Wikivoyage/Summit/Archive/2013-10

October 2013

en

This month sees a healthy readership increase: +21% to 12.8 million [1]
A bit of spam is starting to appear.

Technical

Echo has been deployed; helpful and zero problems.
Users can now choose to disable the listing editor and maps in their preferences (Preferences > Gadgets > General), where they are set to <On> by default.
In-article embedded maps can now be seen in HTTPS with the latest browsers (like Firefox 23). Other language Wikivoyages are invited to consider switching to the HTTPS PoiMap2 server. Tiles are still sent unencrypted, and the local language (eg: Hebrew in Israel maps) is shown rather than English; both problems should be fixed when Wikimedia gets its own OpenStreetMap server, which may take a long time.
A lot of maps don't have SVG sources, making them very difficult to modify.
There are many images whose file names conflicted during the transition from WT, leading to erroneous images remaining. A script should be written to find them, but no one has stepped in so far.
Discussion is proceeding about hiding the page titles in the main namespace

Content

20% of our articles now have a custom banner. Other language Wikivoyages might want to reuse our banners for their equivalent articles, an automated script could be written to help with this. Banner filenames could even be shared via WikiData?
Discussion about creating a Reader's portal, MyVoyage.
Should we reflect the US Government shutdown? Yes, but not much.
Heated debate sparked by temporary blocks and a permaban has led to a productive discussion on "How to handle unwanted edits".
Proof-of-concept article for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics

-- Nicolas1981 (talk) 16:42, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: if you want to use the banners from Wikidata, make these changes to your language Wikivoyage's banner: voy:en:Template:Pagebanner --Rs chen 7754 09:30, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Social Media

Both Facebook and Twitter accounts have seen a rise in popularity over the last month.

Facebook likes have now risen to 236, whilst efforts have been made to merge the official page with FB's auto-generated outlet.

Twitter followers now stand at 243, thanks in part to increased co-operation between the account and the others of the WMF.

Once again, any ideas for tweets would be most welcome! --Nick ^talk 10:42, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nick, is it possible to add in the post the links to all the languages? Maybe with just the clickable language code (i.e. en, de, fr, it...)? --Andyrom75 (talk) 19:57, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I'm afraid it isn't really as Twitter automatically counts html links as 20 characters, regardless of length; were we to link every language version, our posts would be made up only of links! If however, you'd like a specific tweet in a specific language (I'm assuming Italian), I'd be more than happy to post it for you. The only other option is to do what the German and Spanish sites have done and set up separate accounts, which we'd be happy to plug on our feed as well. :) --Nick ^talk 21:00, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nicholas! Creating an Italian T/FB account is out of my possibility because of lack of time.

About T accoung what do think about adding two links instead of one when the subject is place of a country related to a language spoken in one of our international language? For example on a twit about Warsaw you could link also pl:voy. Is it feasible? --Andyrom75 (talk) 22:52, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That might work yes, although once again, it does mean that any accompanying message would have to be rather short.I'm also happy to send single language tweets if you've got any in mind as well. If you don't have time, it may be worth talking to the WMF social media team - I think they administer quite a few Twitter accounts and have tweeted occasionally on the @Wikivoyage account - could they manage an Italian variant? --Nick ^talk 22:29, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If they could, it would be great. As you said, I don't have enough time to follow it, and I don't think that any other current user can. If you know the right people, I would ask you to to bring this request to their attention. Thanks, --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:04, 17 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

it

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

Redesign of the Quickfooter code in order to make it more flexible, that means:
1. Applicable also to parks, archeological sites, lakes, etc... not anymore only to continents, countries, regions, cities and districts.
2. Applicable to articles that involve more than 1 region/country/continent/etc...
3. Integrate all the needed info (the previous release needed extra IsInCat templates in certain cases)
4. More user friendly. This version is definitely easier to be used
5. Allow the personalization of the embedded Interprogetto template.
- On the other hand, the use of this template it's not anymore in just one line... but all the other benefits have pushed for this change.
- The new Quickfooter has been already implemented in all the articles that used this template but on the city articles because of some work in progress.
Wikinews-Wikivoyage integration
1. Each voy article has a link to the relevant n category when exists (managed through JS)
2. Each n category ha a link to the relevant voy article (added with a bot)
3. Creation of a Latest news page to add automatically travel news inside the site. ...the content is still a WIP, but the mechanism should work already.
"Single & easy" wikidata information have been integrate into the various Quickbar. Multiple information (list) and complex information (that need formatting), still need to be integrated.
Replacement of all the "broken image link" with existing one, so this category has been reduced to zero ... well honestly to 1, but it seems to be a false positive because the image in that page exists. I'll be glad if anyone can explain me why it does still appear as a not existing image.
- I simply purged the cache on that page and it seems to have disappeared from the maintenance category. Texugo (talk) 18:42, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  - I've done it almost 10 times, but I'm glad to see that you succeeded! It seems a slot-machines system :-D Thanks. --Andyrom75 (talk) 22:12, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Implementation of the QuickbarArch to all the archeological site articles.
Creation of the QuickbarMount related to mountains and implementation on almost all the relevant articles.
wt credit tag link has been eliminated from all the smaller articles. Now only the bigger articles have it.
Local pictures: have been reduced to zero! Now it:voy is based only on commons: free pictures.

What's going on

District renaming today ~40 district articles need a renaming activity to complete this cleaning task.
Elimination of the wt credit tag link from the bigger articles. Legals seems to not want to give us a support, so I'm afraid that I'll give up this point soon.
Reclassification of the existing articles related to island that in the past have been described through QuickbarCity instead of QuickbarRegion. So most of the parameters are not applicable and in any case it's a wrong classification.
Importing of the best it:wt article currently missing on it:voy applying the credit approach expressed previously.

What's next

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.
Policy and template manual implementation: slow progress on this point.
Implement Dependences Quickbar to better describe the toponym in the article. ...hopefully this should be the last one to describe all the articles.
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

In Wikimania I've contacted also the VisualEditor team in order to implement, not the full editor, but just the listing popup editor. It's technically feasible and should be enough easy to maintain once implemented. Current Listing Editor it's fine and it's working pretty well, but maybe to have a standard tool would be a better solution also (but not only) because it should have a higher support by the greater-wiki community.
POI interactive map no progress on this point. Currently it's not a priority, although it's something that for sure will be implemented.
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.

fr

Technical

This month on french wikivoyage has not much a lot of new technical implementation.

We solved serveral bug in the listing editor, dubble title with banners.
New quickbars for itineraries, city districts.
The map part of the quickbars developped originaly in every quickbar template is now a template element of the quickbar (Modèle:Info carte). The template allows to use automaticaly the wikidata coordinates with a default zoom of 12 for the city quickbar. For other quickbars zoom must be specified because regions have too differents size.

Content

60% of the articles have a quickbar witch includes POI map on the area.
50% of the banners has a specific banner image. The idea of a bot or a wikidata link (better) for the banner image is welcome.
A lot of cleaning works have been done this last month to reduce the list of the special:Uncategorized pages.
Skeleton articles in french are not deleted but should be improved beginíng by the Shortest pages for that we use mainly contents of wikipedia. We are using the same system as in italian to credits the autors.
We continue to delete the files documentation without associated file. - on this subject I have a question: On special:Statistics we have 1959 files, on Special:File list we have less than 30 files. Where are the around 1900 files left? 'cause when deleting the documentations files we still have the same 1959 files in the statistics. -
A few days ago the first star nomination process has begin with the article Gaspésie.

--Adehertogh (talk) 09:38, 10 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Two quick questions/notes (perhaps people from other language versions could reply as well):

We have same problem with non-existing files, which are counted by the statistics at voy:ru. Do other projects see it as well? If yes, we should definitely file a bugzilla request (or do we already have one?)

Who is in charge for transferring banners to Wikidata? There are several tricky issues related to different implementations and different policies in different language versions. We should probably discuss this before any massive actions are done.

--Alexander (talk) 10:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

About Wikidata banners I would say "Go nuts, upload them all already!"... I actually started uploading. Could you please point out what are the differences in policy exactly? Thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 02:03, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

First, we may have different banners in different language versions. It is sometimes hard to decide which one is better, and of course each version wants to keep its own banner. Second, several languages (Russian included) are using generic banners that won't be accepted by others. --Alexander (talk) 05:21, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Generic banners should not be uploaded. If a language really wants a different banner, they can easily override it. I just started writing a banner upload bot. Nicolas1981 (talk) 09:30, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good to know, french banner is ready for wikidata now.--Adehertogh (talk) 13:12, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We shouldn't have to fight over which banner goes on Wikidata because it is possible to put more than one. (See wikidata:Q3992 for an example.) However, we need someone to create a lua module to replace the #property call for any templates which are automatically using the wikidata property — #property returns both file names smashed together, so we need a way to return just the first image listed under the property. Does anyone know how to do that? Texugo (talk) 22:53, 12 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible, using code similar to w:en:Module:Infobox road/map. But I personally think we should try and keep the images consistent. --Rs chen 7754 00:11, 13 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the advantage in forcing all language versions to use the same image or limiting WD to listing only one? Texugo (talk) 11:11, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I don't really see why several banners can be specified. How to specify one in particular? Overwriting locally sounds easier. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just as I was about to run my banner bot, I noticed that KLBot2 has already uploaded them all, taking care to not upload generic banners. So now every language can benefit from all banners by using this template. Nicolas1981 (talk) 08:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the pictures in fact I was wondering why fr:voy had so much local images: now I have the answer :-)

I think that this is another bug of the wikistats (I've already highlighted one on the meta:voy page). According to my personal statistics, the most affected by that bug are pt:voy that show ~600 not existing articles and fr:voy that does NOT show ~170 existing articles. You should open a new bug for the image but be prepared to wait a lot.... --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:50, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've just noticed that sv:voy has only 3 pictures instead of the mentioned 462! :-) So it's a spread bug. To speed up the bug resolution you should try to find which is the cause. So the developer can just fix the code instead of troubleshooting the problem. For example, regarding the wrong articles number, I've found that the import procedure has a bug that increase that number by the revisions number instead of 1. --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:47, 12 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

About the not shown existing articles, I also noticed. It seems to be the article without any category or IsIn template. This number is reducing by cleaning and adding the usual templates but it stays difficult to find them. --Adehertogh (talk) 06:37, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Adehertogh, I'm not sure that stats on fr:voy:Spécial:Statistiques work that way. They should count as an article all the pages present on the main NS regardless of the content. For example look at this Shiraz is counted as an article but this mere copy & paste (from fr:w I suppose) and doesn't have any kind of wikitext. This means that this disconnection should due to a count bug.

However, for your convenience I've made an extraction of all the articles that doesn't contain any wikilink, in this way you should check them easily. You find there empty articles like fr:voy:Bangkok/Chinatown (to be enriched or deleted), or good article like fr:voy:Amalfi just to be slightly enriched, or messy article like the previous Shiraz that should be deleted. Feel free to modify directly that page as you like to monitor your progress. ...at least that's how I work on it:voy... --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank for the help, I'check them...--Adehertogh (talk) 08:23, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you have already opened an bug for the image count, please share it here with us, so we can track/support it. --Andyrom75 (talk) 06:42, 20 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

ru

After a quiet period in the beginning of September, we resumed our regular activity and in the last couple of weeks had some nice things accomplished. The listing editor and a better integration with Wikidata (links to Wikipedia and Commons read from the Wikidata elements) are still on our to-do list. I am wondering what external force we need to complete these tasks... but let's skip this worrying part for a while. Digr has just introduced quickbar-type templates for city districts and regions. They are rather similar to the quickbar templates used by other language versions (coat-of-the-arms, locator map, etc.) but feature our own greenish-colored design that I personally like a lot.

Another style feature may be interesting for the whole Wikivoyage. We introduced our own, brand-new templates for article status (outline, usable, guide) based on the new logo. Spend a minute and take a look. I am not saying that everyone should copy our design, but at least check our idea, perhaps it inspires some new development. The original article status templates are rather bleak and really need a replacement.

We have also done substantial work on the content:

New regional scheme for Ukraine, this time based on historical and cultural rather than administrative regions. Let's see whether Ukranian Wikivoyage decides to use a similar one. As far as I know, other language versions had so far very little interest in Ukraine, but if they ever decide to work on this country, a decent regional scheme is already available.
A bunch of fresh content for the Russian Far East (Vladivostok, Spassk, more cities are coming). English Wikivoyage had some nice articles as well, but unfortunately I don't know who can appreciate it now or at least work on the updates.
Smolensk is a sort of our "collaboration of the month", because Russian wiki-conference is scheduled to take place there in early November
Finally, we have started a big project on preparing and updating lists of cultural heritage monuments in Russia. You may know such lists from different branches of Wikipedia. They were typically prepared for the Wiki Loves Monuments competition. Unfortunately, Russian Wikipedia is far behind the crowd and never tried to make systematic lists of Russian monuments, so we decided to start our own project on this topic. We plan to invite and, hopefully, accommodate in Wikivoyage those people who work on studying and protecting cultural heritage monuments in Russia. We also hope to dig a lot of new information out of such lists. The lists become really indispensable for smaller cities and villages, where none of the versions of Wikipedia tell you much about the place and its attractions.
Our pending issue is the writing of travel guides for Sochi as a site of the imminent Winter Olympics 2014. As far as I know, we have zero activity on this topic across all language versions of Wikivoyage, but perhaps it makes sense to start something, as the games will start quite soon.

--Alexander (talk) 00:02, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]