Wikivoyage:Here to build a travel guide Voyage Tips and guide

This page in a nutshell: Wikivoyagers are here to build the world's best travel guide, i.e., a free, non-commercial guide to sights, activities, cuisine and accommodation around the world. Users whose behaviour suggests they are here for some other purpose risk being blocked or banned.

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Wikivoyage is both a travel guide and a community of editors who build it. This means that you edit here primarily to help improve Wikivoyage's coverage of destinations, itineraries and travel topics; to provide constructive input into communal discussions and processes aimed at improving the project and the quality of our content; and do so in line with the project's goals and policies. Because Wikivoyage is a collaborative community, editors whose personal agendas and actions appear to conflict with the purposes of the site risk having their editing privileges removed.

The expression "here to build a travel guide" is used to distinguish constructive from non-constructive edits. As a rule, Wikivoyage has unwanted edits and not unwanted editors, but contributors who repeatedly demonstrate an inability or lack of interest in collaboratively building a travel guide may be asked to leave the project.

If you're here to build a travel guide, you will most likely show one or more of these traits:

Genuine interest

You love travel and have a genuine interest in improving our travel content (destination articles, itineraries, travel topics) and/or features of the site. You may indulge any of a wide range of interests, including article writing, substantive edits, or other significant activities (e.g. editing templates, patrolling, or participating in our Collaboration of the month). You might also take part in policy discussions, help to sweep the Pub, or be on hand to answer other users' questions at the Arrivals lounge or Tourist office.

Respect for core editing standards

You respect agreed policies when editing, and demonstrate awareness of being part of an international community of editors. You observe Wikivoyage's policies.

A focus on building the travel guide

You keep non-travel guide-related contributions to a limited level in comparison with positive and constructive contributions to the guide and/or its editorial processes.

Self-correction and heeding lessons

When you make mistakes, you try to learn from them. You appear to take editing seriously and strive to improve your editorial ability and quality of input. If other Wikivoyagers express concerns about your edits or behaviour, you listen to them and try to do better.

If you're not really interested in building a travel guide, the following traits may apply to you:

Promotion of yourself or your business

You treat Wikivoyage articles as free adspace for your business, your user page is more like a lengthy autobiography, or you view your fellow travellers as untapped revenue or potential followers.

Using Wikivoyage as a social networking site

You're only interested in editing your own user space, you exclusively use talk pages for casual chit-chat unrelated to the travel guide, or you treat Wikivoyage as a place to save your homework.

Creating articles with no connection to travel

While everyone is encouraged to plunge forward in creating new travel topics, phrasebooks or destination articles that Wikivoyage does not yet cover, remember that this is a travel guide, and new articles should have travel-related information. Creating articles without travel-relevant content is not being constructive.

General pattern of disruptive behaviour

You have a long-term history of disruptive behaviour with little or no sign of positive intentions.

Treating Wikivoyage as a battleground

Excessive soapboxing, escalation of disputes, repeated hostile aggressiveness, and the like, all suggest that you're a fighter, not a traveller. If you're in a dispute with someone else, then you're expected to place the benefit of the project at a high priority and seek to resolve the problem. If your anger causes you to obsess about articles or other users, you may find the fight, rather than writing a travel guide, has become your focus.

Little or no interest in working collaboratively

You display an extreme lack of interest in working constructively and in a cooperative manner with the community. For example, you treat the views of others as unimportant; you aren't interested in heeding others' legitimate concerns; you'd prefer to continue arguing rather than find a solution, and no warnings or remarks from others cause you to stop making disruptive, unconstructive, offensive or otherwise problematic edits. On talk pages, you repeatedly bring up the same bugbears or try to rerun old arguments in a way that derails civil and productive discussion — or you may fail to use talk pages at all, ignoring other users' attempts to communicate with you. You feel like you own articles and get angry or defensive when other users edit your contributions.

Long-term agenda inconsistent with building a travel guide

You're on Wikivoyage with a mission to right great wrongs in the world, to uncover long-suppressed truths, to stick it to the man. You repeatedly insert irrelevant political content into articles, focus excessively on one tangential issue, or otherwise behave like you have an axe to grind.

A lack of respect for Wikivoyage's aims and methods

Your edit history shows that you have received multiple warnings about your behaviour that were ignored. You've burned through second, third, or fourth chances, all of which were flouted upon return. You've repeatedly made promises to change that proved insincere.

Legal and moral issues

You espouse extreme views inconsistent with law or common decency. You insert bigoted content into articles and talk pages, or use a slur in your user name. You deliberately offend or provoke other members of the Wikivoyage community. You repeatedly insert information encouraging activities which are illegal in the relevant country or territory. You use Wikivoyage to promote or carry out inappropriate relationships with children. You threaten other members of the community with violence or legal action.

You may be interested in building a travel guide in accordance with Wikivoyage's principles, but with different areas of focus or approach to some other users' goals or emphases. Differences that arise where both users are in good faith hoping to improve the project should not be mistaken for "not being here to build a travel guide".

Focusing on niche topic areas

You may have a keen passion for a certain cuisine, a specific sci-fi franchise, or a particular time period and only be interested in contributing content related to your area of expertise. As long as your contributions are travel-relevant and traveller-focussed, please continue! Don't feel as though you have to edit more traditional destination articles just to fit in.

Focusing on particular processes

You may prefer to focus mainly or exclusively on fixing typos and grammatical errors, developing templates, or improving article compliance with the Manual of Style. These are essential activities that improve Wikivoyage. Many "behind the scenes" processes and activities are essential to allow tens of thousands of users to edit collectively. Not every editor needs to perform "on stage", by creating articles and drafting new guidelines.

Trying to change the way Wikivoyage works

Wikivoyagers have a very wide range of views. You may believe a policy or communal norm is wrong-headed or poorly approaches an issue, and if so you may wish to advocate for change in discussion with the community. Go for it! Provided you approach a discussion in a collegial manner and respond to others' feedback constructively, all honest attempts to improve the travel guide are welcome, even if your idea ultimately fails to gain the community's approval.

Being "here to build a travel guide" is about a user's overall purpose and behaviour in editing Wikivoyage. In considering whether or not a user is here to build a travel guide, the user's overall pattern of editing and contributing behaviour, as well as the clarity of past warnings (dismissing vacuous warnings) or guidance and their attempts at improvement, should be reviewed as a whole. If you can resolve behavioural issues amicably, for example through discussion between the involved parties trying to find common ground, this is always preferable to resorting to sysop action.

However, if a user is clearly using the website only to engage in vandalism or similar bad faith editing, it may be better to handle these unwanted edits according to the guideline Deny recognition.

• Wikivoyage:About
• Wikivoyage:Goals and non-goals
• Wikivoyage:Keep Wikivoyage fun

This article is significantly based on work which can be found at Wikipedia. A list of authors can be found here.