User talk:(WT-en) Bulliver Voyage Tips and guide

Contents

Hello Bulliver! Welcome to Wikivoyage. Please take a sec to look at our copyleft and policies and guidelines, but feel free to plunge forward and edit some pages. Scanning the Manual of style, especially the article templates, can give you a good idea of how we like articles formatted. If you need help, check out Project:Help, and if you need some info not on there, post a message in the travellers' pub.

Thank you for contributing to Penticton, great article and already Usable!!! -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 18:09, 24 February 2006 (EST)

Just a note to say you're doing an awesome job with those maps! Thanks! -- (WT-en) Ryan 13:45, 28 February 2006 (EST)

...and thank you. I must say it is actually quite fun and somewhat easy to create them. Still having problems getting the perfect curves down though. (WT-en) bulliver 22:53, 28 February 2006 (EST)

Man! I'm really digging your maps! I hope the styleguide has been helpful, and please let me know if you think we should adjust any of the colors or anything. Also if you need a copy of the Blue Highway font I can send it (the license allows redist). -- (WT-en) Mark 16:53, 1 March 2006 (EST)

Thanks. Yes, the styleguide was very helpful! As I mentioned elsewhere, I have never used Inkscape let alone drawn a map prior to reading the guide, so I would say it is very helpful. The colours are just fine. The only problem I seem to be having is omitting details from sections that are not under the scope of the map. With the Vancouver map I did, I really had to force myself not too add the street names on the little bit of Kitsilano in the lower left corner ;)

Do you use Inkscape for your maps? There are a couple issues I am having that are not addressed in the Inkscape tutorials and I wouldn't mind picking your brain about them...

As for the font, I am sure I can get it installed myself, I am just a lazy, lazy man! I'll see about it now, while I am thinking about it. Thanks again.

Ok, I take that back, the link from Project:How to draw a map does not provide a free download, and the link that Ravikiran posted in the talk page seems to be dead. Go ahead and fire the font to me at [[1]] -- (WT-en) bulliver 02:31, 2 March 2006 (EST)

The font was included in Knoppix. AFAICT the license allows us to do what we are doing here, but it's become hard to find the download since Ray has been trying to sell the fonts. It's still available on his site somewhere, but it's kindof hidden. It is however in the debian pool here: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/t/ttf-larabie/ttf-larabie_20011216.orig.tar.gz

If you have any Inkscape questions fire-away! I'm happy to help. I'm just glad that somebody has shown an interest in working on wikivoyage maps. -- (WT-en) Mark 04:29, 2 March 2006 (EST)

Ok, well I have answered most questions myself, but there is still one thing: The tutorial makes reference to a 'palette' for quick access to recently used colours. I can't seem to find it anywhere? A palette would be great but any way to lock down the stroke colour would be very helpful. When drawing roads or whatever the default is always black, and it is very annoying to manually change every single line to white, is there any way to lock down the default to white or any other colour? Thanks - (WT-en) bulliver 13:20, 11 March 2006 (EST)

You can double-click on the drawing tool to launch a configuration dialog which lets you set the current selection as the tool's default. Until they added this I would just copy and paste a line like the one I wanted. Clearly this is a lot faster. Also I think one of the tabs in the style dialog has a pallet, but I don't remember offhand where. -- (WT-en) Mark 13:53, 11 March 2006 (EST)

Nice! I got it now. Took me 5 minutes to do the street grid of my last map rather than 45. Thanks! (WT-en) bulliver 19:12, 12 March 2006 (EST)

You have done a great job with Penticton. Thank you for you efforts and work. As you can see there are others of us wanting help to get the article to Star status, but it would not have happened without your start and all the efforts you put into it. Your article may be the fastest ever to make it to Star Status. Thanks! -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 14:09, 28 February 2006 (EST)

Thanks. I have been lurking here for awhile, to research my trip to Europe and decided to jump in when I noticed there is hardly anything down for the Okanagan, one of the most popular tourist destinations in western Canada. I am off work from now until my trip (starting July) so unless someone else jumps in I might just try getting something useable up for every town/city in the Okanagan Valley. Thanks again for the kudos, and let me say I am starting to get the hang of what you all are looking for based on your comments and corrections to the Penticton guide. This is a great site and a great idea, and I am very happy to help where I can... (WT-en) bulliver 22:53, 28 February 2006 (EST)

Hey, if you want to hook up while you are over here let me know. I live in Lausanne, so there, or Geneva are super-easy, but I'm a daytrip from Paris, Milan, Zurich or Karlsruhe. I'll be bouncing between London and Oxford during mid-April, and could be convinced to go just about anywhere else.

Also if you are planning a trip, but are a bit free in terms of destinations I would suggest Tossa de Mar or the Cinque Terre as a couple of cool places that you don't normally hear about. -- (WT-en) Mark 16:57, 1 March 2006 (EST)

That sounds great! I am going to be doing a whirlwind 3 month tour of Europe, and am just now fleshing out a rough itinerary, but Switzerland is definitely on my list, with tentative stops in Zurich, Bern, Lausanne and Geneva. I have enough German and French to order some food and get lodgings, but I don't think it is enough to have any sort of meaningful conversation so it will be nice to meet up with some English speakers. It will help to ward off the homesick feeling I am sure I will get from such a long trip. First time away from North America for me!

Also thanks for the tips. I do have plans to visit Cinque Terre, if only to walk along the path that connects the five towns. I have not heard of Tossa de Mar but I will look into it. While three months is a long time, there are a lot of places I want to see, and I need to strike the perfect balance between seeing everything and having enough time to enjoy them without burning myself out. I've started a rough itinerary of the trip on my user page -- (WT-en) bulliver 00:24, 2 March 2006 (EST)

Just another note to say that these maps you're creating rule -- IMHO maps are something that are sorely lacking on the site, but you seem to be on a one-man crusade to change that. A while back (WT-en) Evan gave out an award called a BarnStar. In his words:

"The tradition, in the wiki world, is to add the image to the user page for people who've made exceptional contributions to the wiki community. In true wiki style, anyone can get one and anyone can give one. Although it's originally from the MeatBall wiki, it's used all over wikidom. There are even different categories of barnstar on Wikipedia (see WikiPedia:Wikipedia:Barnstars on Wikipedia)."

So here's a goofy bunch of pixels to thank you for what was probably hours and hours of work. The rewards around here aren't always the greatest, but the appreciation is genuine. Thanks! -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:05, 14 March 2006 (EST)

That's great! Thanks a lot. - (WT-en) bulliver 18:50, 14 March 2006 (EST)

As a side note, if your recent experiences have given you any ideas about how to improve Project:How to draw a map, please go ahead and add your thoughts. Having only briefly looked at that article I had some questions about where to get good satellite images, what resolution to use, etc. I think you've also had some questions about fonts and color palettes that might be useful if incorporated into the article. I realize I'm rewarding your amazing work by saying "and would you mind doing this too", so please don't feel obligated, but as someone who is new to mapmaking and who does it well you might have some very valuable input. And you still rock. -- (WT-en) Ryan 19:17, 14 March 2006 (EST)

I will give it some thought, but really, I am quite happy with the guidelines as they stand, and find myself sticking to them as much as possible. The only time I might stray is with the National Park maps, and big-city maps, such as the Seattle map I just finished. As for scale, I generally just change it at will to fit as much detail as possible into the area being mapped. As various cities/areas can differ wildly in the size of the district or whatever being mapped, I don't think it will be feasable to standardize on any sort of fixed scale. That being said, I generally try to work with as large a canvass as possible on the svg source, and scale down the png version to be managable in the guide (ie: try to scale it 800x600 or so, so that it may fit on one screen in its entirety without scrolling).

As for where to get sattelite imagery, I have gleamed from the Project:How to draw a map page and the mapmaking expedition discussion that it is not prudent to list the source due to potential copyright issues, however, if you follow the discussion there it will quickly become apparent where I get it from (hint: starts with 'goo' ;) ).

So: I will definitely give this some thought, and put any ideas I can come up with in the talk page of Project:How to draw a map so it can be discussed before changing the actual howto. - (WT-en) bulliver 00:32, 15 March 2006 (EST)

You may be seeing effects of the caching stuff -- when my login expires, I still get my usual talk page and stuff listed at the top of the page. -- (WT-en) Colin 16:41, 16 March 2006 (EST)

That seems to be it...I see 'bulliver' at the top of the page, and when I click I get my normal talk page, but edits show up as my IP. At first I thought it was only with Konq, but it seems to happen with Firefox too. Could this be because I am logged in on two different computers? Anyway around it? - (WT-en) bulliver 17:05, 16 March 2006 (EST)

I usually check my watchlist first thing. If it doesn't show, I know that I have to log in. — (WT-en) Ravikiran 17:17, 16 March 2006 (EST)

I've only seen it since I've been logging in on two different computers... I'm guessing I get logged out after about 24 hours... but I really don't know. There's no way around it other than logout and log back in at the start of a day's session. - (WT-en) Colin 17:30, 16 March 2006 (EST)

This conversation may best be moved to Project:Bug reports, but I'm getting logged out a lot and using only one computer. I'm on a DSL connection and thought it might be due to the IP address changing, but it's happened in the past 24 hours from the same IP. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:44, 16 March 2006 (EST)

As a heads up, if you're re-doing the BC regions you may want to take a look at how we did California. The California regions were a bit of a mess for a while, but proposing a list of non-overlapping, top-level regions and then creating a map to explicitly show what went where worked out quite nicely. Not sure if it will help or not, but it can't hurt.

Yeah, I guess a map would be best to sort it out. I left a note in user webgeer's talk page, as he mentioned he wanted to clean up the mess. I figured he might want to tackle it together, but it looks like he hasn't been around in a while. (WT-en) bulliver 17:43, 17 March 2006 (EST)

As a random aside, you can create links to images from your user page using the syntax [[:Image:Image name]] (note the colon at the beginning). It's a bit easier than entering the full "http://www.wikivoyage.org/" bit. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:37, 17 March 2006 (EST)

Thanks for the tip, that's exactly what I was looking for, as I want to link to the pictures, not display them. (WT-en) bulliver 17:43, 17 March 2006 (EST)

No problem. The format is the same as all other Wiki links, so if you want to display a title other than the image name simply do [[:Image name|Image title]]. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:48, 17 March 2006 (EST)

• • Just move the last good page to the correct spelling and leave the mispelling behind as a redirect. That way you take all the page history and the redirect will take care of future bad spellers. :) -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 20:24, 17 March 2006 (EST)

OK, thanks. I couldn't rename the page because I already created the correct one. However, there was nothing there but an outline so hopefully the history is no big loss. I will keep this in mind for the future - (WT-en) bulliver 20:35, 17 March 2006 (EST)

Yeah, no big deal, I have done the same thing. What we have now is about the same thing. The thing is when you do a move it takes all the history and talk page with it and then creates the redirect auto-magicly. In this case it really didn't make much difference anyway as all the edits were yours and there was no talk page. That aside, I want to chime in with everyone else in thanking you for everything you have been doing in adding content, maps and pictures. I just wish I could figure out the map making. ha! -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 08:18, 18 March 2006 (EST)

Thanks Tom, I am more than happy to help out where I can (and some places I probably shouldn't ;)) -- (WT-en) bulliver 15:15, 19 March 2006 (EST)

You are very welcome, BTW for disambiguation, I am getting in the habit of checking Wikipedia. I am going back on some of the pages I have created and doing a disambiguation on them. Thanks. -- (WT-en) Tom Holland (xltel) 15:48, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Actually, it was your initiative for standardizing the 'eat' section that got me going. So, thanks to you. Also, I must admit that as I was the person who nominated Bangalore for the collaboration week, there was some feelings of obligation behind my efforts. The article is still far from being a 'star', but at least now it has some shape. (WT-en) WindHorse 19 March 06

Your article title threw me for a mild loop here. There have been some discussions -- and some disagreements -- about how to make sense out of the Rocky Mountains in a hierarchically logical way. Rocky Mountains (United States of America) is used as a "region" name, which creates confusion because they're obviously also a range and destination.

What's your intention with this title? Is this thing, whatever you call it, "part of" the Rocky Mountains, or is it a region between mountain ranges, or a separate range altogether, or what? I'd appreciate explanation, as I (we?) try to make something more integrated out of the various Rocky Mountain articles. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 19:32, 15 April 2006 (EDT)

Well, I am not too happy with the way Rocky mountains are handled here generally. I cannot speak for American Rockies, but the Canadian Rockies just seems incongruent and tacked on. If we look at the Canada page, we see Prairies and British Columbia as top level regions. And the Canadian Rockies page just seems to exist in limbo. I fully agree that the 'Rockies' are a destination in themselves, but it still doesn't feel right to me, as it just messes up the heirarchy, as it is in Both BC and Alberta.

Specific to the Columbia-Rockies page I started: I just spent a lot of time and effort cleaning up British Columbia's heirarchy, which was a complete mess. This region is a sub-region of the Kootenays, and covers an area far west than just the Rockies. It covers three ranges from the BC-Alberta border to 350km or so west of there. Quite frankly, I don't see how it should affect the 'Rocky Mountain' heirarchy at all, as it seems no matter what happens to that designation, there will be some overlap unless we change Canadas regions as a whole from the ground up.

If it really upsets you I can drop the 'Rockies' from it, and just call it Columbia (British Columbia). I was just trying to match the official BC tourism board's regions as close as possible when I reorganized BC's heirarchy. (WT-en) bulliver 05:01, 16 April 2006 (EDT)

Hi Bulliver,

Do you know about Shared? It's where we try to upload all of our images now so they can be used on EN or any other language version of Wikivoyage. I'd appreciate it if you could start uploading your images over there. The one downside is that you have to create a user name for Shared. Thanks! -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 05:44, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

OK, I have made an account there. So is there no way to copy them over to shared after the fact now? (WT-en) bulliver 05:50, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

Not yet. You don't have to transfer them (Hopefully someone else will do it :) ). Just as a future reference thing. -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 06:05, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

One more thing. If you're going to include the image in an article on EN you do the same thing. I.e. [[Image:Example.JPG|thumb|200px|Example caption]]. Just be sure you type the name of the image exactly otherwise it won't work. -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 06:08, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

I was just about to go on Talk:Victoria (British Columbia) and promote OpenStreetMap.org's Victoria Mapping Party (a mapping project to create open licensed maps derived entirely from grassroots GPS surveying) ...when I noticed that wikivoyage.org already has great maps of Victoria!

How did you create them? (and the crucial license question) ...based on what data?

-- (WT-en) Harry Wood 14:56, 19 September 2007 (EDT)

Hi Harry. As is my understanding, you can copyright a specific map, but not the basic information that the map contains (ie: streets etc). One way that mapmakers enforce their copyright is by putting bunk streets in their maps. So: I use Google Maps to get the basic geographical outline, and plug in the streets etc using a secondary reference as a guide (typically a dead-tree fold out map by Map Art or Rand McNally or whatever.). If google and the secondary source agree, then I conclude that that particular feature exists.

Plus, I generally only make maps for places I have been to and am somewhat familiar with.... (WT-en) bulliver 15:04, 30 October 2007 (EDT)

Ah right. My understanding is that this approach is copying! By cross referencing two different sources you'll probably eliminate the copyright Easter eggs, thereby hiding the fact that you are copying. As long as you spot all of them, nobody would be able to establish a breach of copyright (ignoring the fact that you have mentioned your sources here now!) ...So you'll get away with it of course.

The OpenStreetMap approach is to go out and survey every street. Bit more laborious! But because map copyright legalities are such a big pain in the ass, we believe this is the only way to arrive at a truly open licensed street map. The Victoria mapping party looks to have been quite successful. OpenStreetMap's coverage of Victoria is pretty good now. But compared with your map I can see there are areas to the North and West which haven't been surveyed yet.

-- (WT-en) Harry Wood 21:28, 6 November 2007 (EST)

I love your maps of Victoria. I uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia. Please check them to ensure I've got the attribution properly. (WT-en) Padraic 14:43, 31 October 2007 (EDT)

Unfortunately, given that you created the maps from copyrighted data, they are considered derivative works which you do not have the authority to release under CC-BY-SA 1.0; thus, these files will soon be deleted from Commons. (WT-en) Padraic 09:15, 7 November 2007 (EST)

Prince George is not in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, not in any known definition; I've taken it out of that section's listing but didn't revise its article as some other coverage of the North-Central Interior (Omineca-Bulkley-Nechako) needs writing up; the map is totally wrong e.g. showing the Peace Country extending south to near-PG; it ends at the Rockies and doesn't include anythign west of them, despite the boundaries of the regional district.96.30.132.165 13:09, 11 September 2009 (EDT)