Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries Voyage Tips and guide

Early discussion

So, I think this page should be about how to make article itineraries -- not a list of those itineraries. --(WT-en) Evan 12:10, 19 Jan 2004 (EST)

Ah OK. But where do we list these itineraries? (WT-en) Yann 12:13, 19 Jan 2004 (EST)

That's something I think we need to decide on this page! I can see a couple of ways to do linking to itineraries. First, I don't think we need one giant Project:list of itineraries. If itineraries are going to be useful, we're going to have way too many to fit on a single page.

For itineraries that are contained somewhere, like One month in Southeast Asia, we should probably have links in the Get Around section of destination guide.

For itineraries that are linked from point-to-point, like New York to Los Angeles in two weeks, we could link in the Get Out section of New York, and the Get In section of Los Angeles.

There's obviously some fine-tuning to do here, though. --(WT-en) Evan 17:19, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I agree that they should be in the appropriate location, but I also think it would be really nice to have a central location for all the itineraries. I think it would be nice to be able to browse through the itineraries, as these are often interesting reading, and give ideas for travel.

I know that in the long run this page would start to get large. I would suggest that when that happens we start breaking it up by geography and subject. In the long run we may end up with articles as specific as Travel Itineraries/British Columbia Road Trips, but I think that is better than having to drill down in the geography heirarchy to Hope (British Columbia) to find out there is an interesting highway to drive between Hope and Lytton. -- (WT-en) Webgeer 13:00, Jul 27, 2004 (EDT)

I have tried to begin such a list. Please look if that is what you wanted. --(WT-en) EBB 13:18, 27 Jul 2004 (EDT)

That is pretty much what I was thinking. However shouldn't it be a regular article rather than a WikiTravel: article (which I thought were for administrative things). Also I think there should be some mention of that page in other locations so that people know to add their itineraries to that page (I'm going to put more discussion on this in the Project:Other ways of seeing travel) -- (WT-en) Webgeer 14:20, Jul 27, 2004 (EDT)

I had written it as List of itineraries but it was almost immediately moved into the "Wikivoyage:" namespace. I don't know what is the best solution. If you do not agree with Evan's decision to move, I will support you *g*. On the other hand such an category feature as in the Wikipedia would make it easier because one would only have to edit one article (write the itinerary and put a category line into it) than writing the itinerary and adding the article manually to the list. Unfortunately I'm not so experienced with the features here in the Wikivoyage therefore I couldn't do it (honestly said, I wasn't thinking about it when writing the list). --(WT-en) EBB 14:40, 27 Jul 2004 (EDT)

P.S. I am grown up enough to criticize Evan on my own if it seems necessary to me but in this case I think both solutions are acceptable. --(WT-en) EBB 14:44, 27 Jul 2004 (EDT)

I moved the article to the Wikivoyage: namespace because the itineraries list is mainly a reference for contributors. Like phrasebooks, itineraries should really be linked to from destination guides, not put in a separate site hierarchy. --(WT-en) Evan 20:13, 27 Jul 2004 (EDT)

I think there should be multiple ways of getting to an article. I agree they should be linked to in the destination guides, but I don't think that precludes a separate hierarchy for those who just want to see itineraries. However, I would suggest a different type of hierarchy (not geographic). I have refined my proposal for a Travel Planning hierarchy. Please see the suggestion at: Project:Other ways of seeing travel I would like to get some consensus from Wikivoyagers whether this is a good idea and should be initiated or whether this is a bad idea and should be abandoned or significantly changed. I will probably add a note in the Travellers' Pub soon to try and solicit more opinions on the concept. -- (WT-en) Webgeer 23:41, Jul 27, 2004 (EDT)

I agree there should be more than one way to reach an article. I would like to write about an itinerary in middle Sweden. Obviously, I will add a link to the page with a list of itineraries. I would also like to link to this itinerary from other pages: the main article on Sweden, regional pages on Sweden and perhaps even on the pages about major cities allong the itinerary. I have looked at some other itineraries and what pages link to them, and I have the impression that there is no consensus on how to link to itineraries. Itineraries might fit under 'Getting arround' or under 'Do', but not quite. Maybe an item 'Itineraries' should be added in the template for articles? I have tried to find guidelines about linking to itineraries in the FAQ and Help areas, but didn't find any. -- (WT-en) Hdk 14:21, 21 Jul 2005 (EDT)

Highways discussion

Pasted from Talk:Princess Highway:

OK... At some point we probably need to hammer out how all these Australian road articles reflect on Project:What is an article?. I get a little mixed up sometimes about it... --(WT-en) Evan 12:44, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I understand what you mean -- that's why I said it probably deserved its own article. However, in the cases of the Gunbarrel Highway, the Oodnadatta Track and other outback tracks, I'm convinced they deserve their own articles. Quite a few people go to Australia to drive along them (as I did). They're really destinations in their own right. (WT-en) DhDh 13:44, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I agree with both Evan's concern and Dhum Dhum's comment about outback driving. Is there a way we can add to Project:What is an article? so that the Gunbarrel Highway and Silk Road are OK as itiniraries/destinations but that will prevent having Highway 280 or Jersey Turnpike? I think we need to clarify what "deserve" means (cause it's pretty? "important"? "popular"? or has something truely destination-y about it?)(WT-en) Majnoona 17:05, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I started working on Project:Itineraries. There's something of a difference between formal routes, like particular named roads (Route 66, Gunbarrel Highway) or trails (Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, Annapurna Circuit), and informal routes like One month in Southeast Asia or Istanbul to Delhi over land). But I think the idea is the same. We have dots (OK, smudges) on our maps that are destinations -- countries, regions, cities, districts, etc. And we have lines that go between those dots -- sometimes they're traditional or established, sometimes they're just "suggested" by Wikivoyagers. --(WT-en) Evan 17:12, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I think Maj means where do we draw the line between formal routes like Route 66 (of which we definitely want an article) and Jersey Turnpike (of which I think we don't want article). Importance and popularity have definitely something to do with it, but that's probably not all. It will probably remain a quite hazy border but maybe we can devise a number of questions to decide if a given route deserves an article here. (WT-en) DhDh 17:27, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

Possible questions:

Can the route be thought of as a destination in its own right, i.e. do people go there in order to travel along it?
Does it connect important tourist places and is it regularly used by travellers as a means of travelling between them?
other...

If the answer to any of these is yes -> go ahead and create the article. (WT-en) DhDh 17:38, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

I think it's pretty hard to say whether a highway or road is guide-worthy (is that a word? B-). I think if we link routes with itineraries pretty carefully, articles like Jersey Turnpike would come out pretty lame. I'd say that if someone went to the trouble to describe an itinerary for the 'pike, well, damn, that's probably worth having an article about. Sucky itineraries and crap places to visit still seem worth having in the guide. Chacun a ses propres goûts. --(WT-en) Evan 19:05, 21 Jan 2004 (EST)

Thematic Itineraries

I am new to this wiki, so set me straight if this topic has been addressed. Is there a mechanism to discover or record thematic itineraries? People like to follow their hobbies or interests while traveling. For example, a Civil War buff might want to locate and visit relevant sites while traveling in the southeastern USA.

--(WT-en) Jwalling 16:05, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)

Should itineraries overlap?

There's an open question right now about whether itinerary articles should cover overlapping areas or routes. For example, if the itinerary for going from point A to point E goes through points B, C, and D, is it OK to have a different itinerary for going from point B to point D?

I think the guidelines in this article seem to show that they definitely should overlap -- that we should have itineraries for different time periods, for different routes between the same two points. I think that itineraries are by nature pretty sparse -- they should really be leaning on the destination guides to provide the bulk of information on the region or route. So the actual duplication of text and images is going to be manageable.

I think very much that we could use New York to Pittsburgh in one day, New York to Chicago in two days, New York to Denver in three days, New York to Las Vegas in four days and New York to Los Angeles in five days, even though the routes overlap. New York to Dallas, New York to Phoenix, and New York to Memphis would overlap these itineraries in some places, and not overlap in other places. I think having an interweaving web of itineraries is a boon, not a downside.

The reductio ad absurdum is that if we keep discarding short routes in favor of longer ones, all we'll have left is Lapland to Capetown, Nome to Tierra del Fuego, Perth to Sydney and Lisbon to Vladivostok. I just don't think that's what someone going from Paris to Marseilles really needs.

Let's open up itineraries to some more experimentation, rather than prematurely shutting them down in the name of efficiency. --(WT-en) Evan 19:56, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

I do not think that completely redundant itineraries should exist. Itineraries should be adaptable so that a LA-to-SLC itinerary will be useful to someone starting in Vegas. But if there is something -- anything -- distinctive or different about the shorter route then yes, we should keep it.

For a subroute itinerary, I would just like to see some indication that there is something that distinguishes the route. The alternative is the opposite ad nauseum -- we not only have Route 66, but we have subsection Albuquerque to Flagstaff and subsubsection Gallup to Winslow.

Now our 9-day Route 66 goes from Santa Monica to Flagstaff in two days -- including visiting the Grand Canyon. Someone who is only going as far as the Grand Canyon might have a lot more time available for visiting stuff, so a "Santa Monica to the Grand Canyon" itinerary could be sprinkled with more sights too see, and could therefore exist.

The question in my mind is "don't shorter routes always have more stuff sprinkled in?" Maybe we should allow all nontrivial subsections. To me if it's nontrivial, the author ought to be able to briefly explain why the subsection is useful. -- (WT-en) Colin 20:30, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

Yeah, I think there's some careful teasing out to be done here. Like, is White Plains to Los Angeles really necessary? New York to Pasadena? Probably not. What about Washington DC to Los Angeles? ...maybe. How far along the segment really makes sense? Do we need a Spokane to Tuscaloosa itinerary? --(WT-en) Evan 20:44, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

Tilting toward either extreme would be detrimental to the project. At the moment, the list of itineraries is a little sparse, but it could easily be overwhelmed by a flurry of New York-to-anywhere routes. However, I think the more pressing need is to expand the offerings of itineraries. It probably wouldn't hurt to present routes that emphasize the variety of travel options that we stress in the destination guides: car, plane, rail, boat. (WT-en) SHC 21:31, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

Here's another live data point to consider:

It's obvious that this is redundant and non-optimal. It's less obvious what the 'correct' split would be. I'd be tempted to suggest that we make one 'superitinerary' called Istanbul to Indonesia, which links to segments called (say) Istanbul to New Delhi, New Delhi to Bangkok, Bangkok to Singapore. So there'd be a kinda-split between 'regional itineraries' and 'section itineraries', where the region route consists of multiple sections. (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:35, 11 May 2006 (EDT)

I think it is crazy to try to come up with a policy for this sort of thing. Any policy you'd come up with, there will be more special cases than cases that conform to rule. Here are some itineraries I thought of 5 minutes ago, as someone interested in history:

Alexandar's route itinerary - from Greece to Punjab.
Grand trunk road itinerary - Afghanistan to Calcutta.
Itinerary that covers the sites of the Indian mutiny - large swathe of the North Indian plains.

I could keep thinking up itineraries - the Government of India markets one based on the events in the Buddha's life, someone might want to follow the migratory path of the Great Indian Albatross, or whatever. There is some amount of overlap between 1 and 2, and between 2 and 3. But I don't know if the same cities are covered. There is no way that any policy assuming that the itineraries are in some straight line is going to work.

I think that we should let itineraries grow organically. If we get a lot of people interested in building itineraries, some of them will stick around and organize them. (WT-en) Piroco, for example seems like someone who is interested in a certain part of recent history and likes his itinerary around that - that should be fine. If he stays and builds this into a great itinerary, it will be an asset to the project. If an itinerary starts off and then loses steam and sees no activity for a lot of time, that is the point at which we should understand that that particular itinerary is not such a hot idea and consider merging or deleting it. Having oo many itineraries is a problem we should love to have, especially if that will get us people who will maintain them. — (WT-en) Ravikiran 13:34, 13 May 2006 (EDT)

Umm. I think itineraries like the Silk Road, Alexander's route, the Narrow Road to the Deep North, 88 Temple Pilgrimage or whatever are a special case, because they are fixed routes and everybody can more or less agree on how they go. However, the three I list earlier are just "overland" and try to answer the question of "gee, what's the best route for backpackers going from from Istanbul to Indonesia?". Here it actually does the traveler a disservice if the information is fragmented among multiple itineraries, and we should at the very least list all the options available when he goes to the highest-level page. (WT-en) Jpatokal 23:47, 13 May 2006 (EDT)

I think shorter itineraries generally are better than longer ones. The main argument here is that shorter itineraries can be combined, longer ones can't. Creating meta-pages for longer suggested trips pointing to itineraries for each leg is, I believe, the right way of doing it. Exceptions may perhaps be appropriate if someone suggest an itinerary with a particular historic, cultural or religious dimmension, i.e. it wouldn't be appropriate splitting up a pilgrimage itinerary which only really makes sense if done from A to C through B.

I don't really understand the concern about overlapping itineraries, or too many itineraries, at least not at this point. Seems to me as some people are just a little bit too keen on administering. If someone really wants to write an itinerary; let them do it. Don't kill their creativity and desire to contribute by kicking them around. Always encourage contribution, and you really need to cut people some slack if you want them to spend time and effort creating content. But then - give it a few weeks or months and if the itinerary is not well maintained, start a process of merging if appropriate. For a new wikivoyager it does not encourage you to stay on and make further contributions if your first page on the wiki is voted for deletion. In fact, you'd be rather weird if you bothered to stay on at all. Sure, pages and itineraries which are completely redundant has to be cleaned up, but if there's just a seed of hope in there, give it some time and see where it goes first! It sounds trivial, but I think it's pretty essential for a social collaboration project such as a wiki to just apply some 'social intelligence' to how we deal with people who give of their time and knowledge.

At the same time, there should be some kind of structure. I think creating a meta-page for itineraries is a good idea. Fully support it. It would also make it easier for everyone to browse and maintain itineraries, and purge those who overlap. Perhaps there should also be some kind of hierarchy to itineraries, i.e. - they should be labelled with - at least - region, perhaps type, characteristics...you could create categories for overland ones, scuba diving, food, pilgrimage etc - and let people browse by category as well. In short; i think itineraries can be put to a lot better use than what it's done today..

Most important tho - give fellow wikivoyagers some slack to do their thing and develop their contribution. Merging or deleting should at best be a secondary concern. It sometimes feels like it's what keeps this place rolling. (WT-en) Piroco 02:08, 18 May 2006 (EDT)

Cities along highways

Archived from the Pub:

I wonder if there's a reasonable way to add a category to a city that's on a road. It would let the traveler have a list of places along their trip. For example, I occasionally travel up TX-35 from Seadrift to Houston and there are lots of interesting things on the way to see. I'm sure someone could do a lot with IH-10 or the like. (WT-en) Jordanmills 20:54, 24 September 2006 (EDT)

When Project:Tags is fully implemented I could see the tag template to be a possible solution. -- (WT-en) Sapphire 21:06, 24 September 2006 (EDT)

One way to deal with this is to do an itinerary for the trip along that highway. Khyber Pass is one example; Route 66 another, and I think Australia has several. This is not always the best solution, or even appropriate, but worth considering. (WT-en) Pashley 01:44, 25 September 2006 (EDT)

Wikipedia has route descriptions, especially U.S. state and federal highways and interstates, but the project manager is adamant that these are not travel guides so information about travelers' services is ruthlessly deleted, even things to stop and see. OK, so why not a parallel project in WikiTravel? What I didn't like about Route 66 is the assumption that everyone wants to start at the same place and go at the same pace. I think it would be more universally useful to be comprehensive about potential travelers' services along the way: food, sleep, get gas, repairs, sights. Also ripoffs to avoid. Places along the way with articles of their own can be linked to. And I would never want to be euro- or amero-centric about this. (WT-en) LADave 00:38, 2 June 2007 (EDT)

Actually, in the case of Route 66, we created Route 66/Cities with a listing of the cites along the route. Most of the attractions/restaurants/hotels are listed on the city pages, while the things that are truly "Route 66" are listed in the guide. -- (WT-en) Fastestdogever 00:57, 2 June 2007 (EDT)

New Itineraries

Archived from the Pub:

After a trip, I've started several new itineraries — two for routes I followed, Yunnan tourist trail and Overland Kunming to Hong Kong — and two for other routes, Overland to Tibet, and Burma Road. Comments and contributions solicited.

The Burma Road one is controversial, arguably unnecessary. See Talk:Burma_Road. (WT-en) Pashley 19:42, 30 June 2007 (EDT)

Some more specific questions arise, though. One is a naming convention for overland itineraries. This has been discussed before, at least at Talk:Overland from Singapore to Shanghai and Talk:Istanbul to New Delhi over land. Should "Overland Kunming to Hong Kong" have a "from" inserted? Or should "Overland from Singapore to Shanghai" have it removed? Should "Istanbul to New Delhi over land" be changed?

Another is how to choose directions for itineraries. I wrote it as "Kunming to Hong Kong" because that is the way I travelled it, but "Hong Kong to Kunming" would fit better as a component in "Overland to Tibet". Do we need a policy, or just a suggestion, that says itineraries should be written from the better-known or more accessible end, travelling toward the other end?

There's also an open question about whether we need some sort of hierarchical tag for itineraries. Or for Travel Topics. isIn is fine for destinations, but what about itineraries. "Singapore to Shanghai" has several parts; should they link to it? How? "Overland Kunming to Hong Kong" could be part of one route in "Overland to Tibet"; should there be breadcrumbs for that?

Just using isIn — "Overland to Tibet" isIn Asia, "Overland Kunming to Hong Kong" isIn China, Yunnan tourist trail isIn Yunnan — might be better than nothing, but it does not seem to be the Right Thing. (WT-en) Pashley 04:32, 12 March 2007 (EDT)

Personally, I favour the briefer alternative of "Overland Hong Kong to Kunming" with the convention you suggested of from the better-known or more accessible origin to the lesser-known or less accessible destination.

However, there may need to be exceptions to this. For example, the Routeburn Trail in South-West New Zealand is best walked from the Glenorchy end to The Divide (on the Milford Road) because walked in that direction, one is warmed by the sun in the early morning and shaded from its glare in the afternoon by the prevailing topography...

...(WT-en) Gaimhreadhan^{(kiwiexile at DMOZ)} • 08:58, 23 March 2007 (EDT)

Article titles

(moved from Talk:Overland from Singapore to Shanghai)

What's the right title for this type of article? Others we have are:

Istanbul to New Delhi over land
Six months overland from Istanbul to Indonesia

Should we try to be consistent? Do we need a convention or policy here?

I'd say this article has it right, "Overland from ... to ..." is the preferred form. It is what we used when I went "Overland to India" years ago and "overland" is what various tour organisers and equipment vendors use [1] [2] [3]. For that matter, a search here on Wikivoyage turns up dozens of hits in the text of various articles.

Despite comments at Talk:Istanbul to New Delhi over land, I think using "over land" here is just wrong. (WT-en) Pashley 23:56, 3 May 2006 (EDT)

Inconsistency continues. The sub-itineraries of this are:

Overland from Singapore to Bangkok
Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City overland
Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai overland

My reading of naming suggestions at Project:Itineraries is that the last two are the preferred form. That's fine by me, though personally I marginally prefer "Overland from ... to ..." format.

I do think choosing a consistent naming convention would be useful, and that "over land" must go. (WT-en) Pashley 03:57, 24 May 2006 (EDT)

I would drop "from" out of the page names here because it needlessly emphasizes direction. Just "to" is enough to indicate traversal. I'd use "Shanghai to Paris overland" and make "Paris to Shanghai overland" a redirect to it. I agree that "over land" could be changed to "overland" for stylistic reasons; "overland" is a travel term while "over land" is just a prepositional phrase. --(WT-en) Rogerhc 19:07, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

The current collection of overland titles, taken from Project:List of itineraries is:

Istanbul to New Delhi over land
Six months overland from Istanbul to Indonesia
Europe to South Asia over land
Round the world overland
Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai overland
Overland Kunming to Hong Kong
Overland to Tibet
Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City overland
Overland from Singapore to Bangkok

There are also many redirects such as Istanbul to Delhi overland; I think they all point to things listed above. I still think we need a policy and some consistency here.

My idea of a good first step would be to move any article with "over land" in the title to "overland" and vfd the old version. As I see it, "over land" is simply an error; we don't even need those as redirects.
I marginally prefer "Overland Paris to Shanghai" to "Paris to Shanghai overland", but don't think the difference is important. I do think we should choose one and stick to it.

What do others think? (WT-en) Pashley 13:32, 5 July 2007 (EDT)

I'd pip for "X to Y overland" just because it feels a little more grammatical. "Overland to Tibet" is too vague (should be split into defined routes) and times like "six months" seem a little unnecessary, because you can do most of them in a week, a year or anything in between.

In general, it seems to me that there are two fundamental types of itineraries. One is time defined: "I've got two weeks in South-East Asia, how should I spend it?". One is endpoint-defined: "I want to travel from Istanbul to Delhi overland, what's the best route?". Titles should also reflect these: the first is "Two weeks in South-East Asia", the second is "Istanbul to Delhi overland". "Istanbul to Delhi overland in two weeks" is too specific. (WT-en) Jpatokal 08:54, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

Those types are the main ones, but I don't think they're the whole story. Generalise endpoint-defined to route-defined so it includes things like Along the Yangtze river. Then add historically-defined for itineraries like Burma Road, Long March or On the trail of Marco Polo; no-one's likely to follow these today (except maybe Long March), but they could be of interest for trip planning. (WT-en) Pashley 06:03, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Next stop option

(Swept in from the Pub)

Hi, I'm new here, and I got an idea to help travellers, but couldn't find anything resembling it (this post might belong to suggestions of features or an idea section?):

What I'm looking for is a feature like the one on the bottom of this page from wikipedia [4]. It should make the viewer able to easily go to the next (available) article on a particular transport route (Bus/Train/Ferry). Maybe even see the distance (in length or time).

The one on the page is just made ad hoc by someone, but the idea is nice.

Why I miss it: When you plan a trip on a train/ferry, you would like to know what the different stops have to offer, but if there is no page for that specific railline/ferry route, the only way to find out soething about it's stops is by manually looking for every city on the railmap.

E.g. On the Irkutsk page is only listed that trains go from Moscow or Vladivostok. It would be nice to mention the nearest important stations Taishet, Novosibirsk and Ulan Ude, but even nicer with a small box saying Trans-Siberian Railway on the top and containing:

Instead of having to do this for every town, it would be perfect to just be able to make a list of station somewhere.

Something like this - just nicer, and not in an infobox.

(WT-en) Clcow 02:45, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

The problem is that most places aren't neatly laid out on a line like the Trans-Siberian: what's the "next" stop from Tokyo or Chicago? But the "Get out" section is intended to provide the traveller some nearby choices for continuing their trip. (WT-en) Jpatokal 03:26, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

Well, in the US I guess it could be used for the interstate highways, but true, in countries and cities with several options it might just add to more useless info. I'm just thinking that in less infrastructurally developed countries, the number of railroads or mayor roads are small, and this could be an easy way for a traveller to check up on places én route to his destination. (WT-en) Clcow 03:05, 8 April 2007 (EDT)

Regarding the Trans-Siberian route: If you can read/translate German definitely check out the German language guide, which is simply awesome. Without looking at it, I think it does list everything in order, or at least all the major stops in order. -- (WT-en) Sapphire • (Talk) • 03:59, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

Thanks, I was actually just using it as an example (I figured it easier to relate to, than ferry routes in Greenland), but I might check some of the German info and merge it with the English. I'll have to do it on paper at some point anyway, might as well do it here.

Itinerary Nursery

This suggestion has come up in the pub before, but to formalise a proposal.

Propose that we have a guideline to avoid creating stubby or outline itinerary articles. Instead, we create the outline itinerary within the smallest reasonable containing region. When the itinerary can stand on its own feet, or when it overloads the containing article, we move it to an independent article.

The advantages I see are

The itinerary will get more attention - more people will see it.
The name and scope of the itinerary can be changed easily (i.e duration and geography).
We avoid have outline itineraries articles hanging around which must go through year-long wait and the vfd process.
Region articles - which can often be sparse or redundant - get more useful content.
Failed itineraries are easily changed, or content merged back into the region.
It helps build itinerary articles by consensus, rather than each itinerary reflecting the original authors view.

Disadvantages:

Otherwise complete region articles may get overloaded with outline itineraries.

Any opinions, or development of the idea?

(as an aside, if this proposal receives support, I will proceed to propose the same thing for a class of travel topics - like "destination with children", that is only when they are well developed do we move them out of the destination article. This has also been discussed previously, but lets not bite off too much here, lets deal with itineraries first). --(WT-en) inas 22:40, 3 May 2010 (EDT)

I think this would be sensible - there is already a sub-section under "See" for itineraries, so it might be worth explicitly stating that itineraries should start out in the the parent city/region article and only move to separate articles once they've grown beyond a few paragraphs. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 00:21, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

I don't like the idea of creating itineraries within the main article. I think it will make the article sloppy and disorganized. It would be a nightmare if multiple itineraries were being created in the same article. I much prefer just linking to the itinerary from the article. Generally, I don't think successful itineraries are created (or at least started) from consensus. I think they work best when one ambitious user creates the page and adds at least enough information to let other users see where it's going (if not creating it all themselves). Itineraries should come from personal travel experiences, I think. It is really difficult to know if it is feasible if you haven't done it yourself. That doesn't shut others out from editing the pages, but it's more useful to have a complete itinerary made by one user than a half-baked, hodge-podge itinerary created from "consensus". (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 19:48, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

It may even discourage people from creating itineraries. You can't give it much structure within the bounds of a region/city/country article without messing up the structure of the article. It also lends the page to a whole section of repeat information. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 19:58, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

I think this line of reasoning is out of line with our goals. We don't want articles consisting of just one person's vision or experience - and we do want articles based on consensus of many. If people want to describe their particular itinerary or trip, they should go to their blog site. And, I think the fact that most itineraries on WT are in fact half-baked would be a strong argument that we generally lack the kind of user who it going to put an itinerary together from scratch - even if this was desirable. And don't forget this guideline only applies to stubby/outline itineraries. If one person, in fact, does write a usable itinerary it is no longer an outline, and this guideline would not apply to it. --(WT-en) inas 20:40, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

This seems sensible on a number of fronts. To the arguments already put forward, I would add that it will encourage content in the most unloved articles at Wikivoyage. The vast majority of our region articles are little more than indexing vehicles. It would not take long to make a list of well developed examples. So yes, let's encourage itineraries in region articles. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 21:20, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

The principal downside to allowing stubby itineraries in our destination guides is that they will bring down the quality of the articles, as there is no limit to the potential worthless itineraries one could add. It's for that very reason that I like our policy of deleting languishing examples. I'd hate to see, for example, barely written itineraries like "30 days in x" appear in the see sections of our better region or huge city articles. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 23:30, 4 May 2010 (EDT)

Have we tried featuring itineraries on the Main Page? Currently, they can only be reached from the travel topic page. They're kind of hidden, so if we really want these to grow, we could try making them more visible.

Some of our itineraries are basically the same as destination articles, like Jomsom-Muktinath Trek and Tiger Leaping Gorge. For that reason, they wouldn't be bothersome in a regular article and a user who has been there and feels that they deserve their own articles could see them and create the article.

For the other, like Footloose in Old Delhi, Two weeks in Morocco, One week in Dominica, etc. they are just clutter on an article page that will likely never grow. They are completely arbitrary trips, so if the creator doesn't provide enough information to work with, there is no need to save them. They can always be recreated, but adding a "Footloose in Old Delhi" subheading to the Delhi page would look like a quick revert to me, and would we really want to waste time arguing over the potential value leaving it could have? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:00, 5 May 2010 (EDT)

If it clearly adds little value, who's to say a quick revert isn't the best thing for it? Preferable, perhaps, to having it clutter the article space for a while, have someone stumble across it later, the outline tag added, then the vfd tag added a while later, followed by a vote, followed by a deletion. If the itinerary is really going to be the work of a single person, then there is always the option of developing it in their userspace until it is usable. If it is a start of a collaboration, then it is subject to the same reversion, modification as any other info in the article. --(WT-en) inas 01:49, 5 May 2010 (EDT)

The original idea at top of this section sounds good and reasonable, although personally I never created or edited a single itinerary--so it's very inexperienced point of view. --(WT-en) DenisYurkin 16:03, 6 May 2010 (EDT)

Is there a way that we don't implement this policy too literally, perhaps by a subjective usability criteria on a case by case basis? This was tagged with "outlineitinerary" today, which is OK by the policy, and which means it will be deleted by 2011 unless it's bumped to "usable", which I don't expect anytime soon, since it requires a very determined Wikivoyager hiking the whole 509-km trail and bringing back his/her notes. However, I see several issues with deleting that article, no matter if it's an outline or not: this trail is a very popular one, in fact a destination on its own, and I've heard of many people visiting Turkey just for the sake of hiking it. The articles goes into basics about trail marks, when best to walk, etc—all very helpful for hikers intending to do the trail. Further, even if it's an outline, it has one of the most, if not the most, detailed descriptions available in English for free about its first 15 or so km section (which is one of the most popular sections of the trail), in addition to a seperate but related 8-km long trail.

So, if just adding the names of villages and major sights along its route would make it a usable itinerary (that is what I gather from Project:Itinerary status), then fine, I'll try to search a little and come up with a list of them. However, I'm still in favour of adding a line to the policy about the subjective usability criteria I've aforementioned. – (WT-en) Vidimian 10:04, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

The policy states that an itinerary that doesn't move past outline status then it will be deleted, but it still has to go through the VFD process. The article you linked to looks like it is already at least "usable" to me, and I have a hard time believing that something with so much detail would gain a consensus to be deleted. This guideline was mainly created as a way to handle all of the random "itineraries" we get that never grow beyond 1-2 paragraphs. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 10:54, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

Actually, having now looked at a number of other itineraries that were tagged as "outline", I think we may either be being too strict with the status (example: Alaska Highway looks usable to me) or else we may need to revisit this policy; my original support was based on the idea that we need a way to clear out itineraries that weren't developed enough to allow others to work on them collaboratively (ie bare skeletons), but both Alaska Highway and Lycian Way seem to be well enough on their way as to be both usable now, and both are clear enough that others could add further detail without wondering what the original author's intent was. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:10, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

The reason why I have not tagged Lycian Way as usable is that further you move away from the western trailhead, less useful becomes the article—it's next to useless once you go past Kınık (or even Faralya). I think well-established and well-known trails and routes (like Lycian Way, Alaska Highway, or Baikal-Amur Mainline), i.e. those not put forward and named by Wikivoyagers, should be treated differently from "X in Z unit of time" itineraries, even if they are complete stubs. I wouldn't mind a note to communicate to the would-be creators of itinerary articles that "if you don't have anything else to say than "X is an itinerary between Y and Z", even if it's a well-established trail/route/etc, don't start the article.", though. – (WT-en) Vidimian 12:45, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

There was a discussion about this a while ago and it was agreed that itineraries of popular/famous/official travel routes are exempt from the one year vfd rule for the reason you stated. These are itineraries that we already know people actually do, rather than a suggested route like the "29 years in Lima"-type articles. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 16:00, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

FWIW, I read the itinerary article status criterion of a complete point-to-point listing of the itinerary's stops to mean simply that the main stops should be at the very least bullet pointed with names, if not full descriptions. As a rule, "usable" is not/should not be a very high hurdle for any article to pass. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 22:16, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article

Latest comment: 11 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion

This discussion continues the #Itinerary Nursery discussion above, but is a proposal to be much stricter about what constitutes a valid subject for an itinerary article. There have been a number of articles created today (apparently as part of a school project) that seem to highlight a weakness in Wikivoyage's itinerary article criteria:

The current policy on itineraries is the following:

An itinerary is an article that describes a path through several destinations or attractions, giving suggestions of where to stop, what to see, how to prepare, etc. If you think of our destination guides as dots on a map, an itinerary describes a line that connects those dots.

The problem with this criteria is that:

It encourages creation of articles with content that duplicates another article. There is nothing that would be placed in the A Long Weekend in London article that should not be in the existing London articles.
It encourages creation of arbitrary articles that aren't collaborative. Only the original author knows what is meant to be included in the Four Day Summer Family Trip in Lower Cape Cod article.
There is no clear criteria indicating when such articles are appropriate; A Weekend in Philly might be a good article, but why not also create "An afternoon in Philly, "Two weeks in Philly", "A month in Philly", etc?

I would propose the following change to the criteria for an itinerary article:

An itinerary article should be a guide for traveling along a specific route and not merely a suggested sightseeing schedule. Examples of good itinerary subjects are Route 66 (a historical path traveled by thousands each year) or The Wire Tour (a description of filming locations for a television show). Invalid itinerary topics would include One week in Sydney or Two months in Eastern Europe; information that would be included in such itineraries should instead be added to to the appropriate city or region articles.

A number of existing itinerary articles would need to be tagged for merging under this criteria, but in my opinion it would be a valuable clarification that would resolve a problematic gray area in Wikivoyage's current guidelines. Since this is a fairly major change to Wikivoyage's article criteria further comments are obviously needed and appreciated. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:03, 6 March 2012 (EST)

I'm inclined to support your suggestion. The problem I have with it is that it may result in the elimination of some good itinerary articles that now exist, but as a matter of policy, I think it's probably good, on balance. (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 23:06, 6 March 2012 (EST)

Could you give an example of such an article? The proposal seems sound to me, and I can even see some of the mergers required improving the chronically anemic See/Do sections in regional articles. The likelihood of collateral damage seems sufficiently low.

Apparently the class that created all these itineraries has been taught before, as with One Week in South County, which highlights the expected fate of these articles otherwise: burst of activity for about a week from a user who then never contributes again, and with no further improvements to the itinerary-in-name-only. — (WT-en) D. Guillaime 01:21, 16 March 2012 (EDT)

I can't give an example off-hand of a good itinerary article that would be eliminated, and until I think of one, it's a weak Devil's advocate argument. (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 03:35, 16 March 2012 (EDT)

Three days in Singapore is an excellent article, and I would be in favor of keeping it if there is a way to do so without setting a precedent that new "X in Y Days" articles are encouraged - perhaps it could be kept because it has maps that explicitly call out the route being described? That article seems to be the (very) rare exception, with the vast majority of such articles simply being bullet point lists that duplicate the main article (at best). -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:01, 16 March 2012 (EDT)

The articles listed above actually do not seem to follow even the current criteria with the exception of the Rhode Island one. That one should cover multiple destinations, but the others are within the same city and are not highlighting any particular aspect of touring the city that would be better outlined in an itinerary as opposed to the main city article. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 07:11, 8 March 2012 (EST)

I would happily support this. Good existing article content should be easy to merge, I think, because of the duplication noted by Ryan. I'd only add a link to one of our intra city walking itineraries, like Along the Magnificent Mile, since I think we should really be promoting that type of article more.--(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 18:37, 10 March 2012 (EST)

Would the following text (in addition to what's above) be sufficient to cover an article like Along the Magnificent Mile while still limiting the number of "X in Y days" articles?

Two questions that can help determine whether or not a subject is a good candidate for an itinerary article are the following:

Is the itinerary article about a specific route? Travelers can agree on what content would be included in an article such as Appalachian Trail, but it is completely subjective what should be included in articles such as "Ten days in Slovakia" or "A trip through historic sites in the American South".
Should the content in the itinerary article be covered elsewhere on Wikivoyage? An article such as "Visiting Boston's museums" would probably just duplicate content that should instead be placed in the main Boston articles.

In general, if there is any question whether a subject is a good itinerary topic or not, start out by including the information in the appropriate city or region article(s), and ask in the Pub whether a separate itinerary article makes sense.

-- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 23:51, 12 March 2012 (EDT)

I like that a lot. One question: Would or should it have any effect on travel topics like Touring prestigious universities in the U.S., that lack specific itineraries? (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 23:57, 12 March 2012 (EDT)

That is a travel topic, which as you point out is not an itinerary but does not need to be one. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 06:56, 13 March 2012 (EDT)

As (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus notes, we'll probably still have a gray area with some travel topics, but at least this proposal should make it clearer what is a valid itinerary subject. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:55, 13 March 2012 (EDT)

(Re-indenting) If I'm reading the comments correctly thus far there hasn't been any disagreement, but given the small number of people who have commented it would be great to get additional opinions. Would anyone else be agreeable/opposed to the suggested changes to the itinerary article criteria? -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:10, 19 March 2012 (EDT)

Anyone? Bueller? The proposed change seems like a worthwhile clarification, but isn't one that I'd be comfortable making without broader agreement. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:01, 24 March 2012 (EDT)

In principle, I like the idea of tightening up the criteria, getting rid of some that are useless, and heading off more. Text above is reasonable, but I'm not sure what's optimal.

How would A week near Hong Kong fare under these criteria? That's mostly by me, so of course I think worth preserving.

Or Shanghai_for_the_first-timer? That may be worth saving because Shanghai is such a huge complex place. (WT-en) Pashley 00:36, 25 March 2012 (EDT)

Since they aren't about specific routes, the two articles you've highlighted would fail the "is the itinerary about a specific route" criteria and thus would be tagged for merging. Recognizing that there are some existing "X in Y time period" articles that are exceptional (Three days in Singapore being one), we could potentially specify a grace period in which existing articles could be re-worked to meet the new criteria - would three months be reasonable? -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:19, 25 March 2012 (EDT)

Merging A week near Hong Kong into Pearl River Delta would be fairly straightforward. I'm not sure merging the Shanghai_for_the_first-timer article would work. (WT-en) Pashley 22:34, 25 March 2012 (EDT)

Is Shanghai for the first-timer really an itinerary, or is it more of a travel topic? If it's the latter than the new criteria probably wouldn't apply. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:58, 25 March 2012 (EDT)

Support in principle. How about requiring a full itinerary article to follow a route through more than one destination. City tours could be treated like districts. Just a suggestion, I dont have particularly strong feelings on this, but agree that a report on one travellers relatively aimless wanderings does not justify an article. • • • (WT-en) Peter (Southwood) ^Talk 02:18, 28 March 2012 (EDT)

Peter raised the example of something like Along the Magnificent Mile, which is a walking tour within a single district of Chicago. Requiring multiple cities would eliminate articles like this one. Is there another criteria that would allow such articles but avoid opening the door to lots of "A five minute walking tour from 4th St. to Broadway in New York"? The "about a specific route" criteria would at least make get rid of the "X in Y Days" articles, but we may still end up with a number of itineraries that sit at outline status for a year before they fall into the "delete outline itineraries after a year of inactivity" criteria. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:18, 29 March 2012 (EDT)

Good afternoon, Wikivoyage authors/community. I write today to weigh in and provide a perspective on this that seems to be less articulated, but at least worth thinking about. Foremost, I want to thank the community at large for their patience with the writers who contribute to this "information ecology". As one of the instructors who teaches the class, I understand the frustrations that are often advanced in these talk pages, but would also suggest that our aims are benevolent when we ask students to enter this existing group of writers and find ways to make meaningful and valued contributions while following the practices, standards, and guidelines provided. Certainly some students are less successful in effecting those goals than others, but from a learning perspective, few assignments are as useful as this because these student-writers get exposure to real world audiences and get to see the ways that others understand, read, and vet the writing they perform. Recently, it has been increasingly difficult for authors to make contributions to articles, so we have decided to have writers begin expanding the itinerary section of Wikivoyage. Like the contributions in other areas, some writers are more successful than others. For example, what appears to me a stronger contribution. One example, of what some within the Wikivoyage community might perceive of as a less succssful contribution.

While I sense some frustration from the community that students are contributing as an assignment, I would argue that such contributions are at the very heart of what makes up the economies surrounding wikis. In principle, anyone can contribute and that is what makes these spaces so wonderful and special. We value the open economy and approach to information, and we hope to expose students to authoring in these environments. We expect and understand that there will be dissatisfaction when new-users fail to appropriately address the requirements/expectations of what counts as a "good" contribution. Yet, at the same time, this is part of learning the genre/environment, and we hope that we foster writers who will mature to be productive contributors to this wiki.

Still, one aspect of this debate (specifically found on this page), surrounds what constitutes/should constitute an itinerary in Wikivoyage. In other words, the discussion in some ways surrounds what elements surround the genre. From a rhetorical perspective, genre is a slippery concept/entity. It is both a container and a set of embodied, evolving relationships that writers enact as they perceived what information should fit within a specific container. This is why it seems there is difficulty saying what types of itineraries should be done away with, as well as which types should be perserved. I concur that when contributions are less developed, such additions should be moved/deleted/cleaned up. However, I would suggest that perhaps allowing for multiple understandings of what itinerary might mean could be a productive and useful stance for this community. Specifically, there is debate on the talk page about the contributions that have been made the to the Fenway by Foot itinerary. In concept, I think that this could be a strong notion of itinerary--in practice, I understand that perhaps there is too fine-grained a view of this place, and perhaps the development of the "path" through the place could be refined and expanded upon. But, to merely state that no itineraries should exist on a single location seems, in my view, to reify a significant potential number of what could be creative and useful additions to this page. Just as some of the itineraries are tailored with a temporal focus (four days in X) and some have a specific slant for a specific audience (three days in X with children), does not mean that such contributions are not itineraries but that these writers understand itinerary as a complex genre that can be oriented to focus more attention to 'place', temporarily, or audience. Those are the question that reside at the heart of these disagreements: Should Wikivoyage's understanding of itinerary emphasize only one of these potential ways of organizing information within the "container" that makes up the data that resides in these itineraries? Perhaps, they should, but each choice will certainly have consequences on for how information is then framed here, and those decisions will reflect assumptions the community at large has about the ways in which they understand place and travels through it. I for one, as a frequent user of this site, value the multiple ways of constructing a way through these places, and would argue for an inclusive view of itinerary as is possible. Why not? Perhaps even consider organizing itineraries differently? Itineraries for specific audiences (parents/families; (non)-drinkers; (non)drivers; bike riders) might be one way of listing/subordinating a growing list of itineraries and it might be a way of attracting more users to the site. Ultimately what good is a text if it doesn't provide information that audiences use and might find useful? And, given the myriad ways that people differ, how can we make assumptions that all audiences will value the same type of information. In think some of the disruption/debate here is useful and good in that regard--it enables and demonstrates the type of complex ways that "we" think about what this Wiki should be. And, what types of values surround who contributes and how they contribute.

That is why it's difficult to say, hard and fast, which type of itinerary should stay and which should go. The best itineraries, however, will provide some information that a real audience would benefit from reading. And, granted some of that information might be better placed in article pages, themselves. I, thank you all for you consideration of these ideas, and for the patience you extend to the students who visit and write here. Some, I know, become regular contributors to this and other wikis, and often this class is their entry into the participatory web.

Tim

Hi Tim. This conversation is veering a bit off course, in dealing with how best to have classes contribute, rather than the question at hand of what exactly we mean by (i.e., are looking for in the term) "itinerary." The problem with the "X period in Y destination" articles is that they are not travel guides—they are essentially essays, and that is something Wikivoyage is not for. (We were working on a branch of Wikivoyage, Wikivoyage Extra [5], which would have been better suited for this, but that has fallen by the wayside.) It is awesome to have students participating here, but it might be useful for the assignment to go back to basics (check out Project:Ways to help Wikivoyage), and to understand that the nature of this site is not conducive to each student creating their own article for grading. Also, try soliciting feedback in the pub from other users as to how to best get your students contributing—I'm sure people would have good suggestions, which would help decrease the likelihood of, say, your students articles getting outright deleted for straying from the scope of our goals and policies.

Back to the policy change suggested here, though, I'd just like to voice my support once more for Ryan's new wording. I do plan travel itineraries professionally, and could write a great "Two days in D.C." article, but the whole point of such work is to tailor it for a specific person/group. Written to the anonymous online mass, these are too tightly prescriptive to be useful, and potentially distract from what our site is about. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 22:25, 2 April 2012 (EDT)

(Re-indenting) Peter said most of what I would have responded with, but to reiterate, having students contribute here is a great thing, although asking them to each create a brand new article on a site that already covers 26,000 destinations is problematic. As Peter noted, a conversation in the Pub about how best to model a student assignment would be very welcome. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:41, 2 April 2012 (EDT)

If I'm reading the above discussion we seem to have consensus for a change. Are there any further comments on the following proposed text?

An itinerary article should be a guide for traveling along a specific route and not merely a suggested sightseeing schedule. Examples of good itinerary subjects are Route 66 (a historical path traveled by thousands each year) or The Wire Tour (a guide for visiting filming locations for a television show). Invalid itinerary topics would include One week in Sydney or Two months in Eastern Europe; information that would be included in such itineraries should instead be added to to the appropriate city or region articles.

Two questions that can help determine whether or not a subject is a good candidate for an itinerary article are the following:

Is the itinerary article about a specific route? Travelers can agree on what content would be included in an article such as Appalachian Trail, but it is completely subjective what should be included in articles such as "Ten days in Slovakia" or "A trip through historic sites in the American South".
Should the content in the itinerary article be covered elsewhere on Wikivoyage? An article such as "Visiting Boston's museums" would probably just duplicate content that should instead be placed in the main Boston articles.

In general, if there is any question whether a subject is a good itinerary topic or not, start out by first including the information in the appropriate city or region article(s), and ask in the Pub whether a separate itinerary article makes sense.

-- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 00:35, 6 April 2012 (EDT)

I again voice support, this time for the new language, which improves on the previous version.

I will offer one new caveat, though: What happens if all the non-conforming itineraries are simply redefined as travel topics, without further editing? In other words, don't we have to anticipate a problem with the remaining loophole? (WT-en) Ikan Kekek 01:59, 6 April 2012 (EDT)

Hopefully this discussion at least sets a precedent that any "X in Y time period" article is not a travel topic, but the definition of what *is* a travel topic could probably use further clarification. I think we'll probably also need to consider either grandfathering or re-working a small percentage of the existing itinerary articles - for example, it would be a shame to tag a great article like Three days in Singapore for merging, but at the same time I'd hate to have that article be used as justification for why more "X in Y days" articles should be allowed. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:57, 6 April 2012 (EDT)

Being the lame person that I am, I would like to make the simple request that the examples include geographical diversity. For example, if we use the Appalachian Trail, then change the "A trip through the historic sites in the American South" to "Cultural Tour of West Africa", "Best of Bhutan", or whatever, and then also change the museum example to some other city with a lot of museums (Beijing, Cairo, Athens, Mexico City, etc. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 11:24, 8 April 2012 (EDT)

I've updated Project:Itineraries per the discussion above, with the changes suggested by (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus incorporated (feel free to change for further geographic diversity as desired). As noted at the beginning of this discussion there are a number of existing itinerary articles that should be tagged for merging under the new criteria, although I'd also suggest we consider grandfathering in a small handful of exceptional itineraries that might not meet the new criteria (such as Three days in Singapore) on a case-by-case basis. For "Three days in Singapore", it has maps and is a guide (if not star) quality article, and it would be a shame to lose it at this point. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:04, 8 April 2012 (EDT)

I apologize for not being aware of this discussion earlier; this page is not on my watchlist!

It seems to me there are two problems we are primarily trying to solve here. First, that itineraries are often written/designed in such a way that they are difficult to improve for anyone who is not the primary author. These articles are not well suited to the wiki environment, and thus not well suited to Wikivoyage. Second, that many itineraries' subjects are arbitrary (an arbitrary number of days in a particular community, or an arbitrary route through a large region), allowing an infinite number of variations to the point of redundancy.

The new rules certainly solve those two problems, but as noted, cause additional ones due to their applicability to excellent itineraries we'd like to keep. So if we want to keep those articles, we have to determine what makes them different from the ones we don't want. Is it just quality? Then it is unfair to say "no 'X days in Y location' articles, period", because any such new article might be carefully tended and grow in the future to become just as good as Three days in Singapore. Is there some other quality of the articles we want to keep that would help us distinguish them?

Perhaps, since we already have a "usable within a year or delete" rule for all itineraries, what if we tightened it to "guide within a year or merge" for "arbitrary" itineraries (ones that don't follow a specific known route or are otherwise not conducive to collaboration)? Would that satisfy all of the goals?

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 12:04, 9 April 2012 (EDT)

I would be hesitant to re-adopt a policy that keeps the door to these sorts of articles open - while Three days in Singapore may be a great article, the vast majority (95+ percent) of these types of articles would be merge candidates under the "guide within a year" criteria, based on a perusal of List of itineraries. Even the Three days in Singapore article would probably be a merge candidate if it didn't have maps since it would fail the "about a specific route" criteria, and thus be hugely difficult to collaborate on.

For the reasons discussed in the thread above, the new criteria seem to be a positive change. If someone really does want to do a "X in Y days" article they can make an argument for it, and I suspect that a map and an edit history that demonstrates a pattern of finishing articles would probably be enough to convince others of the value of such an article. To my mind that's a far better situation than allowing anyone to start any arbitrary article, which splits up content that belongs in destination guides and leaves it to other contributors to then do the tedious task of merging after waiting for twelve months. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:49, 9 April 2012 (EDT)

Well, not to be too contrary, but who's going to go to the trouble of making a map for an itinerary that we might not let them work on? I thought you were looking for a way to render the policy to justify keeping Three days in Singapore, but any such rule is going to have to also allow other good itineraries to stay. (WT-en) LtPowers 14:28, 9 April 2012 (EDT)

An argument could be made that Three days in Singapore meets the new criteria since the maps identify a specific route, which I think would justify keeping it. As to "who's going to the trouble of making a map for an itinerary that we might not let them work on", I think that's inherent in the new guidelines - new itineraries should be about a recognized route, and if someone REALLY wants to create an itinerary that is not about a recognized route then it is up to them to find a way to meet that criteria. The alternative is that we continue to allow itineraries that don't easily lend themselves to collaboration. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:53, 10 April 2012 (EDT)

As more of a reader than an editor here, I've found these "X in Y day(s)" itineraries to be very helpful. Even if they are not to be followed specifically, they aid in trip planning since articles on individual cities fail to prioritize the sights - and the longer the article, to more "unimportant" sights a short term traveler will have to sift through. On a 2 day trip to Chicago a couple weeks ago I used Along the Magnificent Mile, not following it exactly, but following it in general to make sure I didn't skip anything important with my limited time there. It is good to have rules, but it is bad to have rules that prioritize consistency over purpose. Any city article in any major tourist guidebook will tell you what you can do in X number of days. Why can't Wikivoyage do the same just because it is collaboratively edited? Without replacement guidelines on how to incorporate ideas on priorities within cities in the city articles to fill the void, Wikivoyage is reducing its effectiveness in removing "X in Y day(s)" itineraries. If something were a real priority (i.e. visit the Art Institute in Chicago), then you'd think enough people would agree on it that collaborative editing would not get in the way of it appearing in an itinerary. Three days in Singapore (parts of which I've relied on while in Singapore a few months ago) makes specific restaurant recommendations. Editor opinions like these are useful, and just because there is the potential for disagreement on editor preferences does not mean information like this should be removed entirely. It should only be removed (or augmented) when there is, ahem, a disagreement.

Now to the problem that different people have different preferences on what to do in a specific period of time - why not create some sort of itinerary purgatory? Draft the articles off the main namespace and enact some sort of approval process. If the problem is with quality, just enact more stringent quality controls, rather than flushing out the good with the bad.--(WT-en) Jiang 13:25, 10 April 2012 (EDT)

Another thought. If I understand correctly, the change in policy is based on the rationale that different editors can have totally irreconcilable ideas on the same topic. The cure can be to limit the geographical scope to an itinerary to match the time given to complete the itinerary. Say City A is a big city, and it takes 4 days to hit the famous tourist highlights. The rule should then be that the time for "x days in City A" as an itinerary should be roughly x=4, and there should be no articles about "One day in City A" or "Two days in City A" because the short time, coupled with what editors deem to be priorities in such a large geographical scope (relative to 1 day or 2 days) will force too many judgment calls based on personal preference. But if you extend the time scope to 4 days, and limit the geographical scope to the borders of City A, then those familiar with City A will generally hold some sort of reasoned wisdom as to what should be seen in 4 days.

Again, if you make a blanket rule saying that no itineraries should tell people how to prioritize their time within a limited geographical area, then I would have to head to Frommers, which does a relatively crappy job most of the time.

Lonely Planet gives me another idea: why not just put a text box to the side of the main article, stating what highlights to hit within Y number of days. Relative to having itinerary articles though, information is still lost. I would have to head to google maps to figure how to get from one place to another, without having that information in accessible form right in front of me.--(WT-en) Jiang 20:44, 10 April 2012 (EDT)

There are comments that somewhat address your concerns further above in this thread, but to respond to your specific point, why wouldn't the main article just contain pointers in the "See" and "Do" sections? The Chicago article highlights some of the "must see" items for Chicago, and Chicago district articles then go into greater detail. In addition to making sure itineraries are collaborative ("about a recognized route"), a second goal of this change is to encourage content to be placed into the destination articles rather than split into multiple itinerary articles. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:11, 10 April 2012 (EDT)

Yet we still have Along the Magnificent Mile, which goes into greater detail on the sights and sounds and scheduling than would be appropriate for Chicago or even one of the district articles through which the route passes. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:53, 12 April 2012 (EDT)

Section break

It was recently brought up again in Talk:Three days in Singapore. Sato rightly states that the article should be deleted per this policy. To me, that says more about this policy than about the article. Along the Magnificent Mile also doesn't follow a recognized route and thus should also be deleted. Why would we delete perfectly valuable articles? Globe-trotter (talk) 00:24, 12 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps, then, what we need is a vetting process. It's ugly, and a lot of work, but I don't see any other way to keep Three Days and Magnificent Mile except to say "these are good ideas for itineraries; if you can come up with an equally good one and make a good article and map for it, fine". That approach doesn't lend itself to collaboration -- the person with the idea will have to do most of the work -- but I don't see much way around it. LtPowers (talk) 00:46, 12 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

I tried clearing some of the trouble up in the policy article. I think the first paragraph really conveys what we mean by "itinerary," and the rest got a little convoluted. I think Three days in Singapore is an example of the type of itinerary article that we don't want (a personal taste schedule of activities, rather than a simple route guide). But it's of such high quality that I feel perfectly comfortable establishing a consensus to keep it as an exception to the rule.

The part I really got rid of was the "recognizable" part, which is very problematic. There is no defined route for seeing public art in the Loop or filming locations from The Wire, aside from the ones I cooked up becoming the de facto standard on the web. But we shouldn't discourage that kind of focused creativity—it's what any tour guide would do in setting up a walking/driving/camel-riding tour. And I see itineraries as our response to walking tours, which we don't allow, because the information is supposed to be included here! --Peter ^Talk 22:06, 12 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

The whole point of the changed policy was to ban routes that are not collaborative in nature. Articles like Along the Magnificent Mile and Three days in Singapore should then be deleted because they are relatively random routes through a city, mostly chosen by one person, and thus deemed not collaborative. I don't see how a random tour through Chicago would now suddenly pass this policy, while a random tour of Singapore would violate it? The agreed upon policy wants to discourage this kind of individual creativity. Globe-trotter (talk) 22:26, 12 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

First, the main tourist avenue in Chicago is not a random route. The first line of the page is that an itinerary is a "guide for traveling along a specific route through several destinations or attractions." Along the Magnificent Mile is that, while Three days in Singapore is a planned trip. I think the policy makes it pretty clear that what we're looking to avoid are articles of the X Time in Y Destination type. Looking at it, I think it would follow this policy as currently written if it were broken into three separate itineraries. --Peter ^Talk 00:42, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Along the Magnificent Mile is basically "One day in Chicago" with a better name. It's a personal itinerary and sightseeing schedule through central Chicago. I could write up a completely different route through Chicago for a day and make an itinerary about it. If it were broken into three separate itineraries it would still not be collaborative. This policy limits itineraries to things like Route 66 where a specific recognized route is followed, and thus is deemed "collaborative". Globe-trotter (talk) 02:07, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

What you are saying about Along the Magnificent Mile is just not true. That's like saying Appalachian Trail shouldn't be allowed because there are other hiking trails in the eastern United States. Anyway, though, I changed the wording from "recognizable" to just "specific," which allows an author to specify a route, even if it's not known to the world (as with Loop Art Tour).

You are the only person who takes such a restrictive view of how this policy is written (much more restrictive than the intent of the last major revision), and that you are the only person who has been adding merge/delete tags to such articles. So strangely, the only danger of your fears being realized seems to be your own actions? --Peter ^Talk 02:45, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

It was Sato basing its judgment on this policy page, I didn't place a merge/delete tag. But well, we have to follow the guidelines the community agreed with, even if I don't agree with them. As far as I can judge, it's not just me who reads it this way, e.g. see LtPowers' comment above yours. The policy states: "Personal" itineraries encourage creation of arbitrary articles that aren't collaborative. While everyone can agree on what should go in an itinerary article like Alaska Highway, only the original author knows what was meant to be included in "One day in Tokyo".

Only you knew what was meant to be included in Along the Magnificent Mile (or Loop Art Tour) when you started it, thus it is not of a collaborative nature per this policy. If you had abandoned the article after a few sentences, no one would have known what you meant to include in it. The purpose of the policy was exactly to prevent personal itineraries that are not collaborative. Maybe I'm not understanding something right, but I'm not sure how this could be interpreted differently. Before the changes you applied, it was even more clear that only recognized routes are allowed. Along the Magnificent Mile, Loop Art Tour, Three Days in Singapore, Yaowarat Tour, all are not recognized routes, they are personally made up ones and only the original author could complete them once started.

If an author can specify its own route, that would mean basically any personal itinerary would be allowed and a complete reversal of the policy as stated. It should then state something like: "Personal itineraries encourage the creation of arbitrary articles that aren't collaborative. This is encouraged. Even though only the original author knows what is to be included in such an itinerary, they are still welcomed if they reach usable/guide status within 1 year." Globe-trotter (talk) 03:46, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

On the specific examples... no. The Magnificent Mile (a mile+ stretch of a main downtown avenue) is a principal tourist destination, with a bunch of the city's main sights right along it. If Marc hadn't written it, I could have, and the content would be pretty similar. Similarly, an itinerary designed to tour public art in the Loop is not a personal itinerary—it tours the most notable public art in the city. Anyone who wanted to write about such things would be able to contribute meaningfully to the article. Only the route was invented by the author (me), but it works and is specific, which meets the policy requirements as of the current revision.

Again, what we were trying to avoid was personal trip planning, e.g., "here's what to do on your 3-day trip to X." Not a single "guide for traveling along a specific route through several destinations or attractions, giving suggestions of where to stop, what to see, how to prepare, etc." The revisions to this policy were meant to discourage "X time in Y" articles, for more than one reason. If the current writing would prevent anyone from writing a themed walking tour, then it clearly would not suit our intent, but I just don't agree that it does that. --Peter ^Talk 04:29, 13 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

I think perhaps the policy needs revision for clarity then, because I'm only just starting to understand the distinction you're drawing. But even with that distinction, we're left with a very good Three days in Singapore article that doesn't seem to fit our requirements. LtPowers (talk) 22:50, 14 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

During the original discussion about tightening the itinerary article criteria we tried to make sure that articles like Three days in Singapore and Along the Magnificent Mile would still be acceptable, but apparently that was not entirely successful. Those original discussions included the proposal that itineraries with well-defined routes were OK, so something like Route 66 was fine since it's a known route, but something like Along the Magnificent Mile was also OK since the itinerary article provides a map that explicitly details the scope of the itinerary. Three Days in Singapore, while something that would benefit from a better title, also details a very specific route, and thus anyone familiar with the route can contribute to the article. Conversely, some of the articles we've gotten in the past such as "A weekend in Providence" were about a time period in a city and not about a specific route through the city, and those were the sorts of articles we wanted to discourage since they merely duplicated content from the main city article (anything worth recommending in the Providence article is worth recommending on the weekend). It's a slightly-odd distinction, but assuming people are still OK with that definition of "itinerary" please update the policy page to make that definition clearer. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:34, 15 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Problems with the changed policy

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Over at Talk:One week in Sydney#Merge tag we have a debate over merging of a possibly problematic intinerary, citing policy from this page. There are problems with such a merge.

First off, it will irritate a contributor who has put a fair bit of work into the article. Irritating contributors seems clearly to be something we don't want to do unless it is really necessary, and I am not certain this is.

Second, there is a difficult trade-off involved. Moving everything from this article into the Sydney article might make that article complex and unreadable, clutter it up with things not all visitors need. On the other hand, if we move only some of it then trash this article, we may lose things that would actually be useful to some travellers. (WT-en) Pashley 01:25, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

I think all of the reasons originally discussed for making the change to the itinerary article criteria (and that are now outlined in the policy) hold true, and those reasons should be considered in this discussion. However, the argument that we don't want to "irritate a contributor who has put a fair bit of work into the article" is a very strong one, and the intent of starting a discussion on that article's talk page was to hopefully steer the contributor towards something that is more obviously a valid itinerary article. With that said, the primary goal of Wikivoyage is to create a useful worldwide travel guide, and literally thousands of comments and discussions have gone into finding a consensus for best achieving that goal; how to organize and present information has been a core component of those discussions, and there is clearly concern about splitting content into arbitrary articles. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:44, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

A wiki is a collaboration. Articles in this form tend to be a shrine to a single user, it isn't and never can be a collaboration.

As far as User:(WT-en) JRG is concerned, he/she is an old hand at this, and I'm sure is more than capable of putting their best case forward for the article to be maintained. If you want you work to be preserved as monument to your effort, then a wiki isn't really for you. --(WT-en) Inas 01:58, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

I've commented on the talk page over there. The point of the article (which was started before the "policy" came into place) was to I suppose "summarise" some of the information and put together a useful collection of materials for a very large city to make a usable itinerary. The Sydney page is enormous and there are about 12 subpages under that. How is any lay reader of Wikivoyage even supposed to understand where to start (besides the well-known tourist attractions)? In no way is it supposed to be a personal page and I'm happy for it to be edited (except no one is doing that for Sydney these days, and even I have little time to help), but I will really be cranky if it is merged simply because of policy by people who have had no input into the article and who don't understand why it was created.

By the way, the idea for this was based on Three days in Singapore, which I understand was a usable or starred article at one point. (WT-en) JRG 02:19, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

It's great that you're happy for it to be edited, but how would that work? What if someone argues that an attraction you called out is not worth anyone's time and recommends something else as a replacement? How does that conflict get resolved? On the other side of the coin, does removing this well-written article actually improve the site? Isn't this article useful, and its content too voluminous to merge? The traveler comes first; if this article is useful for the traveler, and the author is not exerting editorial control, why remove it? (WT-en) LtPowers 10:02, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

Responding to (WT-en) JRG, Three days in Singapore was actually cited during the original discussion about changing the policy as the very rare example of a good "X in Y Days" article, and the policy was crafted to try to grandfather that article in - that article calls out specific routes and includes maps of those routes, so the scope of the article becomes very well defined. I'm sympathetic to the amount of work that has gone into the new Sydney article and would probably support making an exception to policy in order to keep it as another rare example of a good "X in Y Days" itinerary article, but please understand that the intent of the policy change was to ensure that content is put where users are most likely to look (in this case, the city and district articles), and to make sure content is organized in a way that is collaborative (as noted by (WT-en) LtPowers, only the original author knows what is meant to be included in a "X in Y Days" article). -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:05, 8 June 2012 (EDT)

I wrote the suggested day itineraries on the talk page, they have been there for comment since the beginning and I'm open to hearing what people want to include. I've made some changes to what I wanted from the beginning (e.g. the itinerary currently excludes Bondi Beach, which is probably a place many tourists want to see). I agree that many itineraries can be covered in normal place articles, however some large places with lots to do and lots of sub-districts (I'm thinking the likes of London, New York, Sydney, etc. - large spread out places with lots of tourist attractions) it might be ok to have an itinerary page to summarise some of the places that people can visit. (WT-en) JRG 23:33, 10 June 2012 (EDT)

But isn't that what the See section of the main article is for? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 20:18, 11 June 2012 (EDT)

(Re-indenting) Only being aware of this discussion now, I heavily oppose the current wording, if not the idea at all. Why would we want to remove valuable articles like One day in Bangkok, Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour, Along the Magnificent Mile, Three days in Singapore, or pretty much every itinerary for that matter? Cities like Bangkok are huge, with a lot to do in many different districts. One could say—"the relevant information is already in the See, Eat, etc articles." I disagree with that. The See, Eat and Drink sections give overall information about attractions and restaurants in a city in prose. An itinerary suggests a route from A to B using specific listings from the district articles. They are basically for the lazy traveller who does not want to spit through all the listings descriptions of all sub-pages, but just wants to follow a set path that is recommended by another traveller. Itineraries are "personal" by nature, so prohibiting "personal itineraries" doesn't make sense. If we'd be demoting itineraries to only using tourist bureau-signed trails like the Appalachian Trail, we might as well call them travel topics and remove itineraries altogether.

Imagine a user starts writing an itinerary and stops somewhere in the middle of it. Two things could happen:

Our policy already states that if the itinerary article is not in a usable status, it will be removed after one year.
If the itinerary is usable, then why remove it? Apparently it is useful information for travellers. Other travellers could expand or improve upon given information. One day in Bangkok was started by one user, but improved upon by other users to its current state.

I'd say if someone starts an article with "Three weeks in Slovakia" and then doesn't complete it within one year, it should have an "outline" status and should be removed. Our previous policy already dealt with issues like these, however I do believe we should enforce it more properly. --Globe-trotter (talk) 13:33, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

This is a very difficult issue, and I'm still undecided on my stance. I can understand the idea behind the current policy. We don't want to end up with Singapore in an hour, a day, 3 days, a week, 2 weeks and a month. Where do we draw the line? And is this just duplicating content from the main article?

But then again, I used the Three days in Singapore itinerary for a holiday I am planning in the near future and found it quite helpful. Something normal Wikivoyage articles don't do well is highlight the best tourist attractions and which ones visitors should prioritise. When written in a list, policy states they should be alphabetical and must-see attractions are often mixed in with "if-you-have-spare-time" attractions. The itineraries which have been outlawed often do a great job of letting you know what you must see before you leave! JamesA ^>talk 14:13, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

I disagree with Globe-trotter's interpretation of the policy a bit. Any article with an actual route would still be fine. Being an occasionally pragmatic bunch, I think we agreed to preserve any really good X time in Y articles (i.e., Three days in Singapore). Overwhelmingly, though, the X time in Y articles are really bad and don't do a good job at all of appealing to a diverse group of travelers. One way of handling this by policy, rather than trusting ourselves to be pragmatic, would be to have a much stricter threshold for keeping X in Y itineraries? Make it guide status? --Peter ^Talk 15:28, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

I agree that many of those articles are of appalling quality, but I think they should just be merged and redirected following the policy we already had in place. Having different policies for already established articles and new articles strikes me as unfair, even if this could be pragmatic. Following current policy guidelines, all star itineraries would have to be removed, just like well-developed articles like One day in Bangkok (which is tagged with deletion).

Itineraries are other ways of seeing travel, by time instead of by location. It is a completely different way of presenting information than the destination articles do. I think that if someone wants to create a new "One day in..." article, that should be encouraged, as long as it is turned into something useful within a year. I would also be okay with requiring it to be guide status within a year to be kept. But I'm heavily opposed to not allowing "personal" itineraries. At least 90% of itineraries on Wikivoyage are "personal", except for those few itineraries that have well-defined paths with signs placed along them (like Appalachian Trail or Route 66). Removing all personal itineraries would pretty much mean the end of the itineraries category as we know it. --Globe-trotter (talk) 15:54, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

(ec)I also think there's a place for well-written "personal" itineraries. JamesA captured my thoughts well -- the good ones separate the must sees from the if-you-have-spare-times, something I personally think our guides don't usually do a very good job of. Requiring guide status after one year works for me. -Shaund (talk) 15:58, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

Agree. The articles about big cities always blur the significance of attractions. I enjoy our content on London, but it is not suited for a first-time visitor. It will be sad to remove all relevant itineraries, so we should rather develop a tough policy. The requirements could be:

Guide status in one year (as suggested)
Map(s)!
"Personal" itineraries are allowed only for big cities with districts and at least usable status.
Only one itinerary per city, i.e., when we have "1 day" we no longer need "2 days" or "3 days" or "afternoon". As long as each itinerary is supposed to be a selection of major attractions (which are, as usual, subject to discussions and consensus), the exact time frame does not mater. We could also think about renaming the existing itineraries, because the time frame depends on a person. Travelers have different pace...
The requirement of having a well-defined route should be fulfilled

Personally, I believe that the title likes "One day in" or "Two days in" should be discouraged. Each itinerary can be easily shortened to one day or even half a day by skipping museums and the like. The time frame also depends on the season. Unless you are in Bangkok or Singapore, the short winter day gives you 30-50% less time than the long day in summer, and it really matters.

-- Atsirlin (talk) 16:39, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

It's possible that the current phrasing on the policy page does not really represent the intent of the change (which I did and still do support). The real point is just that the itinerary should have... a route, not merely suggestions for day 1, day 2, etc. --Peter ^Talk 01:29, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

Also, as there clearly is a clarification issue here, I would certainly hold off on adding (or even just remove) all those merge/delete tags. --Peter ^Talk 01:30, 20 September 2012 (CEST)

[re-indent] Having read through many (but not all) of the comments, it seems pretty clear that fixed routes (Annapurna Circuit, or Alaska Highway) aren't a big issue, except when they may be too long/unwieldy, but that time-based itineraries and vague point A to point B itineraries are rather contentious. Here's a couple ideas to fix these issues (sorry if some examples are too US/North America-specific):

Route too long — like Trans-Canada Highway, Route 66, Appalachian Trail — Create a new form of travel topic, routes, which would include general background, travel tips, practicalities, etc on the main page. For more specific information, divide the route into segments that become separate pages (think of how cities are divided into districts). On Wikipedia, major routes (like Interstate highways, I-95 or I-40) are divided into sections by state. Here on Wikivoyage, a route like Route 66 would have a main page, featuring historical info and practical info (description of current route, route map & pertinent safety/travel info). Then, segment pages (by political boundary...state...or regional...multi-state) which contain the detailed info, like the actual highways used (with tips, like "heading east, Route 66 splits to the left when entering Town A"), attractions along the route in some detail, and maybe a header with iconic eat/sleep/fuel listings (but a box at the beginning of the section reiterating that listing belong in city/town pages). The Route 66 Wikipedia page is a good example, great info, with specifics on pages by state (under "Route facts", example w:U.S. Route 66 in Arizona). With the example of the Appalachian Trail, the main page would discuss practicalities for the whole route, while segment pages would go into detail with info on route (distances, GPS waypoints, elevation, camping locations, local hazards, etc).

Routes too vague — like Silk Road, Istanbul to New Delhi over land, Along the Yellow River — There need to be specific criteria for vague routes to exist. Criteria I can think of are:

Historic routes such as the Silk Road & Hippie Trail (which is what Istanbul to New Delhi over land is). A historic route would have sections on history, a description of common elements (if any) of the route, practicalities, general route description, and safety. If necessary, segments could be separated out onto another page. A great example of this would be the Silk Road, which lures many adventurous travelers still today. While we may not need encyclopedic detail like Wikipedia, a good history section would be the start; Route Overview (a new section) would cover the people, climates, topography, cultures, and various common aspects of the route (caravansaries, chaikhanas [teahouses], and stuff you can still do/see that are relics...like buying porcelain or lapis jewelry); Prepare would cover practicalities to cover the whole route (visas, and special traveler issues...like navigating around Turkmenistan/Iran, which are difficult to get visas for, and good places to begin/end travel along segments); a route description (ideally in paragraph form and full of links to city/town pages); and end with various safety/cope/stay healthy info. Separate pages can be created to go into more detail along the route, which for the Silk Road would probably be between major cities (or former major cities) on the route rather than national boundaries, such as "Silk Road: Xi'an to Kashgar" and "Silk Road:Kokand to Merv".

Navigation corridors (best wording I can come up with) that may warrant special attention — The most common example would be travel along rivers. Some rivers, like the Danube, Volga, and Yellow, are common itineraries for travelers and it makes sense to describe them as routes, describing common elements (riverboats, landscapes, history) and the route; as opposed to otherwise using the map on a regional/country page to figure out yourself which villages/towns lie along the route. I don't see any examples in our current list of itineraries, but I also think there can be appropriate circumstances where there is a common way of traveling through a region where writing an itinerary would be appropriate (like "National Route X across the ABC Mountains"). Detailed listings would go/remain in the city/town pages. This can also cover travel between two places by less-common means or a less common route, such as Russia to Japan via Sakhalin, but only when there are limited options (too many options and it becomes opinion/too broad and should be treated as opinion—see sugestion for time-based itineraries below).

Commonly-traveled routes would focus on the practicalities of getting from Point A to Point B and could be grouped together with "Navigation corridors" above, but may deserve slightly different treatment in that little/no info is given about sights/attractions and these guides simply focus on routes and there practicalities. Examples of this would be Pan-American Highway, Cairo to Nairobi overland (a common path, with only a couple main routes to travel by), Europe to South Asia over land (too broad to cover sights/attractions along the way, but a common path for travelers), and Overland to Tibet (again, too broad for sights/attractions, but a helpful topic for travelers).

Contentious/subjective topics (namely "X Days in Such-and-such City"). This has obviously been the most difficult topic to discuss. As far as only allowing one such itinerary per city (per time period), there are far too many ways to write "2 days in London" and I don't like the idea of limiting ourselves to just one. But when we have "2/3/4/5/6/7 days in London" pages, it borders on absurd. My idea for this is to allow many versions of each and set up a rating system and allow others to vote on the quality of a guide. So, 20 different users write "One week in New York City". Criteria would be set for ranking user-generated itineraries. Only those itineraries which reach "guide" status would get a tag on them, putting them into a special category. The public would be able to view a category (say {{Itineraries:London}}) which displays all user-generated itineraries that are at guide level for a particular city/region/country. A link in the sidebar or a box on the destination page (like the commons box on WP pages) would point the general public (anyone who reads Wikivoyage, not just us editors in-the-know) to these itineraries. On the category page of user-generated itineraries, there would be a link at the bottom to all itineraries for that destination, just so that they can be seen. The biggest issue would be naming and possible confusion. My preference would be tacking on the user's name at the end ("3 Days in Hong Kong by AHeneen"). The link at the bottom of a destination page or in a box might be "Wikivoyage has suggested itineraries for a visit to Chicago. See {{Itineraries:Chicago}}." I think this would be a great asset to Wikivoyage in that we expand choices for our readers (that's any person stopping by for travel advice, whether familiar with wikis or not). Should any itineraries reach "Star" status, they should be linked to on the destination article. AHeneen (talk) 07:20, 15 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Merge tag on itineraries

Swept in from the pub

A merge tag has been placed on many itineraries, such as One day in Bangkok, One week in Eastern Tasmania, A week in Sheki, etc. Has there been some kind of policy discussion I am unaware of? I don't see how these articles would breach the criteria for being a separate article. --Globe-trotter (talk) 02:20, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

Yes, from back in March/April following a sudden surge (apparent class project) in skeletal itinerary articles: the discussion is here, and the revised policy is Wikivoyage:Itineraries#"Personal" itineraries. — D. Guillaume (talk) 03:25, 19 September 2012 (CEST)

Themed itineraries

Latest comment: 11 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

Hi. I thought about contributing to the site before really looking at it and I had the idea of starting something like "George Orwell's Barcelona", which would basically be an itinerary for a walking tour of the city going past key locations in Orwell's book Homage to Catalonia, with context info and photos. Looking at the policies, though, I'm not sure if this is a type of article that would be OK. Would it? FormerIP (talk) 23:36, 16 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Not only do I think it would be okay per our policies, I'd actually be eager to read it (I'm an Orwell fan). Plunge forward. If other editors have a problem with the article, they'll make it known and you can hammer out a consensus as to its future direction. But speaking from my own experiences, I doubt very much that will be the case. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:46, 16 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes, that sounds fantastic! Some good itineraries you might want to look to as models include Yaowarat and Phahurat Tour, Loop Art Tour, and The Wire Tour—if you've already watched the show, that is. --Peter ^Talk 01:02, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

We have a stub Literary travel where you might add a link, and articles like Literary London and Marco Polo which might serve as examples as well. Pashley (talk) 01:15, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Reading Wikivoyage:Itineraries before, I was also inclined to believe such an itinerary isn't allowed. We need to change the wording of it. Globe-trotter (talk) 01:41, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

What in the article gives you that impression? I mean, The Wire Tour is the most prominent example there, and it's a tour of filming locations. --Peter ^Talk 02:10, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Some old discussion: Wikivoyage talk:Other ways of seeing travel#City Theme Pages Pashley (talk) 02:13, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

The usual pitfall with local itinerary is to write A day in Dullsville in such a way as to merely create a duplicate of the main Dullsville article, listing all of the same attractions. Certainly, an itinerary can give more flexibility as a means for a journey to follow a theme (we have many itineraries like Across Canada by rail / Across the US by rail, as well as themes retracing US Route 66 or the Titanic maiden voyage). These can work well if there are clear criteria for what is included and some sort of natural sequence to the trip, instead of merely repeating what's in the city article. If w:The Grapes of Wrath were an itinerary, for instance, it would start in Oklahoma and head westward to California with brief stops in every town mentioned in the book. K7L (talk) 02:32, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the responses. I will start on a userpage draft soon-ish. FormerIP (talk) 13:49, 18 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Does an itinerary have to have an order?

Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

I'm wondering if a page like Kentucky Bourbon Distilleries Tours would count as an itinerary. There is an official Kentucky Bourbon Trail consisting of just 7 distilleries, although there are a handful of other distilleries that aren't part of the official Trail.

But the trail isn't in order; it's just a list of 7 places. Does it still count as an itinerary? --Bigpeteb (talk) 17:50, 17 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes, an itinerary needs an order. Otherwise it's just a list. A good itinerary would tell travelers how to get from one distillery to the next, and provide information on the other attractions and amenities along the way. LtPowers (talk) 18:06, 17 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

All that would need to be done, then, would be to put them in order. But I think that KY distilleries might be better covered as a more free-form Travel topic. --Peter ^Talk 18:29, 17 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Geographically, it should be possible to go (east to west) Maysville, Lexington, Versailles, Lawrenceburg, Lebanon, Loretto, Bardstown, Clermont, Bowling Green, Pembroke, Hardin as an itinerary. Then again, there's nothing wrong with adding an optional side trip or two if an itinerary almost but not quite falls into a line (Trans-Canada Highway was built as a system with marked alternates for side trips to places like Charlottetown, Route 66 travellers often left the route entirely to see the Grand Canyon, a trip through Toronto as itinerary might have a side trip which sidetracks to Niagara...)

Underground Railroad is awkward as there is deliberately no one clear single "main" route but [6] falls largely into an east-west line. K7L (talk) 21:45, 17 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

World Heritage Sites

Latest comment: 11 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion

We don't have a single itinerary article yet on Sri Lanka. I'm planning to go Sri Lanka soon and would visit all the eight inscribed World Heritage Sites in the country. May I know if it would be allowed here on WV to write my travelling as an itinerary article? --Saqib (talk) 22:25, 6 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Is there some obvious and large advantage to visiting them in the same order? Texugo (talk) 15:40, 7 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Didn't understand what you meant. --Saqib (talk) 15:44, 7 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

I mean, is there a reason why the order in which you have chosen to visit the places is obviously better than any other possible order? Are the places arranged in a ring or something? Texugo (talk) 15:49, 7 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes, my itinerary is arrange in ring and I'll choose to travel around either on bike or using local transport such as bus, train or rickshaw which means it will be a budget tour as well. --Saqib (talk) 15:58, 7 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good. There are some itineraries in Japan that are along those lines and might give you ideas, 88 Temple Pilgrimage and World Heritage Tour in Nara. Some text might go in destination articles or in Sacred sites of the Indian sub-continent rather than in the itinerary; you can figure that out as you go along.

Sri Lanka has excellent sapphires or for a more limited budget, good moonstones and fine batiks. If you want to bring some home for your wife, you may need a little research before you go. Pashley (talk) 01:22, 8 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

Pashley, will you please elaborate which text will go in destination articles? Btw, thanks for your suggestion. --Saqib (talk) 17:39, 9 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

When writing about something as diverse as different World Heritage Sites I would personally just write a brief description of each destination in the itinerary itself (what the site is and the most important things to see there) and put more detailed information in the destinations' own articles. For an itinerary article it's almost more important how to get from one place to the next one. I looked up the location of the sites using Wikipedia's coordinates and they seem to be situated along a line from Galle in south to Anuradhapura in north (Galle/Sinharaja/Kandy/Central Highlands/Dambulla/Sigiriya/Polonnaruwa (a little "sidetrip" to the east)/Anuradhapura). Therefore I don't know if it's necessary to make a circle itinerary, but if you do that the best solution would probably be to connect both ends to Colombo because I think most people arrive in and leave Sri Lanka from Colombo's airport. Another thing, when I saw your question in the Tourist Office I took a look at Sri Lanka's article and some destinations and most of them definitely need to be expanded (and a cleanup). So: enjoy your trip and hopefully you'll have a lot of valuable information to add when you're back! ϒpsilon (talk) 19:35, 9 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

ϒpsilon, I thought you're in Sri Lanka when I saw you editing Sri Lankan article pages. As you can see here, I've already started my article and the journey starts from Colombo and will probably ends in Colombo. Feel free to copyedit my itinerary from time to time. --Saqib (talk) 07:22, 10 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

VfDs for "personal itineraries"

Latest comment: 10 years ago15 comments9 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

I'm not opposed to merging or deleting them, but I'd like the text at Wikivoyage:Itineraries to be elaborated to clarify where the boundary lies between itineraries that are allowable and those that are too personalized.

The reason I'm concerned is that I eventually plan on writing several itineraries for self-guided architectural walking tours of various Buffalo neighborhoods, which seems to me to be in a gray area: neither the fact that many buildings of great architectural distinction are located in Buffalo nor that architecture buffs constitute a large and growing proportion of visitors to the area are in dispute, and the material I envision including is probably too specialized to include in Buffalo or any of the district articles. But the selection of which points of interest to include is, to some degree, a matter of personal taste.

I'm posting this in the pub rather than at Wikivoyage talk:Votes for deletion because this touches on a larger policy issue rather than any individual article that's nominated, or at Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries as the discussion would likely languish in obscurity indefinitely if placed on as low-traffic a page as that one.

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:06, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I suspect the main concern is that One day in Buffalo isn't created in a format that merely duplicates info in the main Buffalo articles. There are plenty of this sort of itinerary that were started but never finished. If the article isn't duplicative of the city guide, and you actually intend to finish it sometime this year, it is valid. K7L (talk) 20:13, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries#Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article contains a very lengthy discussion about why the itinerary criteria was tightened. There have already been questions raised about how to more clearly allow good articles like Loop Art Tour or Along the Magnificent Mile while discouraging random "X in Y days" articles, so suggestions for policy clarifications and improvements would be useful. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:14, 20 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Oh Lord. That's one mess of a discussion. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 12:38, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

It would be fantastic to have some place comparable the former WT Extra to move such personal itineraries. Even if they are unsuitable for Wikivoyage per the above discussion, I've personally found "X days in Y" like itineraries useful more than once. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:09, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I haven't read up on those discussions yet, but I quite agree with Ypsilon. For the average traveller a well-constructed highlights tour for a day is more likely to be useful than a tour only about art in the public space, or something else specific. To me the concept that a more general sights tour is per se more "personal" than any selection of art, architecture etc is a misconception. A good "one day in.." is more than just another listing of things you can find in the article, it also provides a logical walking route and/or public transport route. I used One day in Bangkok just last autumn. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:54, 21 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think that we should encourage one day tours of huge cities. The way our guides are structured it is sometimes hard to find the wood for the trees, so it is good to have a plan for either a one day visit or the first day of a longer stay. To make these easier to find they should be called <placename> in one day. In some cities it may be appropriate to have more than one route in the same article, but they should be self-contained one day routes - I see less value in more days in a city, but one or two weeks in a country can also be useful. It looks like we are only wanting the sort of routes where the local council has already put up signposts and written a leaflet, where we have little to add. AlasdairW (talk) 23:38, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

(undent) I'd favour some sort of exception that allows both the one-day-in type of itinerary and things like Shanghai for the first-timer at least for large complex cities, perhaps only the ones with districts. Such things would clearly not be much use for small places, but a pretty good case can be made when the main article or set of them is large; Alasdair is right about woods & trees above. Pashley (talk) 23:57, 23 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

If we could come up with very clear guidelines for such itineraries then they could be a useful addition, but the problem we've faced in the past is that no one agrees on what "X time in Y location" should include, so we get tons of incomplete articles that duplicate the main articles, and which then need to be cleaned up later. In my mind, a better solution would be something akin to Wikivoyage talk:Geographical hierarchy#Weak regions, where our region and huge city articles become essentially highlight summaries of the child city/district articles - in such a scenario, a visitor reading Hong Kong would get a few paragraphs on each district that would be useful in planning a 1-2 day trip, and could then drill down into the Hong Kong/New Territories article once he narrows the focus of the trip to specific areas. However we proceed, I think organization of our guides needs to be a key consideration, and I don't think that re-opening the floodgates to "X time in Y location" articles is the best solution. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:28, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I believe we should work that out over time - let us focus working on a few "One day in Bangkok makes a hard man humble" articles and see how it pans out - what type of content did we have to remove, what to keep off limits and what rules of a thumb can we draw from that experience. Atm, I really really really don't see how "One day in X" are bad for WV, except for the fact that some are incomplete. But then, let's just complete them! PrinceGloria (talk) 05:43, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

PS. I never saw a "flood" of those, much like anything, they have not seen nearly enough contributions. I wouldn't worry about more being created. I find them EXTREMELY useful as a traveller.

See Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries#Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article for a list of twelve such articles that were created in a single week, leading to the current guidance against "X location in Y time" articles. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:57, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

That was two years ago! I wish we had that level of content creation today... PrinceGloria (talk) 06:26, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

I think all of us accept that "x days in Y" can be good articles: Three days in Singapore is one I think everyone agrees is a good itinerary article. The issue is what criteria we can use to avoid articles like A weekend on Block Island that are totally unnecessary. If you haven't done so already, please read through some of the previous discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries, particularly starting with the "Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article" section. If you can offer a good set of criteria that will enable us to distinguish between good "x days in Y" articles and those that should be deleted, and that set of criteria is different from the one currently in use, please do! Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Block Island is a good illustration of why we should put the place name first. A weekend on Block Island is currently up for deletion. 3 Days in Block Island has already been merged into Block Island. I suspect that editors of each article were not aware of the other, but would have been if we had insisted on Block Island in a weekend and Block Island in 3 days.

I think that "city in a day" articles only become useful for huge cities with districts, or perhaps cities with more than 50 see and do listings. Maybe city itineraries should be discussed on the city talk page before creation. One day in Hong Kong is the sort of article that could usefully be developed, as it manages to show a good cross-section of the city visiting 3 districts, which I don't think somebody reading our 8 articles on Hong Kong would think of. AlasdairW (talk) 23:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Proposed criteria for good "Y in X days" articles

Precise sequence of POIs to visit
Transportation between POIs described in detail (which bus to take, which streets to walk)
Timing given per each part of itinerary
More than one option for the above possible, as long as it is still legible
Not duplication (or contradiction!) of general descriptions of the main city or district articles, this should be an utilitarian article

Your thoughts? PrinceGloria (talk) 20:19, 25 March 2014 (UTC)Reply

Creation of many more itinerary guides that are about the filming locations of specific prominent popular TV series / films

Latest comment: 9 years ago42 comments13 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

In my opinion, creating many of these type of guides and linking to them from the TV shows + film articles in the English Wikipedia might help us significantly increase the number of people getting here from Wikipedia. What do you think?

P.S - how many such guides do we currently have? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 23:11, 15 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Good idea! Note: I believe that a guide about drama XYZ should be written by fans of the dram XYZ, otherwise the spirit might be lost. So I would suggest only writing about dramas you watch. In addition, a collaboration with Wikia might make sense? They have a lot of passionate editors: http://www.wikia.com/WAM (wikis activity ranking) Nicolas1981 (talk) 01:49, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'd prefer to stay away from Wikia as that site has a pattern, when a community leaves and takes its content elsewhere, of leaving the old project open in direct competition with the new wiki - much like IB did to us. That hurts communities because of the duplicate content penalty on search engines.

That said, a look at our list of itineraries should give an idea of how many reference film and video in some manner. I'd think very few have their own itinerary, Radiator Springs being an exceptional case. More often, we mention films "set in" an individual city or "filmed in" an individual city in passing in the city-level article (so Buffalo will mention "Bruce Almighty" just in case anyone wants to ring God on +1-716-776-2323 and maybe Delta City would mention "Robocop" as the only means to Stay safe, as films were set there, but Tulsa might not even mention Weird Al's "UHF" or "The Incredibles" as shot there). Certainly Bedford Falls would mention "Its a Wonderful Life" as the Bailey Building and Loan is the only sound US financial institution, inspiring a museum and a seasonal event which are listed locally (under the towns' real names if the films rename them). It would seem that we create single-city itinerary rarely (Literary London, perchance?) and the "Cars" film only got its own novelty itinerary article as the village depicted is a composite of five states worth of Route 66, so doesn't fit into an individual, real Wikivoyage city. K7L (talk) 02:33, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I noted a few months ago that WT had one for 'Breaking Bad'. That is actually something that would mostly fit on a map and I'd be interested to visit, and Albuquerque does have a small tourist industry around it.

As with all articles, what is legitimately interesting varies a lot. I loved 'Battlestar Galactica' as a series, but wouldn't want to check out the endless scenes of forests shot around Vancouver. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:53, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

The inspiration for this idea came to me from this website and just from knowing that a big portion of the web traffic Wikipedia gets on a regular basis comes from people whom want to read about pop culture articles, so for example, I am sure that the millions of fans world wide of "The Walking Dead" or "The Twilight Saga film series" or "Harry Potter film series", "The Hangover film series", or the "The Hunger Games film series", or the "The Lord of the Rings+Hobbit film series", or of "Sex and the City", or of "Seinfeld", or of "Friends", or of "Lost", or of "30 Rock", or of "Star Wars film series" will be very very happy to find such detailed open source guides here at Wikivoyage about the locations they would really really want to go and see sometime sooner or later (even though I am sure such free guides exist already in many other websites, nevertheless, such links directed to Wikivoyage from such prominent articles in Wikipedia might get many people over here). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 03:08, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

In addition to Radiator Springs, there's one more: The Wire Tour. Such articles could be very interesting, and I'd welcome more of them. Though it'd be very unfortunate if people would start making articles but leaving them at a few paragraphs (like is the case with all too many travel topics!). In the worst case there might not be anyone here knowledgeable to continue building on an article of this type. ϒpsilon (talk) 05:36, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Some shows have their own wikis already. My favorite has A Wiki of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones Wiki, both with a CC-by-SA license. We should not duplicate these but might link to them & consider whether we could do something specifically travel-oriented & get them linking to us. Pashley (talk) 12:32, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'd expect any links would get the infamous rel="nofollow", unlike our Wikipedia interwiki links, so don't expect SEO gains. We also need to be careful about copyright; while there is a "fair use" exemption to allow quoting from copyrighted works to comment on those works, an entire wiki on some proprietary franchise is taking this a bit far. Most of the wiki farms allow fair use to be taken pretty much to the point of abuse, while Wikimedia is inflexibly strict on this point. There, one might get away with "this real thing (image:real photo) inspired this fictional place (image:fictional place in cinema promo poster)" but here we'd have to back off to "this real thing (image:real photo) inspired this fictional place (no photo, but a textual description in our own words)". Certainly, it is common for a fictional item to get several times more Wikipedia page hits than the original, real McCoy (10 views/day for Dawn Welch of the w:Rock Café on Route 66 in Stroud (Oklahoma) vs. 80 views/day for her Pixar cartoon car, w:Sally Carrera, for instance). Ultimately, though, we are constrained by whether there are real places and things to see. Something like "the Grapes of Wrath" goes through plenty of real places, while Darth Vader's Death Star does not. K7L (talk) 15:21, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

For a Star Wars article, places like Plaza de España in Seville and in Tunisia where the movies were shot would be included. Again, that'd be up to the authors of the article. Also, why would we need to duplicate anything from other sources? Wikivoyage articles are written from a traveler's (traveling fan's?) point of view while a fanwiki is not. ϒpsilon (talk) 16:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sometimes, the shooting location is far from where the movie purports to be set (so Bruce Almighty and Robocop, while they wrap themselves respectively in the identities of US-Canadian border villages Buffalo and Detroit, were shot nowhere near Lake Erie). Sometimes, a location will be tied in solely as a studio's publicity stunt (Smurfs are Belgian, yet an easy target for a "Smurf village" piece is Júzcar in Andalusia, Spain as the studio literally painted the town Smurf blue). A cartoon may not literally have been "shot" anywhere photographically, yet may slip in obvious parodies of real place names (for instance, by enrolling Fred Flintstone briefly in "Princestone University," aka "P.U.", for one class). K7L (talk) 17:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yes, obviously it depends on the movie/tv series/game and how it was produced. ϒpsilon (talk) 18:23, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I've actually been to one of the real-world locations where they shot Star Wars. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:30, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Elaborating on this discussion from another perspective, I can already see a *very* long list of what/when/where was filmed at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, from the Batcave entrance to the chase sequences in Rocketeer and Terminator:Salvation. It would blow the scope, wouldn't it. Ibaman (talk) 18:36, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

In order for such guides to help produce high web traffic to Wikivoyage we should probably not just mentioned the filming locations in our real-world articles about places where filmes were shot. In my opinion, such articles would have to be itinerary articles, probably with names such as "Itinerary for a trip to the filming locations of Game of Thrones", so that we'll be able/allowed to add the links to such articles at the bottom of these prominent Wikipedia articles using the Template:Sister project links template. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:50, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

That's a preposterously long title. I'm in favor of this idea in general, but very much opposed to burdening our articles with stilted prose just for the sake of SEO. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:18, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

How would you rephrase that title? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 06:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Probably Game of Thrones Tour (cf. The Wire Tour). -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 09:45, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

If the community would decide to go ahead and collaboratively produce such comprehensive guides (containing more than just addresses and pictures), a good place to start would be by using some of the filming locations information mentioned at IMDB (Example #1, Example #2, and Example #3). ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 18:50, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

So how would our article on Bedford Falls (It's a Wonderful Life) differ from what's already at Seneca Falls? Would we only create these itineraries when they span more than one village? K7L (talk) 19:44, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Had to smile when I read this and thought about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves film were Kevin Costner goes from France to Sherwood Forest via Dover, Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall, and no one remarks on him not having a sense of direction :-) .--Traveler100 (talk) 20:07, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Suggestion

In my opinion, this is a classic case of "if you build it they will come". That is, although alone most of us would probably not be able to create really good comprehensive itinerary guides for real-world filming locations of prominent films or TV shows such as Hunger Games or Seinfeld for example, nevertheless, I think that in theory, if we create such guides together, and make sure that at the very least they would be good enough at the very beginning, and afterwards link to them from Wikipedia, I think that most likely sooner or later some of the biggest fans of those films / TV shows, whom have gathered a lot of knowledge about their filming locations, would most likely notice these guides and choose to help us improve them tremendously over time.

I suggest therefore that, as an experiment, we'll chose one of the current most popular films or TV shows from this list, and begin developing this itinerary guide in a sandbox. Once we'll manage to create something decent enough for the main space, we'll move it to main space, link to it from the TV show or Film's Wikipedia article, and see over time if the article gets a lot of page views + If a large fan base would help significantly improve and expand that article.

What do you think? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 20:30, 16 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'm not really sure why this has to be an experiment. We already have a handful of corresponding and valid articles for literature. For example On the trail of Kipling's Kim, Travels of Hans Christian Andersen and Literary London. I'd suggest you choose a subject and plunge forward --Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:04, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yes, just start it, even skip the sandbox phase if you want and go directly live :-) Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:50, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I would still consider it to be an experiment because it would be the first article of it's kind that would prove once and for all if an itinerary type article about filming locations of a trending film / TV show, with A LOT of fans world wide, linked back to Wikivoyage from the film or TV show's article on Wikipedia would actually end up producing A LOT of web traffic to Engvoy as a result. In my opinion it should also be considered an experiment because as of yet I am not sure if the quality of the end result (the actual article), which would be produced collaboratively over time, would actually be good enough and be something we all would want to see more of in Wikivoyage. Most importantly, I would also consider this an experiment mainly because I would need the assistance of other Wikivoyagers to produce this article.

Either way, I just went over this list, which contains the 5000 most accessed articles on the English Wikipedia (as of 15 March 2015‎), and I have listed the 19 current most popular long standing TV shows and film franchises that in my opinion would be the best candidates for our first article of this type:

10 current most popular long standing TV shows that I think are good candidates

"The Walking Dead" - during the week of March 8 - 15 the The Walking Dead season 5 article had 476,572 page views! (only 4,172 page views less than the Facebook article).
"House of Cards" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 458,640 page views.
"Game of Thrones" - during the week of March 8 - 15 the The Game of Thrones season 5 article had 252,720 page views.
"Downton Abbey" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 128,850 page views.
~~"Friends" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 116,975 page views.~~ the only real-world site is the Friends apartment building exterior in Grenwich Village.
"Parks and Recreation" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 96,210 page views.
"Modern Family" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 92,493 page views.
"Mad Men" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 76,804 page views.
"Lost" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 60,366 page views.
"The Office" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 53,365 page views.
"Sex and the City" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 39,960 page views.

9 current most popular long standing Film franchises that I think are good candidates

"The Hunger Games" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 178,357 page views.
"Divergent" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 130,962 page views.
"Star Wars" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 104,910 page views.
"The Hobbit film series" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 92,913 page views.
"Harry Potter film series" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 85,204 page views.
"The Twilight Saga film series" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 74,866 page views.
"The Lord of the Rings film series" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 55,996 page views.
"The Matrix" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 43,846 page views.
"Indiana Jones film series" - during the week of March 8 - 15 this article had 28,222 page views.

Is anyone interested in helping me create such an article? if so, which of the choices above would you prefer we'll create our first filming locations itinerary article for? ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 06:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't think all of those necessarily make good candidates. In particular, some of them are almost entirely in-studio work and don't have enough recognizable real-world settings to fill an article (e.g. Friends, The Office, The Matrix, etc. etc.). Do House of Cards or Modern Family really have iconic filming locations to make an interesting article? Meanwhile, I'll second whoever mentioned Breaking Bad above, and it definitely does have enough visitable filming locations to make it worth it. Texugo (talk) 11:10, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Also, given the existence of The Wire Tour etc., I also do not consider this idea to be experimental, at least not in the sense of needing to have support for it first or marking it as experimental. I'd also point out that the itinerary model is not a very good fit for many of these. It worked great for The Wire Tour, but even when the majority of a show's locations happen to be in the same city, there is not necessarily any single, logical order for narrating them in such a strong way as Peter did in The Wire article. Moreover, very few travelers are going to go country-hopping on a sequentially laid out tour of Star Wars or Game of Thrones locations, nor should we attempt to make a huge US-wide circuit of Criminal Minds or X-Files filming spots. I think a travel topic would be much more suitable for the majority of shows. Texugo (talk) 11:21, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I didn't know about the existence of The Wire Tour article. In my opinion, the real-world filming locations shouldn't necessarily be amazing/iconic for the thousands/millions of fans to go out of their way just for the chance of being able to stand at the same spots their favorite show/films were filmed before (see example), and therefore I wouldn't rule out such guides just because of that.

Regarding the shows Texugo mentioned above - I removed Friends (because the only real-world site is the Friends apartment building exterior in Grenwich Village.). Regarding "The Office" see Link 1 + Link 2. Regarding "The Matrix" see Link 1 + Link 2. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 12:38, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

(indent) I think some of the thinking above is too haphazard. It's okay if the filming was all done in a single city, but there have to be enough locations to build an article around. Also the comment about a "long list of films" filmed at Griffith Park seems irrelevant, because "Griffith Park" would not be the film article, the article would be about a single movie filmed there. The other movies would not be given any mention, as each movie article should describe what scenes from that movie alone were filmed there. If the concern was that Griffith Park would appear in multiple articles, I don't see why that is a problem if they are all reasonable articles and about different films. Articles written around movies, books, folktales, etc. are all great for fans, but based on the above discussion, people are really going to need to either do some research or stick to what they know before creating articles. Popular movies/citcoms alone are not good candidates. They need to have enough real locations to make them worthy of articles. In addition, museums centered around the film are also worth putting in, or even just if they contain a particularly iconic outfit, prop, etc. A coffee shop that the cast visited often or gave publicity while filming would also be worth inserting in the article. The articles should be guides for the fans, so any place of relevant interest is worth putting in the article. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 13:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Basically the above. A list of popular TV series or films does not equate to quality Wikivoyage articles. 'House of Cards' is a popular series, but the itinerary wouldn't frankly be much different from a standard Washington DC tour. 'Sex in the city' ended in 2004 .. so how many featured New York establishments are still open?

There really needs to be some criteria, such as A) Existence of real world locations and B) Locations that are not mainly already existing tourist sites --Andrewssi2 (talk) 19:45, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

My vast experience with creating articles on the Hebrew Wikipedia has thought me over the years that really good articles/content could be created collaboratively over time (which would eventually be superior to the initial vision the first editors of these articles had) if only a small group of editors is willing to take a risk and try to put together an initial decent article (which in this case, I am betting would eventually be vastly improved over time by the true fans whom find those articles). At this point, based on the feedback given so far, it seems to me that there is a lack of interest among the majority of Engvoy core community members to create of such articles, although many agree the general idea is good. I will go on to the next couple of wiki projects I am working on. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 22:38, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

If you believe in your idea then really go ahead and do it! My reading of the comments above is indeed supportive, but only by actually creating an article in question can you gauge how many people would want to be involved. If you need to know that other people will be involved before you even start... well I guess you could form an Expedition ? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:01, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

At this point I can not promote that aspect of WV completely by myself. there is too much to do on Hebvoy for me to be fully devoted just to this or one project. I need help. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 23:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

(edit conflict) Unfortunately, due to the small size of our community, for two or more authors to collaborate simultaneously in writing an individual article or launching an initiative such as yours is very much the exception rather than the rule. Even Expeditions, which are launched for the explicit courage of fomenting such collaboration, have a low rate of being followed through on to the end. This is one of the reasons why attracting more editors needs to be a high priority for us. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:25, 17 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I was hoping I would find a prolific writer/s passionate about this idea as well, whom would be willing to help me develop these initial articles. Oh well... at least I am happy I got to share this idea with you, and maybe by bringing it up here, I have just inspired someone here to create such articles sooner or later. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 00:20, 18 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

It's always better to start an article than to try to inspire someone else to start it, so I'd really urge you to plunge forward. I'll say for my part that I haven't had a television in years and wouldn't start any article about a television show I didn't watch, but I'm usually happy to copy edit articles others start. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:39, 18 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'm actually minded to plunge forward with a 'Breaking Bad' article. Google Maps already helpfully lists locations. Only thing against it is that there are plenty of other pages on the Internet for this show specifically, but it would at least provide a reference for similar articles in future. Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:14, 18 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Plunge forward. We don't remove beaten-path destinations like Paris and London just because they're in every other travel guide for their respective regions ever published. K7L (talk) 17:45, 19 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Being a Breaking Bad fan and a former resident of Albuquerque, I'd be thrilled to help out with the creation of such an article. Like The Wire, there's a lot of real-world locations that make it a good choice for a Wikivoyage itinerary. PerryPlanet (talk) 20:04, 19 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Don't know how much I can help, but Breaking Bad is one I could get excited about too. Just as long as we refrain from throwing pizzas on the poor lady's roof. Texugo (talk) 20:31, 19 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

I've taken the plunge and started the page Breaking Bad Tour; obviously there's a lot left to add, but that's why you're all invited to help build it! PerryPlanet (talk) 00:52, 20 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

That is a pretty comprehensive 'start' :) I'm actually relieved that there is someone familiar with Albuquerque to be involved. It does raise a question about format.. should the POI's be in the itinerary text as you have done or as a bullet point list as is done in traditional city articles?

It is just an open question. I think your format lends itself to prose better. Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:02, 20 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Initially I was going to bullet point them, but after looking at The Wire Tour, I thought in-text might be a better fit for an itinerary like this. The nice thing about these POIs is that you don't need to include lots of extra info like hours/price/phone#/etc that would be better suited to the bullet pointed listing templates to handle. PerryPlanet (talk) 03:36, 20 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Personal itineraries, revisited

Latest comment: 9 years ago16 comments9 people in discussion

In a related discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Destination of the month candidates#Personal itineraries as FTT the point was made that "personal" itineraries have great value. For what it's worth, as the person who initially led the charge against the "X in Y Days" articles, I agree - an article like Three days in Singapore is a great article, and if someone can come up with a way to allow more articles like that one while addressing the concerns raised about such articles (see #Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article) then I'd be in full support of bringing them back. However, until somehow can find a way to deal with the problems we experienced with these articles previously I continue to believe that we are better off encouraging users to put content into the main articles rather than into an "X in Y Days" article. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:20, 18 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Mark me down as opposed in mainspace but in favor in user space or some way where it appears like an "essay" (working title) with a disclaimer along the lines of "this is the personal opinion of User(s) X... if you want to see other things to see and do at said destination see..." Do you think something like this would work? After all, most of the objections against personal itineraries is that those things are difficult to determine by consensus or even majority rule. But if these things are already explicitly labeled as the personal opinion of one or more of our editors, what's the harm? Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:59, 18 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

That's an intriguing idea. We've generally frowned on single-authorship of articles like that, but maybe in this case it's the best solution. There are a couple of problems, primarily involving the high likelihood of scores and scores of stub and out-of-date itineraries in userspace. Powers ^(talk) 01:05, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think it's the best solution, too. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:57, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think there is no problem with good personal itineraries. I can imagine edit wars over what points of interest to visit, but I believe they would be rare enough to be handled on a case by case basis (clearer defined theme, possibly forks). Having thirty itineraries for London is no problem, we would just have to label them clearly. For most places there would be none, one or a couple, so those could just be linked.

Personal itineraries on user subpages do no harm. You are probably allowed to plan your journey, and write a diary about it, on such a page. Could be fun reading and space is no concern (you have to write quite a novel to use more storing space than that of one image).

The problems arise when writing itineraries take time and energy from writing destination guides, or when linking from mainspace or wanting cooperation is concerned. I think the rule about having content foremost in destination guides is good. Itinerary stubs could be linked from the talk pages if the author wishes feedback or cooperation (and forgotten if nobody cares), while usable ones could be moved to mainspace and linked from the destination article (or if there are plenty, from a subpage).

I think we quite easily could get a working policy and practice on handling linking and cooperation. The problem that remains is how to use your time. Accepting, but not encouraging, itineraries might be a working solution for the time being.

--LPfi (talk) 08:33, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I guess we cannot (and maybe should not) proscribe which way of spending ones time and editing resources is best. While you may be right that we should not outright encourage said things (unless they prove to be a major draw in pageviews, readership or other desired metrics), we may hammer out a farily lenient and tolerant policy... I am unsure how, but quite confident there is some way... Hobbitschuster (talk) 13:31, 19 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I really think we should let go of that perception of "personal". I fully agree mainspace is no place for purely personal opinions, or routes devised by one user that can't be changed by another. I'd say they'd already be allowed in userspace, but such things would be better of on a blog, where readers can find them. I can also see issues with mentioning specific restaurants in e.g. a day in Paris, like most printed guides do.

I don't see, however, why we can't just work jointly on such an itinerary, using discussion where needed, in the same way we determine the nine most notable destinations in a country, or the wording of listings, or a See-section. Over the years, I've written quite a bunch of country See-sections for the abandoned Country surgeon Expedition. In effect, we're doing much the same there as we would do for a "3 weeks in Macedonia" article, just minus the (very useful!) practical planning/timing suggestions and minus the "Do" or "slice of life" activities you would find in a suggested itinerary. I would actually very much like more input for those See-sections, just like I imagine people could work together on itineraries. And if it's too hard to combine opinions on a specific destination in one article, why not make two (possibly themed) itineraries to choose from? They would only have to be linked from any destination article, so it's not like they're in the way and I really don't see people starting to write dozens per place. Especially if we would keep businesses like hotels and restaurants out (rather referring to areas or streets), these itineraries would not be the target of touts.

I'm one of those travellers who depend on suggested tours for planning all the time. I'm not saying I follow them exactly, but they give quick impressions of what I can reasonably see in a given time-frame, and save me a lot of time identifying the most prominent sights. They're much more useful for such rough planning purposes than our practicality-filled articles, as they have focus and take into account travelling times, climate etc. Some time ago, I had a conference in Paris and an extra day to spend afterwards. With a friend, I just wanted to go and see the highlights of town. We have an excellent article on Paris; but it's huge, long, with dozens of sights and lots of information on local transport. An yet, I found myself buying a printed guide on a Paris street, which just gave me a simple route (from which we diverted a few times to see things we liked more), and not looking at the WV article again.

Suggested tours or itineraries don't have to be long at all; especially not in Wikivoyage, since we have that great tool of linking to the relevant articles and sections in our guides. In fact, that would make suggested itineraries here even far MORE useful than those in the printed guides, because one could simply click through to the relevant regions, cities or districts to get more information or alternative suggestions for the next stop. JuliasTravels (talk) 10:07, 22 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

A year and a half ago or something like that I suggested starting up something similar to the other site's Extra for subjective stuff that can nevertheless be useful for fellow voyagers. People weren't very enthusiastic about it back then. Especially for big cities that we cover well (with hundreds of things to see and do), it definitely would be useful to have a couple of non-official itineraries to facilitate travel planning. ϒpsilon (talk) 11:09, 22 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

While I find the concept interesting, I'm afraid our community is still far too small to fill and maintain such a space. I'd say it's more a thing for the future.

I've been reading up on some of the old discussions about the topic (in which I was not involved). What strikes me, is that there's consensus about the fact that such itineraries can be great value when executed well. The main problem seems to have been a wave of class-room article creation that lead to a bunch of unsatisfactory results. Over time, several people have suggested to implement criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff; to make sure we don't get lots of stubs, copies of See-sections, very short walking tours or other articles that don't help us or the traveller. Two topics above, PrinceGloria came up with a first proposal on such criteria, but there was no further discussion. Let's continue from there? If we agree on criteria, I'm happy to come up with suggested policy text. JuliasTravels (talk) 22:01, 22 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Proposed criteria for good "Y in X days" articles and similar itineraries

Precise sequence of POIs to visit
Transportation between POIs described in detail (which bus to take, which streets to walk)
Timing given per each part of itinerary
More than one option for the above possible, as long as it is still legible
Not duplication (or contradiction!) of general descriptions of the main city or district articles, this should be an utilitarian article
... please add

—The preceding comment was added by JuliasTravels (talk • contribs)

Let's also delineate what makes an itinerary "personal" (and thus what makes the above criteria go into effect).

For example, Historic Churches of Buffalo's East Side doesn't include literally every church on the East Side, only the ones I personally felt were most interesting given the focus of the itinerary (architecture and local history). The choice of which churches to include was at least somewhat subjective and arguable, so does that make it a "personal" itinerary? If not, where does the boundary lie?

-- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 23:23, 22 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

That's why I'd really like to let go of that "personal" term. To me, the churches tour is most definitely the same category, but (like the other good examples) it's not personal. I'd feel free to just edit that article, adding or removing a church or editing the text, just like I'm free to edit the Three days in Singapore one. For me, the distinction between X days in Y and all the other itineraries (perhaps except the ones that follow a known trail or road) simply isn't valid and is mostly the result of some bad experiences from the past. As I see it, an "overland from X to Y" is really the same thing: it provides a planning tool to combine and use the information we have in the relevant articles. Great articles like the Ruta del Tránsito do essentially the same, just with a historical background for relevance, where Three days in Singapore has that relevance by nature, being a popular travellers' destination. Our itineraries serve a variation of purposes, and typically several of them at once.

Provide a practical planning tool to actually see (some of) the listings within a single article in a reasonable timeframe (e.g. Three days in Singapore or One day in Bangkok)
Provide a an added level of detail about a topic that would overwhelm the relevant destination article(s) or are too target group specific (e.g. Historic Churches of Buffalo's East Side or the Breaking Bad Tour)
Provide a useful arrangement of sights/articles for which our information is spread over many articles, to inspire travel, to give (historical or other) context and help planning (e.g. On the trail of Marco Polo or Istanbul to New Delhi over land.)
... I'm sure there are more.

The more I think about it, the more I begin to think we're looking at it the wrong way. Maybe we should simply identify what the main problems have been, and just make sure we write a policy to counter them; leaving things as open as possible. For example, issues that have been raised are the potential number of stubs - but then the one year rule for outlines will help. The perception of personal can be countered with text underlining that any choices for sights or route may be challenged and in that case will follow our usual consensus model, etc. Thoughts? JuliasTravels (talk) 09:13, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Er, as a sidebar since I'm not particularly picky about itineraries, Three days in Singapore is at least five years out of date, falling into much the same traps as most personal itineraries do, ie. how to decide which part to toss and what takes precedence. I even ran into a comment by User:Jpatokal elsewhere, perhaps FlyerTalk, where he suggested a complete rewrite of the Sentosa bits. It's a long-term problem though, exacerbated by the fast reconstruction of Singapore, so take it for what it is. -- torty3 (talk) 09:48, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Fair enough; but being outdated (while that should be addressed) is a different issue and not specific to itineraries. I used it purely as an example of the type of article. As to "personal" choices; we make such choices for everything we write. We're not the yellow pages, so what ends up in an article besides the few main highlights is really what's most interesting in the eyes of who-ever is writing at that time. The choice to write an article about Kota Kinabalu to Brunei by land instead of Prague to Paris (or any other two random destinations) is equally personal. But then it's a wiki, and others can make changes and write other articles. JuliasTravels (talk) 09:59, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Itineraries like these should not get too deep into detail (individual entrance fees etc.), and try to avoid to things like individual eateries because they close or change frequently — those should be listed in the destination articles instead. Good districts for eating, shopping and sightseeing as well as individual sights is better as they change more slowly — whole old towns or shopping districts do change little by little but they rarely just completely vanish. Cities and landscapes stay where they are unless something really awful happens. Unless the itinerary has some kind of a theme on its own, I think it should as far as possible just help the reader to find the right destination articles.

Then, for articles like these, we may want to have a somewhat stricter line for deletion of stubs. If the author hasn't even written out from where to where the itinerary goes (yup, there were at least two such ones around when unofficial articles were allowed) they should perhaps be deleted within a couple of weeks. Once the article has grown to such length that a reader can get some sort of idea about the route, this isn't necessary.

BTW, perhaps we would also need a travel planning article of some kind as suggested here. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:42, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

When you visit a United States National Park there is a section in the park guide that lists suggested activities for a given time period - "If you have less than a day, see..., if you have 1-2 days see..., if you have more than three days...". Each time period gets 1-2 sentences. A similar sidebar or other section within our city/district/park/region articles might fulfill the substance of what JuliasTravels is requesting in itinerary articles, although we'll probably have to experiment to figure out how such a subjective list would work in a collaboratively-developed site. As for returning to the days when we would put that info into separate articles, all of the arguments above seem to me to be suggesting we just return to the way things were before we limited the scope of itinerary articles, and I think that's most definitely the wrong thing to do for the reasons outlined under #Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article and reposted below:

It encourages creation of articles with content that duplicates another article. There is nothing that would be placed in the A Long Weekend in London article that should not be in the existing London articles.
It encourages creation of arbitrary articles that aren't collaborative. Only the original author knows what is meant to be included in the Four Day Summer Family Trip in Lower Cape Cod article.
There is no clear criteria indicating when such articles are appropriate; A Weekend in Philly might be a good article, but why not also create "An afternoon in Philly, "Two weeks in Philly", "A month in Philly", etc?

Hobbitschuster's suggestion to handle itineraries that are about a time period in a destination rather than a specific route by incubating them in userspace might be viable as well, provided we could come up with some guidelines on when the articles could be promoted from userspace to mainspace. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Eateries should be OK to include in itineraries if they're old and historic. If they close, oh well. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:54, 23 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Direction of travel/voyage

Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I'm a bit unsure about this recent addition:

Where a route goes from a well-known destination to a less-known one, put the well-known one first, for example Hong Kong to Kunming overland.

Sometimes, a trip could just as easily be taken in either direction (a Trans-Canada Highway run can start on either coast, while Australia Highway 1 as a ring road can start from anywhere) but occasionally direction does matter. The Orient Express runs east, Route 66 runs west, the RMS Titanic runs west, the original around the world in eighty days trip runs east to use the time zones as a plot device. Flipping a Grapes of Wrath tour to start in California and run to Oklahoma overland doesn't work, even if Californians insist their federated state is the more notable of the pair. The choice of travel direction often does matter and needs to be based on more than just "a well-known destination" first. A safari "Into the darkest heart of the African bush from London" might make more sense than one "Into the darkest heart of Heathrow Airport from the African bush"; one starts at some point that's unexciting but easy to reach internationally. Whether a place is "well known" is only one factor when choosing travel direction. K7L (talk) 18:29, 7 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Add a sentence "When there are no good other reasons for a specific direction of travel..." Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:30, 7 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

I suppose the reason for the addition was to make it easier to find itineraries that are relevant for a specific area. I dislike making editorial choices on technical reasons, and this seems to be a prime example. Instead find a technical solution to the technical problem. I think making an exception where there is a good reason isn't enough, I think the author should think carefully about the direction in which to describe the journey, and any reason, even just a gut feeling, should be a valid reason to choose one direction over the other.

Or is there some other reason to choose the more well-known place as starting point? Then this should be stated, as one more thing for the author to consider. The guide on itineraries could definitively use some expansion, with advice on several points aside from this.

--LPfi (talk) 06:34, 8 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Itinerary style: waypoints and landmarks

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

I launched the Stockholm history tour. While many destinations are waypoints, others (typically tall buildings) are landmarks visible from some distance; not intended to be visited during the tour, but mentioned as part of the presentation. Which categories should be used for waypoints and distant landmarks, respectively? /Yvwv (talk) 00:15, 3 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure that there's a rule for this, but there is a generic marker template which would probably work best for both of these. Is the only difference between 'waypoints' and 'distant landmarks' that one is on the itinerary, and the other is not? --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 07:02, 3 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

You can categorise them by a type of colour instead of a type of listing. For example, instead of type=see or type=do, if you write type=red, type=blue, type=black, etc. the colour of the listing marker will change to that colour. You can then add a key like in Presidents of the United States which explains what each colour means. Gizza^(roam) 21:16, 3 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

One can also put the key to be displayed after the title (text) of the mapframe (keep it simple of course). In addition, one can draw a shape and place it on the map and when clicked; its popup could then display a more involved legend. One can also move from 1 map location to another using links within that mapframe; or if desired, even to another article's map (position). It is also possible to introduce links on an article's page to pop up a map displaying only a select group (ie. a map with only See listings or only city listings etc.) All of course requires extra care, thought and effort. (Note: Remember using Kartographer can also be a moving target!) -- Matroc (talk) 00:43, 7 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

I played around with the Stockholm history tour article data on this page to illustrate a few things I mentioned above (Some of which can be complicated to do) if interested. -- Matroc (talk) 05:44, 12 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hiking trails

Latest comment: 4 years ago20 comments9 people in discussion

Do hiking trails count as itineraries? I can't find guidance here or in wv:wiaa. I've found two articles about hiking trails in Canadian provincual parks: Rock Point Trail, a 4.1-km loop in Blue Lake Provincial Park, and Esker Trail, a 5.7-km loop in Bird's Hill Provincial Park (which doesn't have an article). Both articles are quite well developed, but have not been substantially edited since 2009. I have never seen a trail article in Wikivoyage, so I don't know what to do with these. The Esker Trail article is only linked to North America itineraries. I'm inclined to say that we don't cover short trails as separate articles. Ground Zero (talk) 11:17, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Yes, hiking trail articles are acceptable. There are some others as well. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 11:23, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

We've got quite a few hiking trails, mostly in Europe: Coast To Coast Walk, E11 hiking trail, GR 10 etc... All of those are long-distance, but we also have walking tours of cities which are much shorter: KL sightseeing walk, London South Bank Walk, the recently-featured Southern Ridges Walk.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:40, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. In that case, I propose to clarify this by adding the italicized text here:

"Examples of good itinerary subjects are Hajj (a traditional pilgrimage route), London South Bank Walk (a city walk), Southern Ridges Walk (a hiking trail), or The Wire Tour (a guide for visiting filming locations for a television show)."

Ground Zero (talk) 11:53, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 12:27, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

I agree too. I think hiking trails can often be covered in the "Do" section of a city, rural area, or park article. But when there's a lot of detail, an itinerary makes sense. (I wonder if Ad's Path or Ohlone Wilderness Trail would make a better example than Southern Ridges Walk, which looks like as much a city walk as a hiking trail.) —Granger (talk · contribs) 15:21, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

There's a beautiful boardwalk in Florida that crosses Lake Ashby, which I plan to turn into an itinerary once summer ends and the insects leave. I would prefer Ad's Path to be featured rather than the wilderness trail, which I largely wrote but which I have never completed myself, though I've done some of it. While I'm sure the information is correct (it was partially based upon information from the park map), it's probably best to use the other itinerary just in case EBRPD maps were incorrect. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 15:40, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

As everyone else said: Yes, they absolutely do, if they're covered that way, which is a good way to cover them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Yes, a(n established?) route is an itinerary no matter if voyagers hike, drive, ride or sail along it. --Ypsilon (talk) 17:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

I'm going to raise a potential objection here. I don't think short hiking trails that don't require directions and don't visit named attractions or points of interest should have a separate itinerary guide. They should be listed in the Do section of the relevant destination article. Powers ^(talk) 17:44, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

I agree. That's roughly the point I was trying to make above—an itinerary article makes sense when there's too much detail to cover in the "Do" section. —Granger (talk · contribs) 18:22, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Yes, of course the shorter route, the less there tends to be to write about it (and the less it would need its own article). Ypsilon (talk) 18:46, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Indeed. I agree with you, too, Powers. -- Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:21, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

But if there’s too much content for a listing, it’s only sensible to write a separate article for the hiking trail. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 19:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

I very much agree that listings aren't optimal for really "big" attractions or activities that need several paragraphs of text to be described properly. In those cases I usually make a subsection in the See or Do section. Then Template:Marker can be used to show geocoordinates for places in prose - I often write the "Go/Drive/Destinations" sections in itinerary articles in this style (e.g. Highway_4_(Finland)#Drive).

On the other hand, if there is enough content for a full article, editors should by all means go ahead and write one, but I think there should be an alternative between trying to force everything into a single listing and a writing full article. Maybe 7 2 could work as a guideline here too, ie. if the number of POIs is less than 10 or so, the route likely shouldn't have its own article but again it's best to use common sense here. --Ypsilon (talk) 20:18, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘There shouldn't be a hard and fast rule but I think as a general rule, short 1-2 hour hikes probably do not have enough information to merit an article. But on the other hand, there are very long trails that take multiple days to complete, so these could get their own articles. Two I can think of are the Appalachian Trail in the US, and the Heysen Trail in Australia. The dog2 (talk) 20:33, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

What about the Land Art Trail on Mt. Učka? --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:50, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

It looks like there's enough information to warrant a separate article, so I have no objection. The dog2 (talk) 22:15, 29 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

See, to me, that's an attraction, not worth its own article. It's like having an itinerary article for a large zoo. There's no need to describe every artwork in a museum, even if the museum is outdoors and several hundred acres. Powers ^(talk) 13:45, 30 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Inca Trail as an itinerary fits, -- Jesus trail if developed further as well -- Matroc (talk) 03:23, 1 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

Itineraries that need TLC

Latest comment: 3 years ago68 comments9 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

Came to mind, but given my mass load of deletions for itineraries recently, I've noticed some "keep" votes, even if there is little content. But I was wondering if we should bring a new page into projectspace (something like Wikivoyage:Itineraries that need TLC) where these itineraries are kept, and if someone wants to work on them, it can. Reasons for this:

Often we don't want to delete the content some contributors have put into these articles
If someone thinks working on it years later seems a viable option, it's there
Often itineraries that were nominated on vfd were worked on for about 1 week

On the other hand:

It still gives the creator incentive to make the article usable, and keep this in mainspace. Otherwise projectspace ≠ mainspace, for readers to view
This page should only be for pages that are more than a useless stub (so a page like Erlian Grassland Tour Loop or Rama's journeys don't go into this page, and should just be deleted)

If the incentive thing doesn't work, I personally feel like if no one touches the article in this new storage page after a certain amount of time (let's say, 3 years?), it can be deleted without a nom.

Does that work better and a better alternative to deleting? SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:24, 16 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

What is TLC? LPfi (talk) 20:26, 16 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Tender loving care. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think that SHB2000's clean-up of dormant itineraries has been a good project, and has resulted in a number of itineraries being improved. Moving new outline itineraries into project space is a good idea. If a contributor starts an itinerary in the hope that someone else will make it usable, we should be able to figure that out pretty quickly. One year in project space should be enough time to determine whether there is interest in working on them or not. Ground Zero (talk) 20:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think our response to a new outline article being created should be encouragement and help in turning it into a detailed, high-quality article, not immediately relegating it to somewhere in project space where it is unlikely to be seen. —Granger (talk · contribs) 10:35, 17 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I'm happy when someone creates a new article with the intent of developing it, although that is better done in User space. Unfortunately what we see mostly is people creating articles for "someone else" to develop. We have hundreds and thousands of stub articles for regular contributors to work on (and I have been adding content to a lot of stub articles), we don't need more added to that list. For example, Kohoku and Miyaki, which were created in 2007 with no content at all, and nothing was done with them for 14 years. These articles don't benefit readers, and stub articles don't make Wikivoyage look like a useful resource. Ground Zero (talk) 12:22, 17 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I will admit that I myself have created some of these itineraries, although I've worked on them, and nearly all of them are usable. The only one I've created recently that remains outline (Alpine Way), was created as one of my redirects on Khancoban seemed controversial, and every time I went back to the Alpine Way page, I seemed to get emotional (it was the last place I was, before going into a 108 day lockdown, and every time I even saw a link of "Alpine Way", it seemed to give me pre lockdown memories). I do have plans to merge that page though. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:01, 17 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

If this thing does go ahead, would this proposal be a good rough draft on how long things should go where:

Outline itineraries that are not famously marked trails (i.e. something like Easy Rider or even Tanami Track) go here after six months, without a redirect. If there's no edits for six additional months, it can be nominated for deletion via vfd (similar what we already do).
Outline itineraries that are famously marked trails such as the newly created stub national historic trails go here after 18 months (I would prefer 12 or 15, but I don't think everyone would be happy with that) of no edits without a redirect, and if it remains an outline itinerary after 48 months, it gets deleted via vfd (that is more than enough for anyone to work on it, and the work doesn't get left to Someone else.
Once an article becomes usable in this project space, it immediately get's moved out
By definition of "no edits", it means actual actual edits about the itinerary, so things like reverting spam/vandalism, fixing typos, simple copyedits, or formatting fixes don't count

This is far lenient, and gives years to work on it. And I feel that our "don't delete famously marked trails" is somewhat used as an excuse to a) not delete the itinerary, but b) also leave the work to Someone else. So basically, it doesn't get moved here immediately and so it does give time to work on it, but at the same time, it forces the creator to make it usable and out into mainspace. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 10:30, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I suppose that after 18 months, the original creator has forgotten about it, and it being moved out of mainspace doesn't provide any discouragement. Any one who wanted to work on the itinerary has had plenty of time, but often we want a new user turning up to find and work on that itinerary. Will they find it in project space? By what mechanism? I still believe that the odd outline has a higher probability to be developed than a non-linked trail (this is different from stub travel topics, where the scope and structure is given by the author, not by our guidelines), and that the odd outline does not discourage readers.

One way to make projects space outlines findable would be to leave redlinks in the summary articles (such as United States National Trails System), and give a link to the project space article for users following that redlink (I suppose it could be done with some mediawiki-space magic). That would require the redirect to be deleted.

–LPfi (talk) 11:15, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I wonder what the goal is. Is it closer to "get pages improved" or "hide embarrassingly incomplete pages"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:17, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

When it comes to itinerary and topic articles, we should not be encouraging article creation by people who aren't willing to make the articles usable. Itinerary and topic articles can bring colour and depth to a travel guide, but they are not the core of a travel guide. Dedicated editors are better off spending time improving destination articles than on itinerary and topic articles that are started and abandoned. Saying that such pages are not part of the guide is sensible if people are uncomfortable with deleting them. Ground Zero (talk) 18:43, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

If that's the reasoning, then why not outright delete them? Because we don't have the courage to do that? I don't like that line of thought. Moving the articles to project space signals that this is something the insiders should take care of – but you say we shan't use our energy on that. Then move them to the creators user space. But is this the way to go also for sufficiently famous marked routes? I assumed we wanted those to be written, i.e. have people spend time on them. –LPfi (talk) 18:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think it is because some people think that someone else will work on these articles some day, so it is worth saving whatever text there is. Insiders can work on whatever they want without regard to what I think. For my part, I think that crappy articles put readers off Wikivoyage, so I work on improving the articles we have. But there are so many articles that need improvement to be useful. I think it is a bad idea to have people creating more articles to be improved by "other people". We don't have enough regular contributors to need passers-by to ge creating more clean-up/article improvement work for us.

This stub article sat for 16 years without any useful content being added. This one sat for 15 years waiting for "Someone Else", as did this one. Ground Zero (talk) 19:14, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Agree. And sadly that was the case for much of these. While some were actually worked on well, such as Nidaros Path (even to the point where LPfi made a mapline, which is time consuming but makes it usable), a lot of articles such as Mountains to Sound Greenway have remained an outline (although that has been taken care of) end up in the same state as they were before vfd.

To LPfi's "But is this the way to go also for sufficiently famous marked routes?", and under these proposed proposal, it also includes famously marked routes, so cases like National Historic trails don't get away, as they [some newly created ones] are just as useless since it has no travel info. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:25, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

The issue is a long standing one. I personally feel the "notable itinerary" thing is being heavily misused to keep articles, and at the same time, leave it to Someone Else. This is not just for itineraries, but destination articles as well. When I upgraded about 400 articles from outline to usable, almost about 150 of them were stubs that were near useless that it may have been better to not have the article in the first place. I probably improved about 100 of them to bare usable, and redirected the other 50 or so. Such include Houtman Abrolhos, a set of uninhabited islands.

To be fair, I wouldn't normally quote someone who has made a ton of personal attacks, but in this case, KevRobbAU/SCO (since retired) has time and time said that it's better to get articles usable from the very start. And I think we can all agree on that – but sadly that's not the case. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 21:38, 22 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I agree that we have too many weak outlines and that new ones shouldn't be created. I prefer redlinks in most cases where an article would be nice to have. Then, when there is some information not easy to reproduce, deletion is a shame (and redirects problematic). Ideally the proportion of weak outlines would be low enough not to give a bad impression, and we could then keep the few that don't get to usable to be worked on later.

If we disregard the historic baggage of existing stubs, I'd hope we could each avoid creating these outlines, and then we wouldn't have to discuss deleting them. Even if one can create an article with some info, the same work put into improving another article will usually be much more valuable and create no frustration in the community or among readers.

There may be exceptions, such as if you travel through part of an itinerary and thus have unique information on it that you want to save in a findable place, but things that can easily be researched on the net should either be put into a usable itinerary or restricted to a Do listing or Do subsection.

–LPfi (talk) 10:09, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Let me explain why I'm asking what the goal is. We generally agree on these things:

Some pages (itineraries and other articles) are in poor condition.
There is more work to be done than volunteers doing it.
Pages that aren't in the mainspace normally aren't seen by readers or by anyone else, for that matter. Someone else is more likely to clean up a page in the mainspace than to clean up a page outside the mainspace.
Some pages (and some types of edits) are more valuable to readers than others.
Volunteers should spend their time making whatever (constructive) contributions they want, even if another volunteer thinks that's a low-value use of time.

There are also things that reasonable people could reasonably hold different opinions about. These things include (but are not limited to) the classic questions of eventualism and immediatism:

Is it better to look good or to look like this is a wiki that really needs you to plunge forward and contribute to it? Looking "good" might improve people's subjective opinions of the project, but looking "finished" decreases the motivation for newcomers to contribute.
Is it better to have a page (even if it's an unusable outline) or to have only better-quality pages? Having a page, even if it's mostly empty, might improve search engine traffic (compared to no page) and it provides some information (however tiny that amount might be), but having a high proportion of pages with dramatically less content than other travel sites might decrease people's interest in clicking on links to the project when they see them.

We also have a fairly limited number of options for an incomplete page:

We can ignore it (most common action).
We can improve it.
We can merge it to a bigger page.
We can delete it.
We can move it to a different namespace.

Option #1 is the default; it provides minimal information to readers and irritates our immediatists and other reputation-minded contributors. Option #2 is highly desirable but not realistic in most cases. Option #3 can be good but is also unrealistic on a large scale. Option #4 increases the value of the median page that a reader will see, but it provides less total information (because readers see fewer pages), and it irritates our eventualists and similarly minded contributors.

Option #5 is IMO the worst of all options. In this option, we aren't offering whatever minimal value the page had to readers; we aren't getting rid of the poor-quality pages; we aren't improving them – in fact, we are doing something that is proven to ensure that the page doesn't get improved. Someone else might only rarely improve articles, but Someone else never improves "draftified" pages. Then, in a couple of years, we'll all pretend that we are shocked, shocked to discover that these hidden pages weren't improved, and the people who would prefer to just delete them now will be able to delete them then without needing to bother with formalities like nominating them for deletion and seeing whether others agree. (Also, we may get disputes about who is allowed to move the pages back to the main namespace under which circumstances.)

So if your goal is:

providing some information to readers, even if it's not much about any specific subject: You want option #1.
driving traffic to the site/good SEO (even if people don't stick around because there isn't much information): You want option #1.
encouraging newcomers by letting them see how much needs to be done: You want option #1.
having pages that we can be proud of: You want option #4.
having readers stick around (once they get here, which will happen less often): You want option #4.

The only goal that fits with option #5 is: Eventually being able to delete these pages without so many other editors noticing and possibly objecting. (If that honestly feels like a goal, then the real problem is likely in the deletion policy/process, not in these pages.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:19, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

There is zero chance if Wikivoyage ever "looking finished". I encourage you to pick half a dozen articles at random and review them. Even if articles were to start to look somewhat filled-in, the nature of a travel guide is that it needs constant updating. Let's not waste time on nonsense arguments.

I do not think there is any basis to say that "Someone else never improves "draftified" pages". There is a small possibility that a regular contributor will improve a project page, albeit smaller than they will improve an article, so we should not dismiss project pages altogether. I am indifferent between projectifying or deleting outline itineraries.

There are lots of websites out there that encourage readers to contribute. The websites that bring me back are those that offer information instead of an invitation to "be the first" to write a review. I don't think I am alone in that. Ground Zero (talk) 22:17, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

To WhatamIdoing's question, I get the same sentiments as GZ. Infact, I never even wanted to start this thing, but given that the "well marked itinerary" reason is being misused, I sadly had to do this.

The whole purpose of this is to motivate the page creator to make it usable before a certain amount of time. If it doesn't, ideally it'd be deleted in 12 months time, but the "famously marked trail" is being heavily misused to keep stubby itineraries that drive our reader base away. But regardless, IMO, they shouldn't be in the mainspace, driving our reader base away. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:29, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

WhatamIdoing, I appreciate your points, but keep in mind that pages on people's userspaces are not nominated for deletion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:35, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

There was a time in May 2020 when a bunch of fictional destinations in LibMod's userspace was deleted, but that's a different case since he's banned and globally locked. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:40, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

And they were fictional. Also, another thing is that draft articles on people's userspaces do sometimes receive substantial collaboration if the host user is OK with that, but usually when they're new. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:37, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Generally, I'm one of those who would want people to edit draft articles in my userspace (examples such as Australian cuisine). Ideally if there were a draft namespace, I'd do that, but we don't have that on voy so userspace is the only option. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 00:41, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

SHB, what is your evidence that incomplete articles are "driving our reader base away"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:14, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Ground Zero, my basis for saying that other editors do not contribute to draftied articles is some research led by w:en:Aaron Halfaker a couple of years ago. You can read the paper at http://jodischneider.com/pubs/opensym2014.pdf Look for the section titled "AfC hides drafts from potential collaborators" and words like "drafts see a decreased level of collaboration". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

@WhatamIdoing: thank you for that article. I didn't read the whole thing, but it seems to support that view that "There is a small possibility that a regular contributor will improve a project page, albeit smaller than they will improve an article", rather than that they will never contribute to a project page.

Wikipedia's AfC is not the process that is being proposed here since that throws up walls at the beginning of an editor's contributions. What is being proposed here is a way of dealing with projects that have been abandoned by the original author, and not taken up by others. So the concerns the paper raises about discouraging new editors don't apply here, in my opinion. Ground Zero (talk) 22:33, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

This research shows that Wikipedia's AfC process is more effective at getting other editors to edit sub-par pages than doing nothing (i.e., what we have here).

This research shows that hiding those pages in another space is less likely to result in improvements than leaving them where they are.

This suggests to me that the sensible options are:

leave them alone, or
delete them now.

The proposal to shuffle them into another namespace, keep track of which one(s) were moved when, and remember to come back years later to delete them all is a whole lot of time and effort wasted to produce the same end result. If you want to get rid of them, then just do that.

OTOH, if you feel that you can't justify deleting them, then leave them alone, because leaving them right where they are gives them the best (albeit very small) chance of being improved.

What I don't want to see is us claiming that we are encouraging improvements to these pages while we are actively doing one of the few things that's been definitely proven to reduce the (already small) chance of improvements. If we're ready to give up on them, then let's use the delete button. If we're not, then let's give them the best chance possible, which means leaving them where they are now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:59, 24 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage and Wikipedia are very different communities, largely because one is quite small and the other is very very big, so the lessons learned from one community are often not applicable to the other. What we do know, though, is that we have a really large pile of stubs started up to 18 years ago that have had no substantive edits since they were started. Giving stub articles "the best chance possible" means greeting a lot of first-time visitors with useless pages that give them no reason to want to spend more time here. For my part, I am happy to delete articles that no-one wants to improve after a reasonable time. I think that SHB2000's proposal is aimed at assuaging those community members who still see a glimmer of hope the Someone Else will rescue these articles someday. I am not one of those people. Ground Zero (talk) 01:04, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I agree with WhatamIdoing that doing something just to assuage the opposition is suboptimal, and I think the reasoning behind "never delete real places" is flawed. At the start, the site did want to get a reasonable coverage, and at that point one couldn't be too choosy about what articles to "approve". Wikipedia had a similar infancy. Now, when large parts of our coverage is well-developed, a pile of stubs somewhere gives a bad impression that we can avoid. Still, I think the project page solutions has merits, if implemented well.

The problem with piles of stubs is mostly about mass created city articles and regions without content. For itineraries I don't see the same problem. We have 186 outline itineraries, which is about half of the itineraries and few enough that a single editor could improve them all (although this would be less efficient use of resources). A list where half the entries are usable or better is not a disaster.

Most outline itineraries have sensible names, suggesting they are worth writing. Thus I don't think personal itineraries are an issue any more. Some, such as Markha Valley Trek, have a reasonable Understand, which will not frustrate readers, unless they have high expectations. Those should remain as linked itineraries in mainspace, in the hope on them being improved at some time. Others, such as Congo Nile Trail, doesn't give enough information to be useful at all, and is the kind we are discussing (the author of this one left when some links were removed as touting). Then we have the lists, such as the US trails and Long distance walking in Europe, enticing passers-by to contribute as best they can.

I think the most important step is to nip in the bud: get consensus on that creating stubs isn't making Wikivoyage better (other than in special cases), and avoid having lures in the form of lists of redlinks (give an external link instead, if warranted, such as with the American and European trail systems. We might reinsert the redlinks at a point where we do want passer-by contributions and have enough content that a few weak outlines are no problem.

Then we have existing or newly created weak outlines. Some could be redirected to a Do or Go next listing (the latter not according to current guidelines), based either on the outline or on new research, which would give enough hints for a reader to find information on their own. The redirect name could be saved as a comment in the listing, perhaps as a hidden template field (outline_at=).

Then we have itineraries we cannot usefully link to or include in the articles, as they would be frustrating if linked directly and info for a listing is too hard to find. Those shouldn't be exposed to readers. Those without any usable info could be deleted, but I don't think moving them to the user space of the author does any harm. We could have a page Wikivoyage:Suggested itineraries linking to a category page for weak outlines moved to user or project space (such as subpages of Suggested itineraries).

Although few of the suggested itineraries will grove, I think some might, and this would be a low-cost solution to avoid long discussions on borderline cases, and in cases where somebody gets inspired by a "suggested itinerary" it makes a real contribution.

–LPfi (talk) 09:01, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I still think it should be the rule that real places of any significance shouldn't be deleted, but a lot of merging is reasonable. Itineraries aren't places, so this doesn't apply to them. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:33, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I would generally tend to half agree with "real places of any significance" with the key word being significance. Unfortunately, I've had to recently merge articles because someone created it because of one roadhouse or one hotel. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 10:11, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Yes, because if that content is merged, the attribution needs to be kept intact. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:56, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

It is possible to merge the article, and then not have a page under the name such as moving it to a different name space, without a redirect, and then fully protecting that page or less favourable, listing all the authors on the relevant talk page (that is not advised as it doesn't tell who wrote what). It's a similar reason to why we can't delete Template:RegionStats/depreciated since the new modified template is based on that template. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 10:59, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

There are lots of things that are possible, but they mess up the attribution. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:08, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

And the risk of someone turning a redirected page back into a separate page is so low that such maneuvers seem like a waste of effort. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:36, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I feel like redirects being turned back into separate articles hasn't been quite so rare here as you'd think. And sometimes it's been done very well. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:29, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I have recently been trying to turn back redirects back into articles using Category:Redirects connected to a Wikidata item as a starting point. Not every redirect in that category is suitable to be turned back but most are. But I agree that new editors in particular, who are not aware that this category exists won't be turning redirects into articles and are much more likely to expand a stub if the stub exists because it's easier to find. Gizza^(roam) 01:18, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

This house believes

At least three editors in this discussion have indicated their belief that outline/stub/less-than-usable pages drive away readers, or that readers (NB: not anyone participating in this discussion) prefer not having a page about Somewhere at all, compared to having a page about Somewhere that say "Somewhere is a city in Wherever".

Does anyone have any evidence at all for this? Even so much as a friend saying they were disappointed in a page?

Informal feedback at the English Wikipedia suggests that the opposite is true: People would rather have a one-sentence "<Person> is a <profession> in <Country>" than nothing. However, while I believe that editor behavior is reasonably similar between projects, I am less convinced that readers have the same expectations. Readers are unlikely to be using Wikivoyage to try to figure out whether Somewhere actually exists (whereas this is a fairly common use for Wikipedia, especially for people who are in the news for some controversy). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:42, 25 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

There is no evidence at all that articles with limited content drives readers away. This Lonely Planet article on El Tigre] in Mexico is equivalent to an outline park on Wikivoyage. Only two paragraphs. These types of short articles are very common on the online Lonely Planet version and it hasn't prevented the website from becoming much more popular than Wikivoyage. Likewise with TripAdvisor which dwarfs WV in the travel information space. Big or well known cities will have plentiful information on the key attractions, restaurants and hotels. But smaller towns like Karasburg in Namibia for example, only lists places to stay (equivalent to "Sleep" in WV) and has nothing on what to see, do or eat. They don't delete information or redirect it because there have limited information on the town. Taking away an article with a few listings doesn't build the guide. It makes it go backwards. Gizza^(roam) 01:10, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think we have evidence that these pages bother editors, as well as evidence that their removal bothers other editors. But has anyone heard from any non-editing readers on this subject? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I appreciate this discussion. Maybe we should revert to leaving largely blank articles alone and not merging and redirecting them, as long as there is potentially enough content someone could add to a destination article. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

No, we are not having a re-repeat of the "redirect cult" thing. I (and Ground Zero) mostly redirect articles because of the fact that it's hard to make it usable because the place only has a motel or restaurant, and it was left for Someone else to do. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:30, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

FWIW, back when I was merely a visitor here (or at WT, long ago), what I found really off-putting was not so much articles with little content but empty article skeletons consisting of headings only. Terrible. Looks like someone started something by CTRL+V-ing a template and then just left. I know that's being done on purpose to encourage editors to fill in the blanks. But for me as a reader that looked so horribly unprofessional that I just shook my head and walked away. How could I assume that the two sleep listings are anything but outdated if nobody even bothered to delete empty headings? Took me quite a while to come back and actually pick up editing here on occasion. --El Grafo (talk) 08:08, 26 October 2021 (UTC) PS: I should probably add that at that time I already was familiar with wiki editing through de.wikipedia and Commons. --El Grafo (talk) 08:11, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I also had a similar experience. Articles with only no sleep listings nor eat listings. Nope, looked entirely unprofessional as a reader didn't come back until a couple of years when I decided to give voy another go. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:11, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

@El Grafo and SHB, I'm interested in your experience. Were you trying to use Wikivoyage for traveling or mostly for reading? If you saw it turn up in search results, did you actively avoid clicking on it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:51, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I mostly used to use it when travelling to the US. But yes, if it turned up in my search result, I just skipped past it. It was only when I went to the Grand Canyon where I came to know that voy isn't just a bunch pages full of substituted templates. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:15, 27 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

If you both think there's really no evidence of articles with limited content makes readers unhappy, see Talk:Turks and Caicos Islands. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:30, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

OK, there was nothing there some time on or before 2007. The article isn't bad now. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:49, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Using that as an example to see how readers get unhappy when they see little to no travel info. While that has certainly improved, there are some others needing TLC. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:53, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I have limited access to the web this week, so I can't fully participate in this discussion. I want to make it clear that if I can expand an article from other-language Wikivoyages or Wikipedias, I do that. If I redirect, it is either because there is so little information available that the place does not appear to meet wv:wiaa, or it would be more useful for the traveller to be redirected to an article that has more information. The places I am redirecting are usually so small that there is a negligible chance of a local expert stumbling across our article and deciding to improve it.

I think we have to go back to wv:ttcf. Wikivoyage is here to serve travellers, not the other way around. We should be looking first at how Wikivoyage can provide information to travellers, and not how they can provide information to Wikivoyage. I think that is how we can best attract readers, who will eventually become editors. Ground Zero (talk) 10:54, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Tiny locations are often not viable articles, even if a local expert did stumble across the page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think there is a difference between those searching for Calcobathwoo because they are going there or passing by, and those looking for things to see in Calcodun, which links to Calcobathwoo along other low level destinations. If the region has twenty listed destinations and the eight first of them are stubs, I'd expect you to turn to other sources and never found out that the ninth is a star. –LPfi (talk) 10:52, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think you're right. One of my relatives often traveled to the middle of nowhere for work. Before the days of Google Maps, even "Tinyville is in Central Nowhere" (with a link to the region, which hopefully would have contained a list of cities big enough to have a hotel) could have been useful to him. It would only matter to a very small number of people, though, and for his purposes, a Wikipedia article would be equally useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for that link, SHB. Here's what the article looked like just before the editor who posted that comment doubled its size. This might suggest that leaving those empty section headings in articles encourages the occasional contribution, but I don't think it's evidence that readers leave Wikivoyage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

The articles that I am redirecting are small places that have been sitting without substantive edits for years, many as long as 15 years, i.e., since they were created in the predecessor site. If they have pages in other-language Wikivoyages, they are similarly lacking in any useful content. These are places whose articles in Wikipedia have been sitting without any travel-related content for even longer. And that includes the native-language versions of Wikipedia. We are talking about waiting for a unicorn to come by to add travel-related content about these places.

There are dozens of review websites that invite readers to "be the first to post a review", and there are travel guides that invite contributions. I don't ever contribute to a site that is just fishing for information, even though I enjoy contributing to Wikivoyage and Wikipedia. I don't think I am alone in shutting down web pages that just ask for information. Ground Zero (talk) 22:11, 26 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I didn't read the entire conversation so pardon me if I missed a point. Personally, I myself prefer having a skeleton template sections over a non-existing page (but then again, I edited Wikipedia for over a decade so I'm a bit biased). I personally would not have started a brand new page and would rather expand an existing, skeleton page. For example, before I expanded Escaldes-Engordany, it looked like this. And for La Massana, it was much shorter before. Having the page already created enabled me to quickly add contents without worrying about hierarchies. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 01:05, 27 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Trialing this system

Would it make sense to see what happens when we projectify about five outline itineraries into this projectspace for three months? I know this is far from the original proposal (where it's much more than three months), but while there does seem to be concerns, this issue is never going to be solved if we don't try new things. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:19, 31 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

I don't think moving itineraries to projectspace is a good idea, and I oppose implementing it. My experience on Wikipedia tells me that moving articles to a separate namespace where they are hard to find is a way to stifle their development, not encourage it. —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:11, 31 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

This is not Wikipedia's AfC though, and I have also never liked that system. This however, is moving dormant itineraries, that have little to no useful info, left to Someone Else to work on. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 10:20, 1 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

This is not the English Wikipedia's AfC; in fact, we have every reason to believe that it will be less effective at improving the articles than the English Wikipedia's AfC process.

Again: What's your goal? Is the goal to get those dormant itineraries improved? Or something else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:04, 1 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

I think a way to find ideas for itineraries might be useful. That could be a Wikivoyage:Suggested itineraries, with links to the redirects, user subpages or whatever. The outlines may also be useful for somebody who is going to write a specific itinerary. Deleted itineraries have the problem of being hard to find, as you don't know what name was used and the search doesn't work for deleted articles. Instead of project space they could be moved to the main author's or creator's user space, to avoid a new category of project pages. –LPfi (talk) 16:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

Yes, the goal is to get those dormant itineraries left for "Someone Else" get it improved, as this gives the creator motivation to get it usable. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:52, 2 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

If you want to get pages improved, then your best bet is to leave them in the mainspace. You might increase the odds (i.e., from slim to small) by communicating with others about specific pages. That could mean making a list on an Expedition-type page (just in case Someone Else ever looks for it) and/or leaving friendly messages for the creators or other significant contributors. (Not all apparently inactive editors are unreachable.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

An Expedition-type page to coordinate work on itineraries is an interesting idea. Wikivoyage:Itineraries Expedition? Another idea is to post on the talk page of relevant destination articles – for instance, hypothetically, if an itinerary like Walk the London Wall needed improvement, you might be able to find people who could help by posting at Talk:London. —Granger (talk · contribs) 18:45, 4 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

First, Wikivoyage is littered with thousands of stub articles left by article creators who expect someone else to do the work of putting travel content into articles they've created. We are making very, very slow progress in doing so. (I regularly find stubs created as far back as 2008 that have had no travel content added.) Second, when it comes to itineraries and travel topics, expecting that the community will populate an article about some idea that a random passer-by has come up with is unrealistic, and not a good way of building a travel guide. Destination stubs are one thing, but if the creator of an itinerary or travel topic can't or won't provide travel content, we should delete, rather than shifting the onus to other contributors. Ground Zero (talk) 19:01, 4 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

We already have the one-year rule for itinerary, which allows them to be deleted after a year if no one is providing travel content, (except for famous, marked routes). I think that existing policy should be enough to take care of any 13-year-old stub itineraries "about some idea that a random passer-by has come up". —Granger (talk · contribs) 20:41, 4 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

That doesn't stop people from creating stubby useless "famously marked trails", do they? SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:35, 5 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

Those are different issues and should be handled differently. The stubby outlines about random itinerary ideas haven't been a problem in years to my understanding, so bringing them up is building a straw man. Let's instead think about a stub about a famous itinerary, with a quite developed Understand section but without any usable Go – is this a useless stub that should be deleted or moved out of sight?

If we do want usable itineraries, then the first questions to be answered are 1) do we get more usable itineraries by deleting stubs or by letting them alone and 2) do these stubs frustrate readers. The project space idea makes sense only if we answer no to the first and yes to the second, and if we do, we shouldn't mock those who contributed to best ability but without getting the itinerary up to usable. Of course, like with other kinds of articles, we might ask somebody who creates several of them to concentrate their work to get them to usable – but then it isn't about random passers-by.

–LPfi (talk) 07:23, 5 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

Deleting broken itinerary redirects

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

I recently just tagged a bunch pages of pages that redirected to now deleted itinerary’s (like the TANAMI track), can an admin delete those pages. All of them now have the {{Speedy}} template Tai123.123 (talk) 14:57, 28 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Done. –LPfi (talk) 15:44, 28 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Tai123.123 (talk) 16:04, 28 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

Crazy new feature idea -- personal itineraries

Latest comment: 2 years ago20 comments9 people in discussion

Swept in from the pub

What if we had a way for a user (probably a logged-in user) to save individual listings to a custom itinerary? (Not a Wikivoyage Itinerary, just in the generic sense of the word.) Or even save individual listings to a Google Map? Some way a user could record places he or she wants to go? Powers ^(talk) 20:37, 15 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Something kinda like this? User:Nelson Ricardo 2500/test places --Nelson Ricardo (talk) 23:29, 15 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Roughly, but see my response to WhatamIdoing well below. Powers ^(talk) 19:53, 18 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

The way I understand the idea, is it's like a personalised version of an article, that lists only the POIs that the owner is interested in. That is already doable by a manual copy-and-paste, but I assume the idea is for something more high-tech, where the user could just tap or click a button on a listing in Prague, which copies the listing over to ThunderingTyphoons!' Prague itinerary.

That seems like a great idea to me, but I don't know how to implement it.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:22, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Oppose First of all, there are multiple issues with this proposal. The first and the foremost is that most readers don't have an account and IP users are not allowed to have user pages or user subpages; IPs periodically change over time so if we are going to be the only Wikimedia project that openly allows such, then we're going to have to do some serious janitorial work in deleting these subpages after a few months. Additionally, this is going to require some brand new tools and gadgets that will take a lot of time – really not worth the time and effort. Finally, saving individual listings to Google Maps is against our what not to link to policy, so no, I oppose this proposal. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 12:04, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

What do you mean, IP users are not allowed to have user pages or subpages? Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:32, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

I don't know whether it's a global policy or a policy only on Meta-Wiki and I think Wikipedia too, but as far as I'm aware, both those projects speedily delete IP userpages or IP subpages as IPs aren't permanently assigned to one user. Our policies don't seem to say anything about this, but maybe WhatamIdoing might be able to explain this better. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 12:41, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

enwiki allows IP user pages, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:220.101.28.25 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:81.168.80.170 Twsabin (talk) 14:39, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

We do, too. IPs' user pages are never deleted here unless they are spam or vandalism. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:50, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Those seem to be at least a decade old though. I just tried making one and the software wouldn't allow me. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 23:23, 16 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

That's very disconcerting. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:07, 17 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

I managed to create one, first ensuring I was in an incognito window. --Nelson Ricardo (talk) 23:25, 17 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

With respect, SHB2000, I think your objections are ill-considered. Firstly, I didn't say anything about IP user pages or subpages; there may very well be ways to implement this that don't rely on them. Second, while it's true that this would require some development effort, you don't even attempt to make a case that the benefit isn't "worth the time and effort". Yes, it would be a lot of effort, but if the return is great enough, it might still be "worth it". (I'm not making a claim either way, just pointing out that you failed to support yours.) Third, what not to link to is about things that are better done here on Wikivoyage; if you're claiming it shouldn't be on Wikivoyage in the first place, then what not to link to doesn't apply. Powers ^(talk) 19:53, 18 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Okay, so if I wasn't clear enough, here's a longer but briefer explanation. Such a tool would work very similar to the already existing editor, but maintaining such scripts is very difficult (I do maintain a few of these scripts IRL) and even if this went ahead, there are a few issues:

Like the listing editor, users will need to have javascript enabled. Without javascript, it simply won't work.
If this tool just copies down all the important pieces of a listing to a separate page, the tool needs to give attribution in the edit summary – otherwise, it's a violation of our copyleft license.
This won't work for outline articles that have little to no content
Users might be intimidated if they want to edit the listing – I'm guessing only maybe 1 or 2 per cent of our readers will know what Wikidata is (which is one of the main sources we use to get coordinates).

What more, this exact same thing can be done with geojson.io. We have few editors who actively maintain scripts like these, and only a fraction out of the few who can will be willing to spend a lot of time and effort into something that isn't even really worth spending that much time anyway. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 11:22, 19 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for explaining further, but I really think you're getting hung up on implementation details that might not even apply for some of the directions we could go with this feature. Powers ^(talk) 12:11, 21 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Powers, were you thinking about individual listings (first the museum, then the restaurant, back to the hotel), or about destinations (San Francisco, then Napa Valley, then Yosemite)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 17 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Individual listings. Powers ^(talk) 19:53, 18 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

What's stopping a user from creating a personal itinerary in userspace under current policy? I'm curious as to the need for a change. As for as I'm concerned, I could create an itinerary in userspace based on an OSM map, and surely, it wouldn't be deleted as out of scope? I'd prefer for the above reasons to avoid Google Maps. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 21:22, 18 July 2022 (UTC)Reply
I already have that: User:AlasdairW/Testpage. This is currently showing a few places that I stayed in in 2018. At that time it was used to send to friends showing where I would be staying on a trip - they got the dates etc in an email that linked to this page.

I would support having a policy that explicitly allowed such a page (for signed in users), as they might be more inclined to also update the article pages at the same time. I think that such pages should stick to using our mapframes, although I would be happy with a tool that allowed a list of lat/longs to exported for use with other tools including Google maps, car GPS systems etc. AlasdairW (talk) 22:54, 18 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Well, willingness and ability to edit wiki pages, primarily, as well as the cumbersome need to copy+paste listings. I'm envisioning a one-click kind of "add to personal itinerary" button on each listing. The use case would be a non-editor coming to Wikivoyage to learn about a destination (or several related ones) and assembling a list/map of highlights she wants to be sure to hit on her trip. Can she just write them down somewhere, or copy+paste them to a personal Google map? Sure, but the proposed feature would remove several steps. Powers ^(talk) 12:11, 21 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Itineraries without itinerary articles

Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments3 people in discussion

I want to cover some World Heritage itineraries like Kalka–Shimla Railway and Nilgiri Mountain Railway without creating separate articles. Can an itinerary be covered in an existing city or region article without creating a separate itinerary article? Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 11:18, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

They can be mentioned and described in short in city or region articles. For those that have good official sites, linking that would enable people to follow it; otherwise such a listing requires a lot of own research from the traveller. World Heritage itineraries should still be worth listing. Give as much info as you can; if you get more than a few paragraphs (in a subsection), then start an outline and link that. –LPfi (talk) 11:49, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Yes, it definitely can. Examples of such do exist, such as Mungo National Park#Mungo loop track or Klaksvík#Climbing Mount Klakkur. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:58, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

[edit conflict] I now looked at Shimla#By train. As one can just take the train, mentioning it as a world heritage helps, but if you have further information, other than what can easily be got by following the Wikipedia link I added, then it should probably get a subsection and listing in See/Itineraries, and it could be developed into an itinerary article. If you don't want to write the article, then don't, just add what you think would be useful. –LPfi (talk) 12:01, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for input. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 07:59, 26 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Itinerary Format

Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I am just wondering--could it be possible to list or sub-list the itineraries according to what kind of trip not just geographic location.....Is it a train voyage? a hiking trail? etc. etc. That would make it somewhat easier to decide on what kind of expedition to attempt next. Maybe this is a bad idea, I don't know. This weekend, I intend to hike the Einstein's Loop trail. Although it certainly is not worthy of a destination itinerary in wikivoyage, at least I know it is a walking trail (a fairly easy one even), and not a train ride or cruise. NathanRlds (talk) 00:22, 28 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

That's a good idea. Would you like to start work on such a list in your userspace, such as User:NathanRlds/Itinerary list? Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:27, 28 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

Sounds like a plan NathanRlds (talk) 23:54, 28 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

Wikivoyage talk:Itineraries Voyage Tips and guide

Contents

Early discussion

Highways discussion

Thematic Itineraries

Should itineraries overlap?

Cities along highways

New Itineraries

Article titles

Next stop option

Itinerary Nursery

Tightening the criteria for an itinerary article

Section break

Problems with the changed policy

Merge tag on itineraries

Themed itineraries

Does an itinerary have to have an order?

World Heritage Sites

VfDs for "personal itineraries"

Proposed criteria for good "Y in X days" articles

Creation of many more itinerary guides that are about the filming locations of specific prominent popular TV series / films

Suggestion

Personal itineraries, revisited

Proposed criteria for good "Y in X days" articles and similar itineraries

Direction of travel/voyage

Itinerary style: waypoints and landmarks

Hiking trails

Itineraries that need TLC

This house believes

Trialing this system

Deleting broken itinerary redirects

Crazy new feature idea -- personal itineraries

Itineraries without itinerary articles

Itinerary Format

Discover

Note: