Wikivoyage/Summit/Archive/2014

January 2014

de

• New idea raised: Showing different pictures depending on whether it is summer or winter.

en

• The Oxford Internet Institute has produced this graphic which shows the spread of articles by language version. Very useful to see what countries need most of the translation effort. Wikivoyage would certainly benefit from more translations between languages. WikiData can help with the POIs details.
• Experiment with bot translation: This article can be translated automatically from German. Smaller wikivoyages could perform similar translations.
• Birthday celebrations.
• What should be shared via Wikidata?

• list of images of each section?
• first image?
• climate graph?

• A difficult technical problem with embedded dynamic maps has forced a roll-down, now using links to full-screen dynamic maps (non-embedded dynamic maps work fine).
• Talks about an indicator next to each interwiki link, showing whether this article is featured/starred/etc in that particular language.

fr

• Birthday celebrations.
• 6 major articles imported from English automatically with https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/transvoyage
• New listings for destination (sections: Villes, Autres destinations or Aux environs) and Diplomatic representation (with flag). We still have some problem with the dynamic maps and listing editor. Hope it 'll be soon improved.

ru

Are we going to switch to the brief bulletpoint format?

Russian Wikivoyage strives to improve its articles about Sochi for the imminent Winter Olympic Games. Apparently, in 2 weeks we won't be able to provide the best ever travel guide to Sochi, but at least we can point out some interesting and typically overlooked aspects of this city, especially its cultural heritage and diverse architecture. Articles in other languages are even less developed, so if you feel like making translations, don't hesitate to start now.

We also had an instructive discussion about sub-regions of Crimea.

And last but not least, the template in Russian Wikipedia is now adding links to Wikivoyage pages automatically through Wikidata. This might be of interest to other languages, because we no longer have to add links manually.

--Alexander (talk) 09:31, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Looks like we are going to have major sights in Sochi in order before the Olympics (voy:ru:Сочи and references therein), so that if someone wants to translate, now it is probably a good time. We have completed voy:ru:Хостинский район, voy:ru:Хоста and voy:ru:Мацеста, and voy:ru:Адлер and voy:ru:Красная Поляна are in preparation. Whatever is rated better than stub is ready for translation.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:34, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

el

This wiki is almost inactive. I still support the project but I'm lonely. Lately I tried to import listings templates and dynamic maps with poor results as you can see here. I'm wondering if any of you are willing to help me out. Any further advice about this post? What's wrong and how do I fix this? --Gobbler (talk) 18:03, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

You should copy Joachim's css file and paste into your voy:el:Mediawiki:Common.css. Unfortunately, we can't do it for you, because we don't have admin rights on el: --Alexander (talk) 19:21, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

If you need anything that requires admin privileges, you can contact me or other global sysops. --Rschen7754 20:17, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, my heart wants to adopt this orphan as I did longtime ago with Italian Wikivoyage. Just give me a couple of days before applying for adminship. I'm an expert editor, a mess as sysop so I have to consult first with my friends in German Wikivoyage. I'll keep you informed of voy/el issues. See you on February --Gobbler (talk) 20:56, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

February 2014

it

Sorry for the long absence from this page, but I've been busy outside voy for several reason, so I've limited my time on it:voy only.

That said, let me give an update on the themes discussed on the Italian report of the previous summit plus some relevant news.

What has been done

1. Finally after a big effort we have completely eliminated, not only from the aritcle titles, but also from the "red link" all the article names that weren't in a wiki-format, i.e. they were father-article/article-name instead of directly article-name like each wiki. This anomaly was born on WT for each article and partially rectified on regions/cities but unreasonably keept for districts.
2. Dynamic map has been successfully implemented, although we are working to customize the mechanism according to the it:voy standards.
3. Lombardia (it's an Italian region for those who doesn't know) has been used as a pilot, to define & design the new touristic territories in order to better describe it. Once finished the basic assesment of all the related articles, we'll proceed with the same approach on the other Italian regions.
4. Completed the reclassification of the existing articles related to island that in the past have been wrongly described through QuickbarCity instead of QuickbarRegion.
5. Celebrate the 1st voy birthday as most of other linguistic version has done. Honestly we have celebrated the whole "birthweek" :-) because a big crowd has arrived to greet us (80% editors-20% vandals .... but at the end they come ;-)) During this period we have achived some relevant goals that I would share with you:
   1. Active users have been tripled ... although I would expect a decrease on Feb/Mar
   2. I've done my best to retain as much users as possible. Let's see the result... A remind for all, me included: a "yes but" instead of a "no" is a much more better approach with people...
   3. Increase of monthly page view by +21% ...I expect here as well a decrease on Feb (cross fingers :-))
   4. The country that access more to Wikivoyage is Italy with ~16%
   5. The ranking of it:voy in Italy is 3.500/3.400 (as a comparison the ranking of the whole voy in the world is 22.000/23.000)

I tend to think that the painfull decision to point to quality (deleting hundreds and hundres of empty articles/categories) and to uniform (where it makes sense) to the others wiki has been the right choice.

What's going on

1. Keep on importing of the best it:wt article currently missing on it:voy applying the credit approach expressed previously. This activity proceed with a slow rhythm, but each imported article increase significantly the overall quality. Clearly a well done job it's very far from being a copy and paste...
2. Less than 250 articles miss the Quickfooter. This activity must be completed in order to not give any bad example to any editor.
3. Tuning of the Lombard articles with particular reference of the Quickfooter (due to the new areas) and increasing their quality (it:voy is "against" empty articles).

What's next

1. Cleaning is still the top priority because there's a lot of work that must be done in order to harmonized the content of the various articles.
2. Policy and template manual implementation: slow progress on this point.
3. Implement Dependences Quickbar to better describe the toponym in the article. ...hopefully this should be the last one to describe all the articles.
4. Quality ranking system. Potentially it's one of the next upgrade that we would "resurrect" in it:voy. A system already exists, but it's obsolete and it has been wrongly used in the past; so we have to rethink it. In order to speed it up we'll use almost for sure one of the existing system in one of the other language version of voy. Some of those are very discreet and nice.

Vision

1. Plain listing conversion into template listing. Currently I'm classifying it as a vision because it's something too big for our current community effort to be started soon. It seems that the en:voy tool won't be used on it:voy so it would slow down further this point.

March 2014

de

Templates

I was busy with template programming. Besides improving the documentation of all templates we have rewritten some important templates in Lua. Some of them pick their icontent from Wikidata. These templates are new:

• Five templates provide different content depending on: Season(2 or five seasons per year ), month, or e specific period of time given by day and month. So we can provide e.g. automatically changing images (summer and winter photos in the infobox) or changing prices in high and low season or special travel alerts one month before big events (Wacken festival, CSD ) or whatever...
• We have rewritten all infobox (quickbar) templates. Some can fetch the information directly from Wikidata. You can see an example on the Malaysian province of Kedah. Location map and flag comes from Wikidata as well. Information from Wikidata are marked with a small sign. Contributors can use the old templates. They work as they always did. If you use a template parameter without a value, the template will look at Wikidata and fetch the information form there. If you use the value in the template, the local information always win. If you dont use the parameter, nothing happens. So u can start with the empty quickbar template, just prewritten with parameters, when you start an article and you will see, what Wikidata provides already. -- DerFussi 13:39, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Stefan, could you give us an example? Kedah seems to be using a standard, old-fashioned template. In particular, I am wondering if you have a Lua module that will properly read the number for population from Wikidata. --Alexander (talk) 00:12, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

How do you think the template ist standard and old-fashioned? Move your mouse over the entries and you will see what information comes from WD. The population is quite new. Numbers haven't been available form the beginning on Wikidata. Going to add it. The province infobox uses Lua-templates. Check all the quickbar templates used in the Malaysian province template. The template quickbar item fetches its content from Wikidata, if no value is porovided. -- DerFussi 07:31, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

The number of population can be fetched from WD. See Sabah. -- DerFussi 11:40, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! One major difficulty is that many language versions have been using the simple {{#property: syntax to retrieve information from Wikidata. You basically started from scratch and prepared a huge Lua module. Its integration into other wikis may not be straight-forward, but we have to do it... --Alexander (talk) 10:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

The simple {{#property: syntax is not very useful. There is no chance to format the fetched data (Thousand periods, wiki markup, image markup...). And on the other hand you can overwrite the WD-info. The local article always wins. Information is taken from WD only if there is a parameter used in a template but left empty. |capital= takes the name of the capital from WD, |capital=Berlin outputs just "Berlin" and ingnores Wikidata. The submodul Modul:Quickbar/Wikidata shows what quickbar template parameter is connected to what propery and how it should be formatted. The modul can be adapted to other languages if needed. -- DerFussi 09:14, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Credit source

You could notice that every page imported from WT had recently got a new footer with credits to the authors from WT, and there is a red link to the history page, because some not very smart person forgot to check the content of this footer. The text is stored in MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits, you can change it at your discretion and correct or even remove the red link, because it is not very clear what legal requirements are. --Alexander (talk) 00:34, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Which language version are you talking about? And I don't think it's fair to call one of your fellow contributors "not very smart". LtPowers (talk) 16:08, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

I am talking about every language version, because this change was applied to all. This unknown fellow contributor is not very smart indeed because he/she tried to repair something that is not broken without even asking whether we want this or not. --Alexander (talk) 20:47, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

The footer used to be correct. Nobody has touched it. I think somebody at WMF technical stuff touched it. -- DerFussi 07:24, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

I haven't seen any problems. Maybe before we start tossing around wild accusations, we can calm down and discuss this rationally... starting with precise details about the problem, possibly including screenshots or at least links. LtPowers (talk) 17:44, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you just go to this page and check the footer, so that I don't spend more time on people who defend the destructive activity of incompetent technical staff. --Alexander (talk) 20:09, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

That problem appears to be unique to the Dutch Wikivoyage; English is not similarly afflicted. You should be able to fix it by editing voy:nl:MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits. LtPowers (talk) 21:59, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I noticed this issue on de some time ago. What do I need to change in voy:de:MediaWiki:Creditssource-credits? --Timmaexx (talk) 17:08, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you should edit this page. I am not sure how to fix the link to the article history, though. Try "[http://de.wikivoyage.org$5 Versionsgeschichte]", or remove this link completely, and feel free to modify the whole attribution message, because nobody seems to know how it should be phrased. --Alexander (talk) 19:33, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Please substitute [[$5|geschiedenispagina]] by [{{SERVER}}$5 geschiedenispagina]. --RolandUnger (talk) 16:56, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

April 2014

el

Hey everyone. I apologize for my long absence from wv Summit. I was travelling for one month and more. I noticed that el wv had no grown during my absence. Contents remain poor and no pages match our manual of style. In order to fix layout problems I previously tried to introduce voy:en:Wikivoyage:Article templates in the Greek version. At the same time I was working on dynamic maps with one of ours favourite experts, Joachim. I hope I get his help again, soon. I confirm my involvement to the project as I did long time ago (Please find a link here). The good news is that user Glorius 93 announced at lounge his intention to get administrator duties after his resignation one year ago. Shall I submit application for short terms administrator? Please let me know your ideas about. Greek wv is very weak. The lack of a teamwork is a substantial concern. Me and user Glorius 93 are the only ones doing all the work. Thanks in advance for your feedbacks on the "Cinderella" of Wikivoyage --Gobbler (talk) 21:13, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi! The lack of editors is a persistent problem for all language branches of Wikivoyage, and, let's be honest, nobody knows the solution. Some possible strategies are as follows: i) link all Wikivoyage articles from Greek Wikipedia; ii) contact regional Wikimedia chapter and see if they are interested in developing Greek Wikivoyage; iii) advertise Wikivoyage on traveler's forums and message boards; iv) contact local organizations, such as tourist information offices in your country, and propose cooperation. Of course, each of these routes requires a huge involvement from your side. Now, 1.5 years after the launch, it is bloody clear that Wikivoyage does not develop on its own simply because the content was moved from Wikitravel. Either you do something, constantly edit articles, tidy up content, and take care of technical innovations, or simply nothing happens. --Alexander (talk) 10:01, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your advices, Alexander. You're very receptive to opinions of other members of our community. I appreciate your availability. As you suggested, I start optimizing contents and I'll take care of technical innovation. --Gobbler (talk) 13:37, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi Gobbler. From the start we at the Hebrew Wikivoyage have had a very low participation. As a result, after understanding it is up to me to do most of the tiresome work relating to building the foundation of the website by myself, I have become over time the main user developing Heb Voy (Heb Voy was launched in March 2013 mostly thanks to my efforts).

In my opinion, the amount of work which needs to be done by the "founders" of any successful Wiki project tends to be technically challenging, consumes A LOT of time, and is not always rewarding (especially when it seems that no one else want to help). Basically, in order for thousands of Greek speaking editors to eventually discover the Greek Wikivoyage and help out, it is up to you "founders" (is it only you?) to create the first decent 1000 or 2000 articles, probably mostly by yourself, making sure that they would be in a decent shape and that as a result the random readers whom would discover them sooner or later would have a much better understanding of why Wikivoyage is necessary at all (I have found that many new users tend to not understand the essential difference between Wikipedia and Wikivoyage, and as a result some would tend to write articles with large segments copied from the Wikipedia or otherwise write different articles for each site/buisness in an encylopedic style, instead of articles about major tourist destination which cover all sites loctaed in them. Your task is to be the first to guide the masses of potential Greek editors how this should be done (by making good articles and by conversing politely with the curious new editors), and try to slowly and gradually gather a community of editors.

We at the Hebrew Wikivoyage have tried most of Alexander's suggestions mentioned above (1) I tried to link all Heb Wikivoyage articles (most of whom are in the quality status "outline" or "Usable article") from Heb Wikipedia, but I was reverted and got "shouted" on for doing so because "Heb Voy articles are not yet of decent quality to deserve a link back from Heb Wikipedia" (in other words, the Heb Wikipedia community wants me to spend A LOT OF TIME writing thousands of good articles in order to get the links back on Wikipedia - this is quite a lot to ask from one or two users) (2) I contacted the Hebrew chapter of Wikimedia and that didn't really help much. All they could offer is for us Wikivoyagers to volunteer giving lectures about the project (although this offer is very kind, this means in practice that they are not willing or capable of taking the responsibility of advertising the project/initiative in media and/or web). (3) Advertising the project on Hebrew speaking Travel forums did help bring a lot more readers to the website, although some of those people only criticized the current poor state, and no one stayed to help. (4) The fourth suggestion does sound like a good idea in theory, although I am not sure doing so would have a huge effect for the Wikivoyage editions with smaller amounts of native speakers world wide, as for example, in the case of Heb Voy most Hebrew speakers live only in Israel (and most Greek speakers live only in Greece), unlike speakers of the English language or Spanish (there are many countries around the world in which those languages are the main languages). I would end this by saying that after all the efforts I have made so far to promote Heb Voy and to get editors from various sources, the only few ones whom ended up joining the Heb Voy editor community are existing Wikipedians (maybe you should try recruiting potential editors from there?). I guess this stems mostly from the fact that most people in the world do not want to write/develop content without getting paid, and apparently even less people want to help take part in creating a wiki that might or might not end becoming successful. Neverthelss, I believe that eventually, after a good foundation of a wiki website exists, and after the articles of the wiki get hundreds of thousands page views each month, it is inevitable that sooner or later additional editors would join the efforts. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:41, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind advices. I read carefully everything. I share your points of views. As a first step I have to ask for temporary sysop rights to manage pages as there is no admin there. You know, we have very few pages but the article about your country was among the first to be created. See voy:el:Ισραήλ. Well there's very little information but I will expand the article soon. I'm going to manage my account in Hebrew wv right away in order to contact you again. You're a fine person. Regards --Gobbler (talk) 19:14, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

en

Just a quick one! This month on the English Wikivoyage:

• We looked closely at ways to compare and contrast articles in different languages for the same location.
• We continued to develop and tweak the design of our Main Page.
• We actually noticed a slight increase in the number of editors - the future's bright?

Apologies for our recent absence from the Summits!

Nick ^talk 00:18, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

May 2014

Several French Wikivoyage editors use TransVoyage to semi-automatically translate articles from English to French.

June 2014

First German-English article collaboration, on the Travemünde article.

de

The following message was created in the end of may 2014 for this report. Unfortunately I forgot to post it here:

Please excuse our absence of the Summit in the last months! Following we want to recompense our fail: After having found a mysterious category containing pages with blacklisted links, we learned that certain URLs, that might help readers of Wikivoyage, are on the global spamblocklist. For example bestwestern.com. There's no reason to keep those on the list. Instead of removing them from the global list, which would mean, that other sister-projects are spammed, we can write them down on our white-list.

In this moment, there is a bureaucrat-election running in our project. In this process we learned some incidents about the rights of bureaucrats we eventually want to change. We're thinking about promoting bureaucrats the right to remove admin-rights, too! So we don't need to make the detour to meta and the stewards. Additionally we have two new importers.

Since 20th of May, users with more than 200 contributions are promoted autopatrolled-rights. This will, hopefully, relieve admins in patrolling vandalism.

With regards to contents: We want to work more on the topic "accessibility".

Greetings from the German Wikivoyage Community, Tim

--Timmaexx (talk) 11:40, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

July 2014

Mainly to show we are alive.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:39, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

:-)))) --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:20, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Happy to hear that. It's summer time and we are going to explore the world. At least we guys from the northern hemisphere will have more time for the report during the upcoming cold season. -- DerFussi 08:03, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

We certainly have smth to say, but let us formally wait till Oct 1.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:38, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

September 2014

el

Since there is no administrator for Greek wv right now, I was thinking about applying for short terms administrator. I have mention about it on Greek traveller's pub, however there is no reply so far. Handrian (talk) 06:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

It may be possible to request at steward requests/Permissions#Administrator access with a link to your thread in the pub if you're unable to get an answer locally. K7L (talk) 11:23, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

November 2014

ru

• We were busy with building up lists of cultural heritage monuments (in conjunction with WLM), some are in a pretty good shape, but only a tiny fraction of them are currently ready.
• We discussed changing the design (removal of bullets before the listing template), so far inconclusive though several options were proposed.
• We also discussed whether in long lists of sights we should mark the most important ones. The general reaction was positive, but the discussion still needs to be closed.
• Recent usable/guide articles (we do not have star articles): Moscow/Kremlin, Inkerman, Vianden.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:34, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I think it is decided that bulletpoints should give way to POI markers because we don't need them simultaneously. --Alexander (talk) 11:30, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Right, but I thought we did not choose the design option. May be we should formally close the discussion.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:40, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

en

• Banners: Extensive lists of all our 16,957 missing banners (sorted by article size) have been created in which anybody can easily suggest which images to make banners from. Having many more people involved in the process of finding suitable free CC source photos for Wikivoyage banners (especially people whom don't have the skills or software to create banners themselves), that exist on either Flickr or Wikicommons, greatly helps speed up the process of creating 16,957 missing banners (many of the suggested photos would be processed sooner or later by the few expert users whom specialize in creating many banners very fast).
• Offline ZIM files are now available for all languages for November 2014: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikivoyage/

December 2014

ru

• We are discussing the possibility of introducing a new layout of sights/regions sections, expanding the text, highlighting, and giving a photo. The consensus so far is in favor of the change, but we are still discussing the details of the layout. See voy:ru:Эстония for an example.
• We now use stars to emphasize the most important sights. There can only be one star (or no stars), which are incorporated into template:listing, and a star can only be added to a sight which is accompanied by a comprehensive description.
• Recent usable/guide articles: Mtskheta, Gyor--Ymblanter (talk) 08:28, 1 December 2014 (UTC)