Talk:Inawashiro Voyage Tips and guide

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Strongly Oppose I think this discussion has occurred before, but the state of the article is not a reason to merge. Merging should be done because the actual destination has almost nothing to offer. Outline articles are still valid articles within the hierarchy; they indicate the state of the article. They don't necessarily say anything about the destination. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 03:52, 15 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Inawashiro is only an hour from Aizuwakamatsu by JR East, so it is an easy trip from a city with hotels and restaurants and other services for travellers. It is more convenient for readers to put this information in one place, than to have a separate article for one museum.

WV:WIAA advises:

"The most common and quickest assessment of whether a type of place merits an article is "Can You Sleep There?" .... Sleeping isn't all that travellers do, though, and there should be some content to fill out our other standard article sections. If there really is no place to find food, nothing to do, and nothing to see at a location, it's likely that the article won't meet the criteria established in this policy. Nonetheless, Wikivoyagers exercise wide discretion to group handfuls of smaller villages into one larger article or split huge cities into individual districts of manageable size, wherever this best suits the destination."

Ground Zero (talk) 06:09, 15 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

It's not an article for a museum. It's an OUTLINE article for a city that has a museum listing and mentions a local souvenir. I don't see where in WIAA that it says outline articles are invalid. I think on the contrary, it's been well-established that outline articles ARE valid and important parts of the hierarchy. I also don't see where it says if it's not on Wikivoyage that it doesn't exist. A quick search shows that Inawashiro has hotels, restaurants, and skiing. They aren't in the article, but they exist. That's true for nearly every article. Surely you understand that the Wikivoyage project is incomplete and that there are places that exist in the world that are not yet here. Like I said, lack of article content is not a reason to redirect; lack of real-world places in the city is what redirects are for. You are misinterpreting WIAA. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:02, 15 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

It is more useful for the reader to have the information in one place until we can provide the other information. For now, the only information the article provides is for one museum. Let's make that available in an article where we provide information on other services, until we are ready to provide information on Inawashiro, like how to get there, and where to stay. "Wikivoyagers exercise wide discretion to group handfuls of smaller villages into one larger article." Ground Zero (talk) 12:16, 15 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Redirecting to Aizuwakamatsu doesn't make sense and kills the destination. No one is going to add Inawashiro's hotels to the wrong city nor should they, but they might add it here. The city has restaurants and hotels and onsen and ski resorts. It's clearly able to hold its own article. There is no policy-driven or traveler-driven reason to redirect a valid article just because it's incomplete. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:31, 15 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

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1. Redirecting an article doesn't kill the destination. Just last week I created an article for Grise Fiord, which had been redirected to Queen Charlotte Islands.
2. If someone is going Inawashiro's hotels and restaurants, they should do so.
3. I have explained the policy-driven and until traveller-driven reasons to redirect, although I understand that you and I disagree on them.

Putting the information on the museum in an article for a nearby city where we have services already listed puts the traveller first. Creating a standalone article that lists a single site puts Wikivoyage's desired future growth ahead of the traveller. Do you have a link the previous discussion on this issue? I do not think it was resolved in favour of standalone articles.

I also note that the museum is a fairly obscure one, that will be of interest mostly to a specialist audience. It's about a bacteriologist who lived from 1876 to 1928 and has exhibits on bacteriology.

I will post this in Request for Comments to get other opinions. Ground Zero (talk) 12:11, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Both articles are in a sorry state, so it is difficult for me to get a firm opinion. However, the sights now in Aizuwakamatsu are within 3 km, except one 7 km away. Adding sights and hotels within 20 km would change the article's character, and the one museum would anyway be hidden among those already present. It is better to have this town as a Go next, mentioning the museum and the lake (which I added from the town's region one-liner).

It seems that getting this article up to usable would require less effort from somebody knowing the area or even knowing Japanese than this discussion (ChubbyWimbus; couldn't you do it?) – but I see little harm in keeping it even at its current state.

Generally I think anybody who creates an article should aim at usable or at least strong outline status from the beginning, or as soon as they have the time, but outlines do little harm as long as weak outlines don't dominate region articles.

–LPfi (talk) 12:19, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Syphilis, yellow fever and bacteriology don't seem obscure to me, although I understand that not everybody is interested, and not too many would take a one-hour train ride to see the museum. However, a beach resort may feel as a nice retreat, better handled in a separate article than with hotels, restaurants, sees and dos spread out in Aizuwakamatsu. A Nearby could work with the current information, but as this isn't a tiny village, it is better to have everything in a city article. –LPfi (talk) 12:28, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Support a merge. Outline articles may be valid articles, but shit outlines with just one thing to see are antithetical to WV:TTCF, unless Someone Else (talk · contribs) adds more useful content. //shb (t | c | m) 12:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

(edit conflict) I've said this before, but our redirects, particularly of one place to a completely different place, are almost never helpful; I've always found them to be annoying. We don't handle redirects well, because of rationale like what you list above, so we should only use them if we have knowledge about the destination. Keeping the article doesn't "put the growth of the site ahead of the traveler", it shows the traveler EXACTLY what we have about that destination. Merging it erases their intended destination (Inawashiro) by directing them to a place that is not where they want to go and asks them to read a long article to figure out what, if anything, is relevant. It's a huge waste of time and can only serve to anger and frustrate the traveler.

You keep referring to the museum, but it's not a museum article. Inawashiro is not a museum, so you shouldn't treat it as such. "More eyes go to X, therefore we should merge A-W into X" is poor rationale. WV has no invested interest in this museum getting more notice. We don't need Inawashiro or its museum to get more eyes on it. We should want the eyes with specific interest in Inawashiro to be able to find the Inawashiro article, and leaving the article alone serves that purpose best.

If a user proposes a merge, they should either know that the destination cannot hold its own article either through research or experience OR ask others if it can hold its own article. If it can, it should not be merged. Instead, content should be added or leave it alone. Merging for site aesthetics is not a valid reason to merge. You've expressed before that you don't like outline articles or articles that don't have an undefined "enough" content, and this seems like more of that, but outline articles are valid articles. This is an outline article for a town that meets all requirements for WIAA. Merging shouldn't be done for a destination that we already know can hold its own article. Merging should be done for articles of destinations that we know or at least think cannot hold their own articles. I guess I'll leave it at that if others are weighing in. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:38, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Redirects to articles where the redirected place isn't clearly mentioned are mostly very confusing. I think that would be the case also here, unless somebody is willing to provide enough context (and e.g. transport information) – which would make the article stand on its own.

That's one thing, but I don't think keeping outlines always is the right thing to do, even if the places would support articles. For somebody interested in that specific place, an outline may be useful, but somebody contemplating visiting a region should find useful articles rather than stubs and outlines.

I think a region article can work if a third of the cities redlink and some of the others are outlines, but clicking bluelinks, a majority of the targets should at least be strong usables. A region article linking five outlines would tell that we don't really cover that region. If the region has five star cities and a dozen of outlines, the reader will probably miss the stars. In that case creating the outlines was a disservice. I'd hate to delete them if they have some content, but actually that might be the best solution.

–LPfi (talk) 14:07, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Using rationale like "It's a shit outline" as justification for merging with zero consideration of the destination doesn't make sense to me and would cause more problems than it would solve if adopted as a valid reason to merge articles. Most outlines are "shit" by definition, so you could merge nearly all of them and make WV unusable. I don't disagree that a bunch of outlines is not ideal, but I don't think that justifies merging cities over article content instead of thinking about the destination itself.

Policing outlines overall doesn't seem like something we should be doing. Sure, if a single editor is creating only outlines in a region (or sitewide), it makes sense to ask them to stop creating new articles and to add content to the articles they've already created. I don't look at the creators of articles much, but as far as I know, outlines are mostly created by different users over time. I know they bother some people a lot, and maybe in certain regions they should be looked at if it's truly unwieldy, but I don't think outlines should be viewed as problems.

Regarding Inawashiro specifically, I didn't remember that I created this article on my first reply, but I did create it in order to avoid Public baths in Japan failing its nomination as a Featured Travel Topic. As briefly stated in the article, Nakanosawa Onsen is one of Tohoku's kokeshi onsen. I added the kokeshi onsen to the article, because I think a public-bath-specific souvenir is interesting and worthy of addition, but it meant adding the destinations, of which there were redlinks for Kuroishi, Okura, Inawashiro, and Zao (Miyagi). Because of this, the article was created with the kokeshi in mind, so the intent was actually to add places to buy them in the "Buy" section for those who clicked from the onsen article. Unfortunately, in spite of the fame and advertising of the kokeshi themselves (they have their own official website), where to buy them is not well-advertised, so it was trickier than I thought to find places where specific shops were named and then I forgot about it (I did find a likely one-of-a-kind kokeshi vending machine just now as I revisited my search that I can add, although I'd still like some shops). Ironically, the museum that has gotten so much discussion was only added as a content placeholder while I looked for the kokeshi stores that were the purpose of the article creation.

With most outlines, we will never get the rationale for their creation, but I don't think it makes sense to assume that everything the city has to offer was added when the article was created and that if it wasn't added, we should just assume nothing else exists and redirect it. Inawashiro was created to eliminate a nomination issue for a different article. Other destinations are not listed because they were not my focus, not because they don't exist (same for hotels, restaurants, etc). It could be argued that I shouldn't have created it, but as I said, the assumption that outlines are a reflection of places and not just our own current content status is bad reasoning. Merges and redirects should not be made on such faulty assumptions. We should always think about destinations before wantonly redirecting them to other articles. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 04:20, 20 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I have created articles for similar reasons (e.g. Kvikkjokk, Ritsem and Murjek because they are mentioned for transport and provisions in other articles]]. I think your rationale for starting the article is valid, and if you don't know much else about the place, so be it. As I said above, I don't find an individual near-empty outline too problematic, although I think one should try to add easily available info in the lead or Understand, Get in etc., getting the article close to usable.

For the policing bit, I think people getting carried away with creating stubs or outlines is a recurring problem that needs to be dealt with. You are right that communication is the best cure, but some of these people just disappear or continue with little communication. In the case where a region gets a lot of redlinks, stubs or outlines and no one wants to put in the effort needed to get those up to near usable, I think it may be better to merge or delete, with some thought put into how to handle the situation.

But yes, this is a community project, and creating outlines when those are useful for some reason and one doesn't have the time or knowledge to do better is completely acceptable. Somebody may add info or nobody might in the foreseeable future, but there is little one can do about that – other than to try to include enough to make others want to contribute and make it easy, such as trying to tell something about why a place is interesting, and to tell where it is.

–LPfi (talk) 09:15, 20 March 2025 (UTC)Reply