamic maps Expedition (with a lot of help from our German colleagues), which aims to put enlargeable slippy maps in articles, with icons generated from geocoordinates in the listings template. A very basic example can be found at Wheaton; a good full-screen example is for Tokyo/Roppongi.

Some other features that we have developed in recent months include the Wikivoyage:Tourist Office, where people can ask any travel-related questions they may have, similar to Wikipedia's Reference Desk; the new Main Page which uses colorful banners, similar to the pagebanner table of contents; clickable imagemaps for use on regions maps (example); and lastly a new display format for external links, which replaces footnote-style links and icon links in Template:Listing.

We are also exploring the idea of a site tour, which would use mw:Extension:GuidedTour to introduce new readers to Wikivoyage and its many features.

Some long term goals that are still just dreams include the ability for users to review listings and to develop a Listings popup editor. We also hope someday to have a listings database on Wikidata, so we can share basic information about listings across all language versions, such as prices, addresses, business contact information, etc.

Other language versions may also be interested in the Wikivoyage:Search Expedition, which explores how to best improve our visibility in search results.

Our number one tech request is sadly a now 6 months old and still unfulfilled: to allow grouped edits to be patrollable Bugzilla:43977.

Some of the best work in recent months on guides that I have noticed includes Ölgii, Oakland, and Musandam Peninsula. Our newest star articles are La Macarena, Russian phrasebook, and Retiring abroad.

That is a lot of news, but it should be shorter next month, since this is the first report ;) --Peter ^Talk 18:36, 9 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We've recently seen a proliferation in Wikivoyage's use of social media. We're now active on both Facebook and Twitter; the former has 98 likes and the latter has 141 followers at the time of writing. At present we mainly use these outlets to make announcements: our 'follower-base' isn't really broad enough to be very interactive, although on Twitter in particular we have contacted individual tourist boards and responded to individual comments. So far, we've made contact with the tourism organisations responsible for promoting The Hague, Eindhoven, Berlin and Manchester, whilst Copenhagen and Pittsburgh have all interacted with the account.

Hopefully all of our social media ventures will drive further growth to the site's traffic and more partnerships with official bodies.

If you'd like to see something tweeted, please post here. Thanks! :) --Nick ^talk 21:31, 9 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

pt

After a rough start, pt: is moving forward again, although the community is unfortunately extremely small, consisting lately only of me and one other regular contributor, a handful of other occasional editors, and even the only other admin only pops in once every couple of weeks lately. That said, we have managed to accomplish quite a lot in recent weeks:

legacy xml listings have been replaced with templates analogous to what was done on en:, and with the help of User:Wrh2, all legacy listings have been converted
listing addition buttons have been added to the edit toolbar, developed in parallel with those now on en:
some new help pages have been created for the new listing templates
User:Ml31415 has made his listing converter tool semi-functional for unformatted Portuguese listings, and conversion of such listings is underway
the "region list" template was replaced with one in Portuguese and all instances converted
the competing spellings of our "IsPartOf" template (Fica em) have been standardized and cleaned up
all pages in the main, Wikivoyage, and template namespaces are now neatly categorized
the article status system has now been divided, as it is on en:, with combined status/article type templates (Usable city, Outline region, etc.), and all mainspace articles have been tagged with a respective status
some new maintenance tags/categories have been created
hundreds of section titles in articles have been corrected to match the article templates
"to be merged" and "to be translated" categories have been emptied out, and articles tagged for style have been reduced to less than 100
hundreds of interwiki links and geo tags have been added

Many challenges remain, mainly that of attracting editors who will be part of the community (literally over 99% of main namespace edits in the last 2 months have been mine). We do not have enough contributors willing to effectively take part in policy and new proposal discussions - it typically boils down to me and one other user who has very divergent ideas about aesthetics and organization, and it is quite difficult to reach a "consensus" for any new change with so few people around. Texugo (talk) 22:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

it

First of all I want to thank Peter for taking the lead in this initiative that I've proposed on June 23rd during a discussion on en:voy. I hope that this Report could reduce the digital-distance between the various voy-teams, although the language could still be a insurmountable barrier for some users for an active discussion.

Now let's go to make a brief summary on it:voy situation.

1^st report introduction

it:voy, after de:voy, is the oldest version (2007). This represent more an issue than an advantage :-) because a lot of hands, styles, ideas, has passed over the site during these years, so when I've arrived in Jan-2013 I've found an important lack of standard inside the wiki, but with a considerable effort of the current active team we are trying to put it:voy back on track. Also a common interlingual standard is important although having some interlingual difference stimulates the local creativity and give a chance to reconsider the current choices already taken for granted.

On it:voy the "very active user" are just few (but very good ;-)), so all the performed activities and the ones in progress has been selected taking in mind this situation in order to not start what would be impossible to get done and at the same time to not spread our efforts.

I think sharing this background was necessary in order to let you better contextualize the following info that summarize the main highlights for each category since January-2013. The highlight orders has no criteria but FIFO: First In (my mind) First Out (my fingers) ;-)

What has been done

Being inspired by the new en:voy homepage, we have recently created a new it:voy home page that merge the graphic en:voy aspects with the old it:voy content. Minor fixes are still needed but we are really proud of the result. The choice of having just the Destination of the Month banner is because we are not enough to take care of the three categories in terms of banner, articles & selection.
To speed up our pages loading and to increase site maintainability I've revised both Common.js (100%) and Common.css (90%). I strongly suggest to perform the same activity in each wiki and maybe support the ones that have not enough time and/or capability to perform it (e.g. fr:voy).
Another excellent idea started by en:voy that we have imported is the Pagebanner. We have made some personalization according to our personal taste and infrastruture. If I consider the current group of pages that could be eligible for a banner, we have reach a coverage of around 40%. Most of them has been imported by en:voy, we have just created few of them (thanks Massimo :-)) relevant to Italian cities that maybe for the international teams has a minor priority. I invite anyone that create and add a new banner, to apply it also in it:voy, this would increase the alignment between the sites & the cooperation between the interlingual teams.
Differently from the other interlingual voy version, in it:voy we use quickbar not only for the countries but also for region, city. We have created dedicated Quickbar for these article categories with just information that could be interesting for . Those Quickbar could be improved but finally they have been standardized. The Pagebanner info are managed by the Quickbar to centralized the template information.
We have abandoned the previous XML Listing implementing the new Template version in order to increase the layout flexibility. A big thanks to Ryan for supporting us for the migration with his bot already tested in en:voy, so I've saved my time to develop another one from scratch. After that I've implemented the relevant set of icons in the edit page.
Implementation of interproject link based on Interprogetto template from it:voy versus sister wiki project (outside wikivoyage world) has been automized through anther footer template. With the help of a customized bot, I've added the interproject link in it:wikipedia and it:wiktionary versus voy. This task has increased the integration of voy inside the WMF family.

What's going on

As stated above Pagebanner importing is still ongoing. Any international help (doesn't need Italian knowledge) would be really appreciated.
Article naming convention is another activity that I've started on January. Practically I'm renaming all the region articles that contains a "slash" in it (e.g. Country/North -> Northern Country). I've increased a little bit the pace of it trying to be as much ready as possible for the migration into wikidata for the interwikilink. It's quicker renaming the page now than afterwards. My personal concern on the wikidata centralization is that although for country and city there everythinkg it's fine, for the district but in particular for the region I've seen consistent discrepancies between the various languages. And altro some false omogenity, that means, regions with the same name but that describe a different portion of land. Furthermore I can't understand the rule for the distric that force a title: City/Distrct, in my opinion also the districts should have the same naming convention.
On January we have applied some personalization on the Regionlist template and since then I've started the implementation of it in our article taking advantage of the work done by the great en:map expedition team. 99% of the time I totally agree with the region division but sometimes (see Ireland) IMHO a new division must be implemented so I'll wait first a consensus, second a rework on en:voy before migrating the content. I'm used to rewrite from scratch the articles of a country in Italian (in two months I've done it for the whole Africa) but for en:voy I need to wait for someone else's support.

What's next

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning :-) ....a lot of work has been done, ok, but more has to be done in order to reach an optimum level of standardization.
Regarding the homepage, in order to optimize more our time we have decided to choose all the DoM now and then to automize their slide show over the next time. ...I just need some spare time, to write this mechanism... :-)
Policy and template manual implementation. We have several lack of those pages and no people that at the moment are interested on developing them.
Develop Wikivoyage:Expedition in it:voy too. I like the idea (and the name :-)) and although we couldn't be enough for the expedition, it's anyway a good approach to list the various initiatives.
Implement more dedicated Quickbar for example for National Parks, archeological sites, Dependences, etc.. to better describe the toponym in the article.
Conversion of the current Interprogetto template from "wiki-markup-language" into Lua. This would be the first implementation of the Lua language in it:voy and it would bring several benefit like the reduction of some logic currently implemented in JS (client side).

Vision

One of the big miss that I've found here in comparison with wikitravel is the listing popup editor. We have made some test in it:voy but the result wasn't satisfactory so it has never gone in production. Question. Could we import the JS used by WT in the same way that most of the articles has been imported in the vairious wikis, or there's an IP (i.e. Intellectual Property) issue? Here the link to the whole script library.
The POI interactive map developed by de:voy is excellent! And it's something that sooner or later will be implemented in it:voy too. I'm postponing this moment because it would take an important effort to delep a good article based on this technology, so for the same reason of the too-few-people, I'd like to focus our energy on other topics.

--Andyrom75 (talk) 22:50, 10 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

ru

I will be very short here and probably extend this report later, or perhaps others will help me to do it. Russian Wikivoyage lacks people with good technical expertise, so we are mostly implementing and developing ideas borrowed from en and de.

Dynamical maps have been introduced. We were also playing around with embedding these maps into articles and found a trivial, but working solution with the collapsible map. But we certainly look for more neat ideas.
Listings template is actively used, although we did not put special effort into replacing old tags with this new template. In contrast to en:, we tried to create a more elaborate template and included separate fields for Facebook, Skype, etc. I think it is a way to go, because social networks are quite different from normal websites and should be properly distinguished, yet they can be very useful for travelers.
We created a quickbar-type template for city articles and use it extensively, although it will probably need further adjustment now, when the page banners are introduced.
We have a lot of good, unique, and first-hand travel content, and we look for people who are interested in making translations. Check, for example, Italian (Livorno, Lucca), Estonian (Rakvere, Sillamae), Ukranian (Feodosia, Vinnitsya), and Russian (Kazan) destinations.

--Atsirlin (talk) 23:23, 10 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Whoa, that Kazan guide is really good, and it's a destination I'm very interested in. I'm going to start working on translating to English. That will take a while, though, so I'd welcome help ;) --Peter ^Talk 19:45, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

May be to add that, as many Wikivoyage projects, we are understaffed: We have a dozen of regular (at least weekly) contributors and several dozens to hundred edits per day. This means that we still did not complete the transitional cleanup: We have articles written in plain text, we have articles with tags to be moved to the Listing template; very few articles have banners, some have no geolocation template, and, what is worst, very few have any sensible material in the "Understand" section, and some are outright stubs created just to promote a hotel. We are trying to clean this up and at the same time to cerate new content, several new articles per month and a couple of dozens considerably improved.

From the technical side, just to add that our template for city articles contains a link to the OSM map with locations, see for example Kazan.--Ymblanter (talk) 06:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Atsirlin, as may you have already read into my #it post, I've already managed the Pagebanner through the Quickbar, and it's easier than you may image. Take a look to the template and to any article that is using it. I've implemented this feature through the whole site in few minutes with the help a bot written ad-hoc. Being something that I have already done, I can support you on this. Let me know, --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:42, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That would be great, Could you please give an example of a page which has the combined template?--Ymblanter (talk) 08:47, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are around 800 pages this way. I'm picking up one city, one country and one region. Let me know, --Andyrom75 (talk) 10:33, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I posted at our Traveller's Pub for discussion.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:52, 11 July 2013 (UTC){{}}[reply]

I'd like to follow up with some challenges we face on ru:, and some achievements. We lack an automated way to create clear static city maps for offline usage and printing. (The classic way to make them requires technical expertise and loads of time which few of us have). I'm personally hoping for a script that would create a fast and simple street plan out of OSM maps. Also, some users find the Listing template complicated and difficult to use as compared to legacy XML listings. Unfortunately we cannot simplify the template at will because this would break all dynamic maps.

On the brighter side: despite the single-digit number of contributors we've been growing steadily. The number of articles has increased 22% since the transition to WMF. Also, we've managed to overhaul the set of rules and guidelines, organizing them into about 20 short pages that are easy to comprehend and don't intimidate new users. -- GMM (talk) 12:09, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Quick question about the Listing template: what do users find difficult to use about it compared to the legacy XML listings? What would you simplify about it? Is it the added map parameters (type, map number, latitude, longitude, image)? The geographical coordinates are definitely necessary, and I've an easier way to geocode listings in a batch, though not too sure about how it'll work in Russian. en.voy is also looking to automatically number them, rather than the more tedious by hand method. -- Torty3 (talk) 02:10, 15 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, people complained about the large number of new parameters: maps and coordinates, facebook and skype (we introduced separate fields for those), as well as additional templates that generate uniform format of phone numbers and opening hours (e.g., we write {{phone|7|812|xxx-xx-xx}} instead of +7(812)xxx-xx-xx). Additionally, I tried to make our listing template more flexible, so that it can be used both in a list and in-line. I think it is pretty well documented now, but the number of new features was perhaps too high. Auto-numbering will be great indeed, yet I don't see what else could be simplified here. --Atsirlin (talk) 06:20, 15 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

es

Disclaimer:This report is from the perspective of a former pre-WV admin on es: who has not been very active on es: Wikivoyage expressly because of some of the frustrations listed below. Others are welcome to add a more positive spin below, if any.

Since its launch in January, es: has fallen further and further out of step with other versions of Wikivoyage. Those who set it up and worked on it in the incubator appear to have made a number of rash decisions somewhere offsite, possibly in IRC, and a great number of policies and practices which were previously in place appear to have been unceremoniously dumped or neglected without any record of discussion to do so and replaced by, well, nothing -- it has become an essentially anything-goes, free-for-all environment. Here is what has become of es: since launch:

De-standardization - Consistency between articles is no longer viewed as something to be enforced, and existing consistency across articles is being haphazardly dismantled. My attempts to stir up conversations about reestablishing or recreating standards have been met with utter disdain or general disinterest:

Article templates have been deprecated. Although the template pages still exist and the majority of older articles still conform to them, the templates/standard section headers are being viewed as the merest of suggestions, and "correcting" articles to match them is actively discouraged (I was actually reprimanded for it). Users are completely free to invent any section names or organizational scheme they please.
Empty sections have been removed in many articles, further encouraging people to invent their own article structure. Inserting empty sections to match the now-neglected article templates is a no-no and will get you scolded. Creating an outline article from the article templates is also presumably frowned upon.
Outline articles have been deleted en masse, including many region and even country articles which contained child articles, regional breakdowns, or city lists, completely fracturing the pre-existing breadcrumb hierarchy and "orphaning" many of its branches
Geographical hierarchy is no longer respected, and articles for overlapping regions and districts are being created, as well as articles for random streets and individual attractions.
No Manual of style exists, and the few admins and fewer active non-admins do not seem to be the least bit interested in having one, mostly arguing against notions of consistency on the grounds that it would somehow stifle creativity, and insisting that no forethought or planning is necessary and that good articles will somehow come forth through vague imitation of other "good" articles (despite there being no existing criteria for evaluating what a good article is).

Ideas from Wikipedia are welcomed wholesale with no eyebrows raised, while suggestions and ideas from other versions of Wikivoyage generally meet fierce opposition and defiant assertions of es:'s right to be different, with little discussions of the merits of any such proposals. There is also an inherent reluctance to consider anything to be "too encyclopedic for a travel guide".

Regionlist has been replaced in a significant number of important articles by an idiosyncratic, wikipedia-style, strangely-coded (template calls within template calls) region list which obligates a tiny thumbnail for every item, and does not display in a way which lets the reader know if there is an article about the place or not, does not incorporate color coding or maps, etc., and the content of which is not being coordinated with any efforts to have articles for each (since outline articles are no longer allowed)
References have been introduced from Wikipedia, and some of the busier articles now have a giant list of technical references at the bottom, mostly referenced from large blocks of text dropped in directly from wp, with links to all manner of off-topic news sites, books, and academic works. Removing any reference is likely to get you yelled at, as it would on Wikipedia.
Wikivoyage-style maps are being neglected and in some cases replaced by random other maps from wikipedia
Factboxes have been reintroduced at state and city levels, and now include such random encyclopedic information as ISO codes, ruler name, mayor and vice-mayor, population density, detailed land area broken down by usage, GDP and other indices, city coat of arms, city flags, founding date and founder name, and random other things, essentially every piece of data contained in such boxes on wp
External links sections have been reintroduced, and appear to be completely unrestricted with no policy on types of sites to link to, and a number of pages are starting to contain collections of other travel sites, blogs, newspaper articles, etc.
Videos clips have been surreptitiously introduced, and in this and many other ways, no one seems to be familiar with or receptive to the idea that travel guides should be printable
Wikipedia-style tables with extraneous encyclopedic information are proliferating, often copied in full from WP

Redundancy is creeping in, as there is no guidance to avoid repeating national or regional information in every city article
The 7+/-2 guideline is out the window and people are free to add massive lists of states or cities
The 5-stage article status evaluation system (stub, outline, etc.) has been left to rot. The pages still exist but enforcing them seems to be forbidden. Instead, a proposal for a one-step "recommended" status (vs. no status) has been made, but there is no established criteria for evaluating articles, especially given the lack of a style manual.
Categories are being inserted manually into destination articles, not using the "IsPartOf" template to do so, and not necessarily even giving consideration to matching the breadcrumb hierarchy, which as I mentioned above, has fallen into serious disrepair

No discussions appear to have examined the reasons for or gained a consensus for practically any of the above changes made, though I am told I must respect the decisions made, despite the lack of policy pages or even discussion pages from which to learn what that supposed consensus is. When I have asked where I can consult this mysterious "will of the community" I have been unable to get any straight answer, and have basically been told to just take their word for it or propose my own policy page. Policy ideas which I have tried to propose have been largely ignored or sometimes flatly dismissed on the grounds that enforcing any policy will stifle creativity or drive away potential contributors. Overall, I get the idea that no one is interested in discussing such things.

Truthfully, after spending some years patrolling and curating the content there, I am quite saddened by what has happened in the last few months there (as User:Peterfitzgerald may upon hearing this report). When I first started trying to work and patrol there after launch in January, I was immediately scolded and told that no such rules exist anymore and that my efforts at keeping things together were unwanted. I quickly realized that things had somehow been changed drastically during the pre-launch phases, and after a few exchanges with the admins at the time, I decided to take a break from it, in the vague hope that the community would get things together in a few months. Sadly, I must report that this has not been the case so far. There are still no policies to patrol, no consistency that can be enforced, no style guidelines to align with, and I really don't even know how to help in that circumstance. To me, the site grows ever more chaotic, plagued by lack of standards and a very severe lack of transparency.

Granted, there may be some positive things to say, not least of which is that there are a few more active users than in the old days, and other minor points which I may not be aware of. But overall, I am very, very disappointed with the direction es has headed and feel that it is the least likely to cooperate and coordinate with other language versions. I feel like the site was practically hijacked in the incubator phase by probably wikipedians with little knowledge of or respect for the history or founding principles of the project. I do not understand how, why, or by whom the pre-launch decision was made to abandon all pre-existing policies, practices, and organization schemes in favor of this messy free-for-all approach, but I cannot help thinking it was a huge mistake, and I sorely wish Peter and I had been around in the incubator to fight it. I feel that they threw out many of the fundamental overarching ideals generally shared by the other language versions, including basic things like goals and non-goals, geographic hierarchy, consistency between articles due to their having the same type of content, avoiding redundancy and extraneous detail, traveller's perspective, etc. I do not think they are being very receptive to reinstating any of these values either, nor have they developed any coherent alternatives to them. Es: is essentially rudderless. Texugo (talk) 01:33, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Judging from the outside it's very hard (and most of the times impossible), so I would avoid to do that, but I can share with you my personal experience during the first three months of my assiduous presence in it:voy. The situation was exactly the same both from content and peopole aspects. I saw a lot of random and "daily-mutant" rules, useless and/or contradictory templates, rubbish within the articles (most of them hidden in the comments), etc, etc, etc... Some bad stuff (maybe more than some :-)) is still alive, but I'm working on it.

After the above mentioned three months I was about to quit, exasperated by this situation, but I haven't done it because of three passions of mine: travel, computer, helping others (the future potential readers of the site). So I've decided to set up a "partisan plan" :-) because it was impossible to face and solve directly and immediately these issues.

My approach was to demonstrate in practice (with a very hard work) how things could get better with a simple use of a magic word: "standardization". So I've rewritten the articles related to ALL the African countries following most of the wikivoyage criteria. It took a couple of months to be consistent with all the continental articles but at the end of the job I've won a great part of the resistance, opening breach for a "new era" ;-)

I may understand that mine is an unexampled approach, but this is me ;-) Another approach could be to create a sort of "interlingual wikivoyage constitution" that list the basic principles that each wiki shall follow. Those principle (like a National constitution) must be as general as possible to not prevaricate the freedom of choice of each single wiki, but at the same time a clear guide line to avoid anarchy (e.g. each article inherent countries, regions, cities, etc... of each wiki must be follow a template ...... but each wiki will decide how these template will look like....). --Andyrom75 (talk) 12:34, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, just let me jump to the "rebels"'s defence :-) on one topic, in particular regarding the elimination of the void pages. I've seen that a similar activity has been done in it:voy around the end of 2012, deleting between few houndreds and a thousand of pages. When the articles has no "children pages", I'm in favour of it because it doesn't make sense to have a page that has nothing to offer to a reader. But, if it's a page in the middle of a breadcrumb I would prefer to enrich it in order to justify its presence on the site. Generally speaking it's clear that is always better to let a page grows instead of let it die, but when we are talking of a huge group of pages a selection is needed to prioritize the effort. --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There may be some reason in that approach, but disallowing outline articles makes it impossible to repair or outline new regional breakdowns of the breadcrumb hierarchy without creating full articles along the way, and in this case many of the articles deleted did have region breakdowns or city lists already in place and were apparently deleted simply because none of the other sections contained much. For countries, I don't think it makes any sense at all, as a travel wiki should unquestionably have articles for every country at some point, and an outlined article with red links for cities and regions is certainly more inviting for people to add content than having to recreate all that from scratch. What drew me back to es: in May was actually seeing the es: interwiki for various countries disappearing from pages on other language versions, and I just thought "what in the world is going on over at es:? Why are they dismantling everything?" Moreover, I don't know what the rationale was exactly because any discussion had was apparently kept offsite somewhere, and before the site even launched. Texugo (talk) 14:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's important to clarify the concept of "void". When I was referring to a void article, I meant "void at all" :-) not with red link. To be clearer I've seen almost in all the wikivoyage sites several article with just the title, first row and the section titles coming from the template (few of them has a Quickbar, but 99% without). In my opinion these are the articles to be deleted. On the other hand, if we have an article with a region division (even if it's a inaccurate division), with a list of places (even if all of them are red), this is not an article to be deleted, it's just a stub that shall be kept.

I agree with you that each country shall have its own article. Unfortunately in it:voy we still miss some of them. It's a shame, I know :-) but currently I've preferred to give priority on tiding up the existing article becuase several user has the tendency to start from an existing article (even if for just an inspiration) instead of from the template, so I've wanted to eliminate the "bad examples" in order to avoid the "error-propagation". --Andyrom75 (talk) 16:22, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

After initially thinking I would continue to be an admin on es (I was pre-WMF migration), I got the quick impression that my background with the project was actually viewed as something undesirable, as I wouldn't be on board with current policies and practices. I couldn't figure out what the new policies and practices were (it seemed like they were just assumptions that whatever is the policy on Wikipedia should be applied to Wikivoyage), so I withdrew from the admin nomination, explaining that I couldn't be of much help, since the policies I'm familiar with from both back in the day and on other versions of Wikivoyage apparently had been discarded before es even launched. (My Spanish reading proficiency is very high, but my writing proficiency is very limited, so my only useful role there is in maintaining standards and other admin work--not policy debates.) I also left a little warning that moving away from the Wikivoyage mainstream will make it increasingly harder to work with other language versions, to capitalize on feature developments and translation opportunities, but I'm not sure that message got through. I share Texugo's concerns about the future of Spanish Wikivoyage. Hopefully other es contributors will comment here about these issues. --Peter ^Talk 20:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is exactly what was feared by moving to the Wikimedia Foundation, and why the Japanese language version never moved. The problem is that the Spanish community was nearly non-existent, and as Spanish is a huge language, a big influx of Wikipedia users took over the site turning it into a new Wikipedia. Unwanted, but hard to do something against as Wikipedians are accustomed to a different set of practices. In the English language version, the core community took an active stance to keep the site's core policies in place, but in the Spanish version such a core community did not exist. I'm not sure on what to do to counter-balance this, unfortunately. Globe-trotter (talk) 21:22, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We also had an influx of Wikipedia users on the Russian version but managed to keep the policies, at least provisionally.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:44, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So if I understand this correctly, there were very few users in es: before the move. Now there are much more, and they want to do things their way, which is different from the way of en:

Do any of the changes contravene the guiding principles or core content policies of the Wikivoyage project as a whole? (unfortunately I do not read Spanish so can't check for myself.) · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:41, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To the question about users in es: before, yes, few - two admins (Peterfitzgerald and I) and occasional random edits. Peter and I were refused continued adminship and disinvited to continue curating as before due to whoever was in the incubator surreptitiously deciding that all previous policies and processes should be delegitimized and disregarded, and that es: would start from zero with nothing in place to preserve intrisic consistency of the content they inherited.

As far as I know, there are no established "guiding principles or core content policies of the project as whole", no "constitution" as Andyrom75 put it. But it does contravene common values shared by the other projects which keep us geared to the convenience and usability for the traveller. I don't think they are doing it on purpose or following any alternative principle other than wikipedia-style assumptions. I would be very happy if they would join the other projects on these points:

Consistency of presentation: recognition that 99.9% of our articles are going to be destination articles which include the same types of information, and therefore presenting the information in an intuitive, standardized way with article models, standardized section headers, and giving each type of information its proper place where travellers can find it easier
Holistic coverage: trying to avoid gaps and overlaps, avoiding redundant coverage so the traveller won't miss info contained in other articles covering the same place, concentrated coverage so that the traveller can find the information without opening or printing dozens of pages about places in the same town (avoiding attraction/street/establishment articles when possible)
Neutrality of medium - keeping articles that are usable both online and in print
Scope: extraneous non-travel information, statistics, and encyclopedic detail eliminated on the basis that watering down the relevant travel information with that stuff makes it harder for the traveller to digest and find needed info.
Non-academic tone - avoid an overly formal approach with official names and administrative breakdown when not relevant to travel, no need to provide sources and references for everything

These are among the points that have always been a part of all versions of our project as far as I know, but since their default assumptions seem to be those of wikipedia, they so far resist modeling their architecture after the project as a whole and insist on not enforcing any of these things. I wish we did have a constitution which included at least these points. Texugo (talk) 16:35, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To put it one way, es: has inherited the first few floors of a skyscraper in construction, and rather than examine the blueprint to see how construction can continue or be adapted, they have thrown out the blueprint and invited a bunch of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and interior designers who are used to building customized homes in Wikipedialand, and set them all to work on the structure individually and without coordination or planning. Structural supports for the higher floors are being inadvertently removed, everyone is going off their own ideas of what the building should look like, and the results are bound to be disastrously disorganized, shaky, and not easy to use. Meanwhile, the other versions are working from sound architectural principles, and though the results are not all the same, at least they share common processes and goals and structures.

Have they contravened any condition of membership of Wikivoyage as a WMF project? If not, there is not much that can be done except watch to see what happens. At the least it is an interesting social experiment.

How were Peter Fitzgerald and Texugo de-adminned? did this follow due process?

I assume there is there a saved version as of before this change of behaviour. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:22, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Technically speaking, to de-admin someone, it's necessary a steward. In it:voy it has been done twice this year (almost three times...). The first time against a guy that, to be short and polite, "goes out of the track", the second time against another guy that hadn't applied a change in the last 3 years. While for the second case few messages are enough, for the first one it's a little bit longer. And, if there's no track evidence for the reason of the de-admin, the steward that made this could be de-steward. --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:36, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, they were never de-admined. What happened was when es.wp was created, they applied to stewards for adminship on the basis that they were Wikitravel admins. Someone from the community objected, and the stewards decided that a request should be filed with the community first, pretty much like a regular WMF project RFA. My understanding is that this never happened, for the reasons they outlined above.--Ymblanter (talk) 22:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ahhh! Now it does make more sense (at least from a wiki PoV). Just a clarification. While to de-admin is necessary a steward, to became and admin it's enough another admin and a community discussion/vote. It's easy to understand that if the problems between the two parties has arisen before the vote, what could have been the result. On the other hand, it would sound stranger if the discussion has taken place earlier. Maybe some log would help to understand the facts. --Andyrom75 (talk) 06:51, 14 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have a question of curiosity. Does this new voy:es look like a growing wiki and active community? Will it continue to develop in its own way, or simply die as soon as Spanish-speaking wikipedians are bored of their toy? I think that both dead (like ro:) and rogue (like es:) language versions of Wikivoyage are a bad thing for the project in general, because they make negative impression on newcomers and undermine the very idea of a travel wiki. --Atsirlin (talk) 09:26, 14 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

ro

I don't know much about Roumanian voy, but I just want to highlight one thing that I've noticed few days during a statistical analysis that I was performing. According to this link currently there's no admin in ro:voy, so I'm a little bit concern about its grow. I don't know who suggest the upgrade from incubator to the current status, but in my opinion at least one of the promoters shoud be upgraded to admin. And according to this one, the most active users are SteveRBot & CarsracBot :-D that neither have the bot flag. Honestly I've never seen a situation like this :-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:25, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

From the recent changes log it looks indeed like the activity is not fantastic.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:45, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

uk

We are the youngest wikivoyage site, after the Greek one, (we moved from the Incubator 3-4 months ago) and it gives us advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

we have created good help and policies (it really helps us when we answer to newbies questions)
we really use standards and templates in the articles
we can steal good ideas and implementations from others wikivoyages

Disadvantages: only few active contributors are working on the project

Anyway we have implemented and we are actively using:

Dynamic maps with POI
Citybar
Listing template
Banners and Geo

In my personal opinion our long term goals should include:

common rules (best practices) for all Wikivoyage sites, we have to implement and support it on every site, so we will be able to use the same templates, bots etc.
wikidata active using for our data - bars, blocks, listings etc.

--Voll (talk) 21:03, 11 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I should say that the quick development of Ukranian Wikivoyage is absolutely amazing, and I am quite positive about the future of this project. From the ru: perspective, we are very happy to see people contributing in both languages and keeping close connections to other language versions of Wikivoyage. --Atsirlin (talk) 09:33, 14 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

nl

A new main page is implemented, as users wanted to have a big clickable map of the world on the front page. The new main page is styled after the French one, and doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

One particular active user has restyled the "Destinations" page, which I think looks great. For the rest it's a small community and moves at a slow pace. With only two star articles, there's a lot of work left. But at least it's clean and maintained. :) Globe-trotter (talk) 21:28, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The previous fr:voy homepage was my first choice for the new it:voy homepage because of the low (near zero :-)) maintainance effort needed, but after 1 month of lounge discussion we have decided to fuse the previous it:voy homepage with the current one on en:voy. I think that we land to a good compromise :-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 13:06, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

pl

It was a really promising start in February 2013 of the Polish Wikivoyage (Wikipodróże) when a flux of energetic Polish Wikipedia users joined in after the fresh project had been advertised by a sitenotice. However since then sadly the userbase has been steadily diminishing and now there are only serveral dedicated users with odd one-time newcomers.

Nevertheless, on a optimistic note - looking back very much has been done and this is a completly a new-look and re-vamped project comparing to the WT times.

new Main Page
bot runs for several tasks (PL Wikipedia links, Commons links, attribution etc)
articles' templates and their how-tos (partially)
fixing themes and itineraries
a short but intensive drive to copyedit and make neccesary writeups of a handful of articles to near-featured level voy:pl:Singapur or voy:pl:Poznań for example

A list of unresolved technical and content problems:

a large number of broken images (from the WT period)
bot tasks and new technical tasks are lagging behind (import of Wikipedia tempated that would be helpful)
review and expansion/amendments of existing content hasn't been systematically done yet
featured content process hasn't really started yet
some fundamental policies and help files remain still to be made
new standards for content
a large number of skeleton articles (to be deleted ?)
concerns about verifiability and blantant advertising has been voiced by several users

Systematic discussion about new initiatives and creating new efforts to enlarge our userbase ought to be taken up in the nearest future.

Things we might like to implement from other Wikivoyage versions in future (but it hasn't been discussed in the community yet):

new design of Main Page
listing templates
banners

Kpjas (talk) 08:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We have discussed above about the "skeleton articles". IMO if they are "leafs" of the "article trees" I would go for the deletion, but if they are in the middle of a breadcrumb, I would go for an enrichment in order to keep them. I think this is something that you should discuss internally taking into account the available workforce.

Regarding the listing template, banner implementation and/or custom and well specified bot activities feel free to ask, I'll be glad to help you. --Andyrom75 (talk) 12:27, 15 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

fr

The french version of wikivoyage has a few steady contributors. The mains developments are:

The new homepage which is inspired by the German presentation but because of the small community and the lack of destination available (we reached 3000 this mouth), the page is much more simple and don't need a lot of maintenance.
We implemented the evaluation of the article on 5 levels. They are still no star article.
A decision process is now accepted by the community (minimum 4 votes and 75% of Yes for approval on 15 days) This is used for star article nomination and sysop nomination.
A big work began on the help.
Géographical categories are now used through the template "dans" ("IsPartOf"). Those categories are hidden but display a non printable bottom banner on which you can read: "Complete list of the other destination of the region:XYZ"
We try to follow the development of the dynamic cartography from the english version.
Listing template are used but no bot made the modification of the old tags. (if somebody can help us, we'll be gratefull)
Banners are used but still with a double name of the article (problem with the geo template).

About the contents, the most important contributions are translation from english but also mainly on the Québec destination, we have original contributions. The fr.voy is maintained, new spam and vandalism are immediately deleled and old one progressively cleaned but not very fast. The broken link files are nearly all removed, stay a lot of description files without image that should be delete (is there a bot for that?). --Adehertogh (talk) 20:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

On en we actually deleted the empty file description pages manually. To convert the listings tags to template form, I recommend contacting Ryan, who operated our bot, and I think has run it on a couple other language versions too. I forget how we fixed the double naming over the banners, but we did fix that... --Peter ^Talk 20:49, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed double title both in it:voy and en:voy. In the following days I've informed fr:voy on how to solve it (my fr:voy account currently run with that patch and it works). Unfortunately they have another problem with geo template (disconnected from the double title) and to solve that issue it requires time, in fact above in my it:voy post I've mentined it and I've tried to search someone to help them on their issue. I've also suggest how each wikivoyage version should modify their own common.js and common.css to speed up troubleshooting. --Andyrom75 (talk) 00:54, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh easy enough for the geo template. The CSS for it in en.voy is in the vector.css instead of the common.css. I think the banner title fix will still be simpler with a config request, or every site will need the Javascript fix for the title. -- Torty3 (talk) 14:44, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

#geoCoord {
  position: absolute;
  right: 0px;
  top: -36px; // adjust according to the title fix
}

I followed your advise. I copied the css code for the geo template into the vector.css but I still don't have the expected result. I would be grateful if somebody can search for a solution. --Adehertogh (talk) 17:42, 22 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One other recent development: the w:Lac-Mégantic derailment of July 6, a tragedy in which an unattended 72-car runaway crude oil train derailed in the centre of a peaceful 6000-person francophone village on the Québec-Maine border 100km (60mi) east of Sherbrooke, killing forty-seven people and destroying much of the downtown. At one point, a third of the local population had been temporarily evacuated (all but 200 have now returned). The region had long depended heavily on tourism, forestry and natural resources; worldwide news coverage caused panicked travellers to cancel trips to destinations nowhere near the disaster, including a pair of provincial parks up to 50km (30 miles) away. Any printed guide would be hard-pressed to quickly update a listing to reflect what's still open and what's gone. Not Wikivoyage. We somehow went from having nothing on this destination to a one-line blurb "The town is currently closed off to traffic, following the derailment, which torched a good part of the center of town, including the library and several cafes." on July 9 (on en: only, posted during the evacuation) to a hastily-translated first attempt at determining what was open on July 14. An attempt to contact a local CVB in the affected area yielded a series of corrections to voy:fr:Lac-Mégantic on July 19th and the updated info has now been copied from fr: back to en:. Merci Lac-Mégantic, et courage! K7L (talk) 03:11, 21 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]