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Script error on Airport articles

Happy new year to everyone. From Brisbane down, the information is replaced by a script error with red text reading: "The time allocated for running scripts has expired." Does anyone know what's causing this and how to fix it? --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:51, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

This seems to be a Lua problem where there are too many modules in one page. Do you know if it ever worked? Were a bunch of new entries added? Did a template used on this page get changed so that it calls multiple modules? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Justin. In answer to your questions in order: Yes, no (both with certainty). I don't know.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:59, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Hm. Weird that it just started then. As someone who doesn't know a lot about modules, I would recommend that a quick fix is to split the article by continents and file a ticket at phab:. Someone smarter than me may know more (but that's always true about everything :/). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 12:01, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Works for me now. Perhaps there were some temporary load issues spilling over on the processor time measured (or changing the limits)? Anyway, it might be good not to push the limits. Wikivoyage is quite heavy on processing; are there ways to optimise the listing templates, or other ways to avoid certain pages be very processing-heavy? –LPfi (talk) 13:33, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

It's also working for me too. We can always file a Phabricator ticket if it becomes a recurring problem. I think we're 14 airports away before we have to split in some way, either by using different colour markers or separate sub-articles.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 15:03, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

That sounds like the PEIS limit, if anyone is curious. I asked around after it a little while ago but couldn't find anyone who would admit to fully understanding how the devs decided what the limit should be. The workaround is straightforward: split large pages, and optimize templates. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Most time is used for fetching the Wikidata datasets, as you can learn it from html code. It contains a NewPP limit report. Getting the entities takes about 6 seconds which is a huge value which is maybe attributed to the complex airport datasets (and which increases by time because of software additions). The total Lua computing time is near the 10-seconds limit, i.e., sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't work. I made a copy to the German Wikivoyage at de:Benutzer:RolandUnger/Flughäfen. It confirmed the huge computing time for getting the entities. But it also shows that the listing scripts can be optimized because it takes only 8 seconds computing time at all which is less by 2 seconds compared to the English Wikivoyage. This shorter computing time prevents any Lua time errors.

Under normal conditions, in locations articles can be fetched up to 250 different Wikidata sets as can be seen from de:Halle (Saale). Surely, the computing times of Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getEntity and Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::callParserFunction should be reduced. And sometimes I made a bug report on phabricator but only minor changes were made removing the bugs. --RolandUnger (talk) 16:46, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Since getting fundamental changes to the amount of memory we have is difficult and relies on developers, I propose that we split this article preemptively. We can locally control how many templates and scripts are on a page, so we should be on the lookout for pages that we think may fail. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:27, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Also, it's failing for me around New York City now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Can someone check this article again? -- Matroc (talk) 04:07, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Nevermind -- I republished the article with no changes and I could see the article. Once I looked elsewhere and came back it was showing errors. One can get page to appear if they ?action=purge (Purge article) - This points me to think in the direction of memory as well.. -- Matroc (talk) 04:15, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

• We could remove the Wikidata calls from that article without doing much harm. Every airport listed has a wikilink to its Wikivoyage article, so the Wikidata and Wikipedia icons are not really needed. We may as well encourage readers to click on the internal link and read our article instead of going to Wikipedia or Wikidata. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:52, 12 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Just first copy the coords from Wikidata to the listing, unless they are there already, to avoid having to copy them by hand later. –LPfi (talk) 20:09, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Take a look at Airport articles/Sandbox. This article is based on Module:Marker (currently through Template:Listing/sandbox and Template:Marker/sandbox) instead of Module:Map.

If you compare the LUA profile of Airport articles vs Airport articles/Sandbox, you'll see that the first one download 85 Wikidata instances while the second zero. That's why the loading time has been dramatically reduced. To properly compare the loading time you should purge the articles, opening at the same time the following two links:

1. https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Airport_articles&action=purge
2. https://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?title=Airport_articles/Sandbox&action=purge

If there is a consensus to go in this direction I'll complete the new module to allow to retrive the coords when missing, BUT take into account that anytime the coords will be downloaded from Wikidata (because not written explicitly into the listing template), this will affect again the performance (less than they do today, but still affect). --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:10, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Justin, ThunderingTyphoons!, LPfi, WhatamIdoing, Matroc, Granger: what's your feedback between:

1. use the current template (coords -and potentially other info- are always downloaded from Wikidata regardless what's written in the wikicode)
2. use the new module as it is (no coords from Wikidata)
3. use a new revised module (that will download the coords from wikidata, only when not provided within the listing).

Let me know and I'll proceed accordingly, --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I think #3 should be just fine, especially if a bot checks coordinates and imports them every [x] days from Wikidata. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:43, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Ditto as Justin. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:49, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm happy to go with anything that works.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:09, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

If #3 is easy to implement and not too heavy, I think that's the ideal solution. We should copy most coords to the listings – at the latest when the templates time out – but there will be new listings from time to time, and coords are not always listed for them. A bot importing coordinates would be nice, but I think new airport articles are created seldom enough that it can be handled by hand, if we get into the habit or are reminded when there are too many listings lacking them. –LPfi (talk) 10:37, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I prefer #3 without a bot. Sometimes I don't want the coordinates from Wikidata (e.g., when I want coords for the entrance but they want coords for the center of the attraction). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:22, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I prefer #3 with a bot which only downloads the co-ordinates if they are missing from the article. Sometimes our co-ordinates are deliberately quite different from WD, listings for large features like rivers are an extreme example.

On other articles, an additional benefit of having the co-ordinates in the article is that this displays the markers on the full screen map (from the icon at the top right of a destination article). Wikidata co-ordinates aren't displayed on the full screen map. AlasdairW (talk) 23:19, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I've just updated the module, now it retrives the coords from Wikidata if not present in the listing.

The effect in the article (where are present 80 listing with coords and 5 without) is that now just 5 Wikidata entities are queried for coords. As anticipated this cause a loading time increased that is difficult to estimate because too many factors affect it (that's why sometimes the original article was perfectly rendered and sometimes got LUA error in its bottom part), but roughly I would say at least 1 second more.

Before put it into "production", feel free to perform some test using "Template:Listing/sandbox" instead of "Template:Listing" and let me know when and if you are confident for the switch.

After put it into production we should monitor this category to be sure that no further article will converge here. Any page of that category needs to be fixed. PS There are already few articles there... --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:21, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I've just cleaned all the "Pages_with_script_errors". The remaining two are there for different reasons.

• User:Buzzy: uses 291 markers with 291 wikidata parameters without coords; using the module and adding the coords the issue will be solved
• User:Pbsouthwood/Dive_sites: uses 553 markers; too much. I suppose the only way to solve the problem is to split the page in two or more subpages.

--Andyrom75 (talk) 23:42, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Without any further feedback, I've boldly put into production the new revised module. Please, promptly highlight (& ping) me any issue you may notice. As expected User:Buzzy page has been automatically fixed, although it takes almost 8 seconds to elaborate the code (very close to the 10 seconds limit). The other one will keep on failing randomly as previously explained. --Andyrom75 (talk) 20:02, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I think that #3 is a viable solution.

• Consider changing the editor to automatically supply the missing lat/long coordinates from Wikidata if needed. (Chop format them up to 6 numbers on right of period). Otherwise enter lat/long manually?
• Airport articles will soon hit the infamous 99 limit. Perhaps use color markers to avoid numbering issue?
• Maps - Perhaps use group and show. 1 main map for all (with a legend pointing to each area) - individual maps for groupings ie. Africa, Asia etc. or a page link to the main map centering on the area of interest. This might reduce mapbuilding costs as well. If time permits I will see if I can make an example. -- Matroc (talk) 06:07, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
• Example I made - this will remain for a few days if interested - Example -- Matroc (talk) 18:50, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Matroc, if you are talking of the listing editor in your first point, I can say that the wikidata sync is possible but shall be explicitly requested by the user (it's not automatic) and regarding the coords, it already round the number with just 6 decimals. --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:22, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for input! -- Matroc (talk) 18:50, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Image parameter does not work anymore

In listings like {{see ..., image=name.jpg, ...}} the image does not show anymore on the mapframe map. --FredTC (talk) 06:57, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

I noticed that on Tasmanian national parks today. I simply ignored it because I thought it was a single-article issue and there were already images listed below but it seems that it's happening sitewide. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:00, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@Andyrom75: needs to test his changes to {{Marker}} again/better :) The version before the change works OK. -- andree 07:13, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

FredTC, SHB2000, as said by andree, I confirm that I need to work on that. Currently I focused my attention on coordinates. Sorry for the temporary disservice.

Just one thing. To show the picture passed through the "name" parameter is relatively easy and won't affect the performance, but to download the image from Wikidata may have an impact on page loading time (see above discussion about coords where the community decide to go for solution #3).

I can follow the same approach, but let's keep in mind the collateral effect. --Andyrom75 (talk) 09:37, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Okay sure. Whichever one works is fine for me. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:39, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

FredTC, SHB2000, now the manually input image is shown in the map. To use the Wikidata image I would like to hear more feedback. Although I've noticed that module:map already did it, so I exclude to achieve worse performances. --Andyrom75 (talk) 10:21, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

There's no way we can exclude image fetching from WD, short of running a bot, which will do the sync WD->WV Articles regularly. That would require non-trivial logic to not overwrite manually entered images... IMO if a page is giving timeout errors, it's time to split it or optimize the software/increase limits. But this particular functionality is my personal favorite of the markers, I very very very strongly oppose removing it! ;-) -- andree 11:46, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Andree, just implemented the Wikidata image retrieval. Roughly it has an impact of 10% on performance (clearly it depends on the number of listings/markers that require such service). User:Buzzy page reenter into the Category:Pages with script errors :-( Let's monitor that category to be sure that no other article will flow down there. --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:17, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Right now there is no indication of an image at the "mouse over" event for the map markers. --FredTC (talk) 11:01, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

FredTC, I'm not sure I got your point. Could you tell me which article and which listing/marker are you looking at? --Andyrom75 (talk) 11:42, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

The affected articles have to be refreshed (e.g. do an edit+don't change anything+press 'publish'), probably it will happen automagically, in time. -- andree 11:51, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

I tried it with Rome/South. At the left side see-22 has an image, nearby see-19 has no image. The "mouse over" info does not show a difference; only if you click the marker, you get the picture (22) or the text becomes bold (19). I did a few chages in the article, but that did not change the "mouse over" behavior. --FredTC (talk) 12:19, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, I cannot even get a mouse-over with older marker template (but the problem could be also my settings, or that something further changed... in any case I never used this, was only clicking on the markers in the map). While we are at it, also the external links aren't highlighted now in the markers. -- andree 12:31, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

FredTC, honestly I don't recall such behavior inside the map. A similar behavior happens when you stop over a blue wikilink inside the text and you have activated the "Navigation popups" gadget. However, this is something managed server side by the map extension, hence we shouldn't be able to alter it client side. --Andyrom75 (talk) 16:20, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia icon on listings and markers

In Southwest National Park and Tasmanian national parks, I noticed that the Wikipedia icon has changed. Any reason to this? I preferred the old one. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:21, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Seems to be the caused by the same as above... -- andree 07:40, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@Andyrom75:? SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:42, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

SHB2000, fixed. I forgot that the en:voy icon is different from the it:voy icon. --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:37, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix :-) SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:39, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

NA creates coords at 0,0

Per template:see when NA is added to a see listing it should create no marker but if you look at Swedish Empire "Skattkammaren" which has coords of NA has a marker at 0,0 when it should have none. How do you fix this? Tai123.123 (talk) 01:58, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

@Andyrom75:, did you accidentally do something? Yosemite National Park is also another example of where coords are concentrated at 0,0.

All I would say is to omit the coords altogether. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 02:00, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Tai123.123, SHB2000, I can fix it but I was wondering why inserting "NA" in place of leaving lat/long parameters just blank? --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:15, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Not sure. I usually just leave it blank, but a lot of articles use "NA" for some reason. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:16, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Andree, since in the past you worked on on both Template:Marker and Module:Map maybe you can tell me which is the reason to adopt the "NA" coords approach instead of leaving them blanks. This issue can be fi in two ways: restore the "NA" approach or to bot-clean the "NA" occurrences. In it:voy we never use "NA", here there are around 250 articles that use it and checking some of those I tend to suppose that is a wrong use, but this is just my opinion. --Andyrom75 (talk) 08:25, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

The reason for this was that sometimes listings have coords in wikidata, but we don't actually want the coords. Mostly it's stuff like festivals, which have coords (even worse if it's at different place every year) of the city where it occurs - but we don't need that. So people here decided we'll use NA to force-remove the coords from the listings, even if they have some in WD. :) -- andree 08:51, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Andree, sorry for late answer but I was out during this sunny Saturday :-P

I would say that if the WD coords are wrong shall be deleted or updated, at least that's what I'm used to to do. If a festival change place is an information that shall be regularly updated like the prices, opening time, etc. I still don't see the need of those "NA" coords. Do you think it worth to reopen the conversation? --Andyrom75 (talk) 19:19, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

In some cases the need might need to be discussed, but I don't think there always should be a marker. The typical example I have stumbled into is where the festival (or whatever) is at a venue which already is listed. I think pointing to the venue in the directions parameter is better than having two markers on top of each other. –LPfi (talk) 20:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

If it's a listing and you specify WD, it will become a marker automagically... -- andree 20:34, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Isn't NA there exactly to avoid that? –LPfi (talk) 20:38, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Yep... -- andree 21:57, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Sunny Saturday? I don't know what you are talking about - it's been raining, snowing and windy all day! :-D

Check Template_talk:Marker#Coordinates being created without being manually set and Template_talk:Marker#Wikidata lat/longs. There will probably be another discussion somewhere, but the bottom line is that WD and WV have different target. So coords WD has may not be of any interest to WV, but it may be interesting e.g. to wikipedia, or for some data mining. IMO there's no "shame" in sometimes only picking data we need from WD, so NA is okay for me (but in the end, I never used it nor don't I particularly care)... And mainly, I don't really want to be involved in re-discussing the topic - since you opened the Pandora's box by touching this thing, you'll have to do the argumentation... :-P -- andree 20:33, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Andree, sorry to hear that, so I would avoid to tell you that I was walking barefoot on the forshore ... a bit unsual for January here as well, but why not :-P

Coming back to point.

Inside the conversation that you linked I've found the following points:

• The listing could be linked to the wrong Wikidata entity (e.g. association that organize an event in place of the event itself), hence I would say that the wikidata parameter shall be deleted
• The information on wikidata are wrong (not only relevant to coords), hence I would say that the wikidata info shall be updated/corrected, to grant such benefit to all the WMF projects that use Wikidata — however let's recall that WD info are just a fallback when local info are missing

LPfi, if I got correctly your point, you are describing a situation when two or more listing have the same location. In the affirmative case I would say that is fine. Let's think on Asian shops that are located in different floor of the same building, or maybe western malls where different restaurants can be found in it.

Notwithstanding this, if there is a real consensus on re-establish the "NA" feature, I'll do it, although I think is a good idea. --Andyrom75 (talk) 09:29, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Shops on different floors is of course a possible situation, but I think it is rare, except when they are in the same mall, which could be pointed at instead of giving coordinates to individual shops; people aren't navigating by GPS indoors. Overlapping markers are problematic, as you don't get to see the individual ones without zooming in. This is of course a trade off; we would have markers for a listed shop and an adjacent restaurant (except in the mall case).

A different scenario is when a festival is all around the town. You might want a marker on a ticket office or similar, but sometimes that would be a stretch or even misleading. And you wouldn't want markers for half a dozen events at the tourist office, or at the stadium.

–LPfi (talk) 09:59, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

LPfi in Asian metropolis is quite common to have shops, restaurants, etc, in different floor of the same building (not a mall, just an Nth floor commercial building), and since all of them are advertised (generally in local language), it's very complicated to understand where you have to go :-D

A festival in my opinion it's similar to a huge airport. Lets' consider JFK or CDG. We have reference coords to locate it "in the world", then if we want to point out specific things (e.g. terminal, car rentals, parking, shops, etc.) we can still use markers typically not associated to Wikidata.

That's said, I'm still not in favor of "NA" feature but I'll follow community's will. --Andyrom75 (talk) 10:35, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

If the coords are useful in a specific case, of course they should be included, as I said about adjacent shops. NA is useful if there are (enough) cases where the marker makes more harm than good. I have seen it as useful in several cases, so I tend to think it should be available. One more case: for festivals that move around, you said the coords should be updated. Yes they should. But next years location may be somewhere I cannot easily find coordinates to (such a venue called on the web site by a local term unknown to me), and removing last year's misleading ones, I'd just get the headquarters' from WD, in another town. –LPfi (talk) 10:54, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

A case where NA is useful is where the WD lat/long is that of an office which is closed to visitors. A festival may sell tickets from the tourist office, but be "based" in an industrial estate, because that is where they store the equipment between events. WP still wants tha address of the office in the industrial estate.

Another example is England#Preservation_trusts where English Heritage has the lat/long of an office but travellers are intersted in the castles etc that they run, and should not try to visit the office. AlasdairW (talk) 10:59, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

LPfi, AlasdairW, in my opinion if the coords in a festival entity are the one of the association that organize the festival, the coords are wrong and should be moved from here to the association entity (if any).

However, in the meanwhile I'm going to work to restore this functionality, but I still hope the community's decision will go in the other direction :-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:53, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Just adding my voice to the chorus – I think the NA functionality is important for cases like those stated above. Thank you for working on this, Andyrom75. —Granger (talk · contribs) 15:16, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I also support NA, which I've used in the past in some cases, such as when multiple points of interest are found at approximately the same coordinates. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 18:47, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I should have restored the NA feature. Please check and let me know. --Andyrom75 (talk) 23:24, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Fine now, Thanks Tai123.123 (talk) 23:30, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@Andyrom75:. Some articles use N/A. Is it hard to get also that variant working, or should we search for such articles? I haven't seen n/a, but that is the correct spelling according to Wiktionary, so it might have to be checked also. –LPfi (talk) 12:07, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

LPfi, I would suggest to use just one single way to avoid the use of Wikidata. This way will go into the template manual and the articles that already use "NA" will be a clear example of how it should work. Because of this I suggest to find & replace all the other similar occurrences. --Andyrom75 (talk) 13:14, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

A search of insource:"lat=N/A" returned just one article. I have taken care of a few earlier. Is that the way to find them or may I have missed some of them? (I tried also n/a and spaces around the equal mark). LPfi (talk) 13:53, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

I think you changed them all. --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:43, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

OK, thanks. –LPfi (talk) 18:38, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Elements not showing on Helsinki/Central

Something is wrong with the map at Helsinki/Central. When the page loads, the map initially shows all the locations of the elements in the article, but then they all immediately disappear and there is no way to get them back. Individual elements can be viewed by clicking on the element in the article text, but there is no way to seem them all at once on the map. The maps on other subpages of Helsinki seem to work OK, it's just Central that is broken. What is causing this? JIP (talk) 19:33, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Maps in other articles have the same issue. /Yvwv (talk) 19:44, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I have edited several pages today Faversham and Sittingbourne they are displaying on both my computer and phone without mapframe elements showing. --RobThinks (talk) 20:37, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

The problem seems to have gone away now. The map elements on Helsinki/Central, Faversham and Sittingbourne work OK now. JIP (talk) 23:38, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

JIP, sorry for the yesterday temporary disservice (almost a couple of hours) but I was working on the previous topic. As you can see, 10 minutes before your last post, I solved it. --Andyrom75 (talk) 09:20, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Category:Listing without plain text name

With the new module I took the chance to categorize all the article that has at least one marker/listing with conflicting information, hence with an external link (url parameter) and with a wikilink name in place of a plain text one (name parameter).

In such case, I've simply ignored the url parameter waiting for any volunteer that would fix.

However, I'd like to know if this choice is fine for the community or if there is a different opinion on how to treat these cases. --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:39, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

I have just seen that Denver is in this category, because there is a wikilink in the listing name of Denver International Airport. I don't think that this is a problem, but others may disagree. AlasdairW (talk) 23:15, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

AlasdairW, regarding Denver you can compare the followings:

• "Centennial Airport" whose name is NOT a wikilink and it's used for the provided external link
• "Denver International Airport" whose name IS a wikilink and it's used for the wikilink, ignoring the provided external link

--Andyrom75 (talk) 12:08, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I have removed the wikilink. I recognise that this is the best approach for consistency. However I am still not 100% convinced that this is the most useful for readers in the particular case where we have a dedicated article on the airport. The external link is now more prominent than the internal one. When the wikilink was there, the external link was still reachable by clinking on the icon after the wikilink. AlasdairW (talk) 22:28, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

SHB2000 reverted the edit on Denver, and may wish to comment here.

A stronger case for saying wikilinks are ok in listing names is Castles. Here several of the castles have wikilinks as part of the name. In this case the castles don't have external links, and it seems verbose to say "Nuremberg Castle, Nuremberg" rather than "Nuremberg Castle". AlasdairW (talk) 23:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

My thoughts are that if we have a link for that POI, then we don't need to include the external link – the external link should be in the linked article. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 23:25, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

AlasdairW, SHB2000, on it:voy, as you can see for example on it:Aeroporti in Italia, I've used a different approach, starting from the assumption that originally the listings were not supposed to have a wikilink in the name parameter (so we normally remove those wikilinks).

Basically, if on it:voy, exists an article associated to the provided wikidata parameter, the template shows automatically the Wikivoyage icon with the relevant wikilink, so the name will be free to accomodate the URL.

Do you think that this approach would be suitable for en:voy as well? --Andyrom75 (talk) 15:22, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Mostly, if we have an article we want to link that, and the external link should be found in the article in question. I have used internal and external link mostly when the internal one is a redlink. –LPfi (talk) 08:37, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Ditto as LPfi. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Page views last year

The sitewide page views showed a slightly strange pattern last year. We had two big spikes. The first spike, however, didn't correlate with a spike in unique devices (the second did).

To get a clearer view, it may be helpful to click the option for "Begin at zero" on the graph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:01, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

The first spike in February and March was similar to a spike in February 2018. For many of us it was during a time of near lockdown, and so was prob1ably caused my armchair travellers, unlike the second peak in August which was when travel was easier for many. From May 2020 onwards, the average monthly page views is about 2/3 of months before. The trends for other languages have some similarities.

Looking at individual articles, Around the World in Eighty Days has grown in popularity from being the 65th most popular page in September to the 4th most popular last month. A BBC TV series very loosely based on the book started showing in late December, which has obviously caused this. AlasdairW (talk) 00:42, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Naming conventions for national parks breadcrumbed under huge cities

This sort of situation is extremely uncommon (and almost nonexistent in most places), but currently, we don't have a preferred style on how national parks breadcrumbed under huge cities with districts should be named, but here's two examples:

• Adelaide/Belair National Park
• Lane Cove National Park

Both of them are breadcrumbed under cities, but both have different naming conventions. Adelaide/Belair National Park is a recently created one, as part of the new districts for Adelaide, but Lane Cove National Park has existed for quite a long time. I'd like to have a preferred style over this, but my preference would be that we use the one that is used for Adelaide/Belair National Park as similar to how we treat districts, but I'd like to get an opinion on how the community prefers it. Currently, the only one we have that's like a national park, is Manhattan/Central Park, but that's not a national park, and that's a city district article.

Also for extra context, Adelaide/Belair National Park is listed as one of the outer districts on Adelaide while Lane Cove National Park is not listed as one of the districts on Sydney. I'm mainly asking because of my recent move on Namadgi National Park to Canberra/Namadgi National Park as part of getting Canberra ready for districts. So, in summary, three options:

• Option 1 – national parks breadcrumbed under huge cities should keep its name (i.e. an article like Lane Cove National Park would stay Lane Cove National Park, not be renamed to Sydney/Lane Cove National Park)
• Option 2 – national parks listed in a city article's districts section would have the name of the huge city, and then the park's name (such as Adelaide/Belair National Park), but not parks that are not mentioned under the relevant city's districts (so something like Royal National Park will remain as it is)
• Option 3 – all national parks breadcrumbed under huge cities should use Hugecityname/Nameofpark

If this message was confusing, I'll try and simplify it. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:50, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

The first question, I think, is whether to list a national park as a district and breadcrumb it to the huge city, or have it as an independent Go next destination, breadcrumbed to the region. Would somebody go to the park other than as a side trip during a visit to the city? Often a park is part of a municipality otherwise covered in a (non-huge) city or rural region article. We could treat the parks in the same way also when they happen to be in a huge city.

The huge city offers the district infrastructure, so that we can have the park in a park article and still have it part of the huge city. If the huge city is a region of its own (which often makes sense, but I think it is against our guideline), there is no other region where to put the park. It is also odd to leave gaps in the city for the parks. The Namadgi National Park is at the border of the city and could thus easily be separated – that would provide an equally sensible border, and avoid having the park listed as both other destination and district – but as Camberra is listed directly under Australia, there is no region to breadcrumb to..

If we treat the park as a district proper, listed in and breadcrumbed to the huge city, it might be logical to use the same naming infrastructure – but why do we use the slash-naming? Is it because we'd otherwise pollute the mainspace with "Eastern suburbs" and the like, requiring disambiguation suffixes, and we prefer Helsinki/East over East (Helsinki), a sensible choice. But national parks usually have unique names, which already are long because of the "National Park" suffix. What advantage does the slash naming offer? It requires a redirect. Would anybody search for the park with the slashed name? I think we could treat the national parks as special cases.

–LPfi (talk) 12:39, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure about why we use the slash naming but I think it dates back to Wikitravel, but I can't seem to find where. Regarding the national parks I mentioned, these are not the only ones as there are some others too (like Heathcote National Park, Sydney Harbour National Park, Kamay-Botany Bay National Park, Malabar Headland National Park and there's plenty of others that I didn't mention) but they all seem to be in Australia for some reason. The only other one that I can find that's even close to this is Rouge National Urban Park, but that's under the Greater Toronto Area so that doesn't exactly count. So that leaves Nairobi National Park as the only one. As to specifically Namadgi, it is a part of Canberra (country Canberra), so I think breadcrumbing under CBR makes sense but I'm don't have an opinion about the others. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:10, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

In general, I like the idea of detaching national parks from individual cities. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay, but what do we do with Canberra/Namadgi National Park? The next level region up that's not a city is the country article. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 04:22, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

• Option 1. The other options add unnecessary information in the article title. Ground Zero (talk) 19:58, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
• Sometimes a national park is entirely within the borders of a city, and treating it as a district makes sense (you may have to sleep in the city). Other times a national park is entirely disjunct from any city, and treating it as an independent destination makes sense (you may sleep in the park during a multi-day visit). There may also be parks with more than one adjacent or internal city, Reality is not compelled to comply with style preferences, so style must be flexible to accommodate reality. So does the "can you sleep there" rule apply? What if the vast majority of visitors do not sleep there, but a few can and do? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 04:55, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

In my opinion the first syntax is wierd also for the district. It was created more than 10 years ago, before the breadcrumb extension was created. That syntax, that do not add any added value, has been completely replaced by the standard one in both it:voy and fr:voy. --Andyrom75 (talk) 14:34, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Interesting to know. I can see the value in keeping the current system tho, not because of any technical reasons, but it comes to how disambig pages are handled. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

In case of disambig, we apply the standard rule of any wiki "title (disambig)", in this case "district (city)". --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Further discussion

It seems there's clear consensus to leave the current articles of parks inside cities that don't have the name of the huge city alone, but it seems that taking it on a case my case basis of the current three parks that have that sort of naming convention and there seems to be a mixed opinion on whether to keep them under cities or detach them from cities. For the three, I'll give a brief overview and perhaps it can be decided:

• Adelaide/Belair National Park – more a popular city park about 10 km (6.2 mi) from its CBD (downtown). For me, it doesn't really make sense to move that name given it is a direct district of Adelaide.
• Adelaide/Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary National Park—Winaityinaityi Pangkara – more on the very outer ends of Adelaide and most of it would probably be better kept as its own article than a district, and takes quite a long time to get there. I think its very long name also makes it a reason to move the page.
• Canberra/Namadgi National Park – takes up about 47 percent of the Australian Capital Territory. It is one of my proposed districts of Canberra, and regarding the breadcrumbs, the next region up is the country article.

If I had to give my preferences, I'd say keep the first and the third one as they are, but rename the second. Any other comments? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:05, 11 February 2022 (UTC) --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:05, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Related pages links at the bottom of the page

Hi all, Can anyone point me to where the explanation for the related pages links displayed below articles can be found? Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:07, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

• @Pbsouthwood: This is our policy on Wikivoyage:Internal links. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:03, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

  The template is useful for fixing strange suggestions or prioritizing certain articles. Another way to fix strange suggestions is to edit the linked article.

  The linked pages are chosen according to how similar the articles seem to be. You can check the results for any article by putting morelike:Article into the regular search bar. For example, the nine pages listed at the bottom of Iowa match the first nine search results at Special:Search/morelike:Iowa. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks @WhatamIdoing:, This is what I was looking for. How are the articles actually selected? (what makes one "morelike" another?} Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:20, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

  I've heard that it looks for similar words and similar links. The official documentation is at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-mlt-query.html WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks @WhatamIdoing:, your ability to come up with a useful answer is much appreciated. Am I correct in assuming that the template you mention above is {{related}}, and that those articles tagged as related will jump to the top of the queue? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:30, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, that's the template. I believe that if you use the template (or its underlying magic word) that the rest of the automatic list is completely suppressed (not just the top of the queue). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Leadership Development Task Force: Your feedback is appreciated

The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation is supporting the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Task Force. The purpose of the task force is to advise leadership development work.

The team is looking for feedback about the responsibilities of the Leadership Development Task Force. This Meta page shares the proposal for a Leadership Development Task Force and how you can help. Feedback on the proposal will be collected from 7 to 25 February 2022.

Best, Zuz (WMF) (talk) 09:29, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

What happened to the Great Lakes?

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T295839

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T288897

I'd like to speak to the manager. I tried to go to the Great Lakes and three of them are missing. No water at all.

This is worse than the salad you served me last time, which had only five hundred islands in it. Really, Wikivoyage? 204.237.91.215 01:20, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Hardy har har. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:45, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It's an issue with OpenStreetMaps. I don't think we have control over this. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:22, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Or with how the data is fetched and delivered? It has happened before, here and there. One thing is not to have control, another whether to work around this. Do we know what it is about? –LPfi (talk) 08:38, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It does happen annoyingly often, and it's confusing and embarrassing (especially because it usually takes so long to be fixed). The Great Lakes are all present right now at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/45.637/-87.374 , but they are still missing on the map to the right, so it seems the persistence of the problem is probably caused by something on our end. —Granger (talk · contribs) 17:04, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Caching tiles is probably necessary for both performance and privacy. Does OSM tell when there are problems, or is there some other technical way to figure that out? –LPfi (talk) 17:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Note that the rendering of OSM data for our maps is done by Wikimedia. Switching to the mapnik layer provided by OSM (second icon in the top right corner) shows the lakes. I wonder if we could just use that layer by default, it seems to be much more detailed in general. Features missing from the Wikimedia renders at certain zoom levels is a known bug. --El Grafo (talk) 08:59, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Unfortunately we cannot use Mapnik by default. There used to be an option to make mapframe use the Mapnik layer, but this was disabled. The Mapnik servers are not controlled by Wikimedia, and so there is a potential privacy concern linking to them by default. (To most readers this is a probably non-concern compared to the embedded Google maps in many other websites.) AlasdairW (talk) 20:46, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

OK, that's understandable. Ironically, the over-arching phab:T218097 reads like these lakes are quite literally leaking from the database somehow. And since the haven't found the hole yet, all they can to is to keep pumping them back in. El Grafo (talk) 09:39, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

This; I believe, also appeared several years ago with Sydney Harbor in Australia - a tiling issue I thihk was the cause... - apologize for late comment... -- Matroc (talk) 23:46, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

New user ban nomination

Hi everyone, there's a new user ban nomination at Wikivoyage:User ban nominations. Any ideas on how to deal with this situation would be appreciated. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 02:42, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Template for approval: Template:Asian cuisines

Title. Works similar to Template:EuropeanCuisines. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 23:29, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I implemented the template. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:52, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Taking a step back

As you probably know, I'm very active here, and that's because I, just like most of you do, edit this travel guide in my leisure time. But these days, I've been endlessly obsessed with the one user from Queensland that we all know. And I can probably confidently say that 95 percent of my recent rollbacks used are reverting him, and it's become a bad habit – and it's just as unproductive, and we all know that there's better things to do than rollbacking copyvios and doing /64 blocks. And then there's the case of an LTA who I now feel like an absolute idiot into thinking they were a good faith user. And my rant could go on.

On top of that, real life issues mean that I can no longer edit as much as I used to, and so just a quick note to let you all know that I won't be much active in the near future – for at least the end of this year.

With that being said, you will still see me make an edit now and then, add some coordinates, and probably do a couple of rollbacks on edits by Brendan, and probably close vfd nominations. I'm not leaving forever, and I do hope I can come back and become more active when things have settled, but until then, I wish the best for the community :-)

--SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 11:08, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure we'll all be happy to see you whenever it works out. Who knows, maybe we'll be lucky and that will even be before the end of the year.

(Don't blame yourself for believing people to be good until thoroughly proven otherwise. That's a sign that you're a good person!) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Have a great real life and we'll still be here whenever you drop by. Thanks for all the great work you do! Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:13, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Recharge your batteries, SHB. We all hope that you'll feel better soon and if you are up to freely giving your labor and expertise, we'd love to have it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks to all of you :) I'm not gone forever tho, so you'll still see me popping around. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks from me too for what you've done. Good luck with your life, and I'll be glad to see you here, regardless of whether you are going to do much or little. –LPfi (talk) 10:49, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Template:Confused should be wrapped with noexcerpt span

In response to my question at the Wikimedia support desk, TheDJ explained that the problem was caused by Template:Confused not being wrapped in <span class="noexcerpt"> ... </span>. I propose that we do this, as it seems costless to readers/editors and would improve compatibility with the Wikimedia API. (Other templates, e.g. Template:Other uses, are already wrapped.)

I apparently have rights to do this myself, and it looks simple enough, but I don't particularly want to, given that I have zero experience editing Wikimedia templates and I don't know their pitfalls. If we agree that this should be done, I am hoping that somebody with a bit more experience in this area could make the change. Brycehughes (talk) 13:52, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

It seemed to be a no-brainer, so I did the change. If somebody sees any pitfalls, please check or undo. In the bug discussion, also "role=note" was recommended, but I am not sure what that does, so did not add it. –LPfi (talk) 14:11, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Weirdly, the API call's "extract" value is just a \n character now. Wondering out loud... would your change propagate that fast to the API? Damn, I should have tested it immediately before posting here. I guess I'll give it a few days and try again and if it's still being weird I'll follow up somewhere. Brycehughes (talk) 14:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I moved the image out of the way in the article just in case that was causing any weirdness. Will see what happens. Brycehughes (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I first tried to include everything in the <span></span>, but that made the ":" not work. Seems it uses the first paragraph, and the ":" line is interpreted as that first line. Extension:TextExtracts does not tell how to get around this. Adding a blank line? But span shouldn't span paragraph breaks. HTML for the ":"? –LPfi (talk) 15:17, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you think the ":" is what TheDJ was referring to in the second half of the response? I think he might be saying we shouldn't use the ":" for indentation and instead use the CSS styling he suggests – this might allow us to kill two birds with one stone, but also seems to relate to a larger issue with our use of ":" in templates. I wonder if that CSS styling is documented anywhere. I could ask him in my MW support thread (though I kinda hate pestering those guys). Brycehughes (talk) 16:55, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Probably yes, to all of those. MediaWiki should have rendered ":" as <span ...> to begin with, but I suppose it is too late for that. I don't know what side effects changing the ":" to something else in all templates would have, but perhaps some of the technical folks here could comment. –LPfi (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay I followed up on my MW thread. Will report back. Brycehughes (talk) 22:35, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi LPfi, TheDJ responded and kindly implemented some fixes over here. The extract for Sun River works now, but it is a bit of a naive solution and in his response TheDJ notes a couple points of action: 1) He provides an example of using CSS styling to implement the indent, rather than using the ":"; 2) Noting the weirdness with the Template:Page banner in interacting with the extract parser, he suggests we "definitely add 'noexcerpt' to the hidden span with country data". I'll admit that (1) is a bit over my head and (2) I don't really understand, although it seems it might be a quick fix for somebody who knew what they were doing. So, a couple questions... do you understand both (1) and (2)? And do you think there is any fierce urgency to pursue these fixes now? One benefit that TheDJ mentioned was improved Google indexing, which might be a win for the site as a whole. Brycehughes (talk) 18:04, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

I'll take a look later. Ping me if I haven't commented here in a week. –LPfi (talk) 18:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Will do. Thanks. Brycehughes (talk) 00:39, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi LPfi, as promised. Personally, I'm not too fussed about this. If you feel like taking a look at TheDJ's suggestions, fantastic. But I'm not really sure of their importance and if you don't have the bandwidth right now I'm happy to shelve this to potentially bring it up again if I notice any weirdness in the future. Thanks, Brycehughes (talk) 19:35, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I am going to do it at some time – not knowing how this works bugs me – but I think I'd better save it for another time. –LPfi (talk) 19:58, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Are marine parks a violation of our bodies of water policy?

I created Great Australian Bight Marine Park today, but was wondering whether it and marine parks in general violate the bodies of water policy. We have very few articles about marine parks, and the only one that's at guide status is the Great Barrier Reef, but that's a region article, not a park article so that doesn't really count. But from Wikivoyage:Bodies of water, "Some regions or for that matter towns are named after bodies of water. These articles aren't about water, they are about the inhabited area on and around the water, with all the sorts of things that make a destination article-worthy." However, marine parks are 100 percent in the water, and so the only thing that can really be added is about recreational activities available.

So, should the bodies of water policy be adjusted to say that marine parks are allowed, or do marine parks violate the bodies of water policy? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 02:41, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

The bodies of water policy basically amounts to "Don't create an article about a body of water unless it's viable as a destination, travel topic or itinerary article." Do you think you can make this into a viable travel article? If not, make it a "Do" listing in the most appropriate place or handle it some other way that seems most useful to travellers - and if there is no way that's useful, it might not even bear mentioning. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:33, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

A minimum requirement would be that there is at least one organized hospitality venue. There is one for this marine park. /Yvwv (talk) 02:45, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense, as it doesn't make sense to have an article about just the marine life, reefs. Would listing dive sites count? (it's not an organized venue, but still something to see) SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:14, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that requirement always makes sense. My examples are all in the Philippines.

The two parks (one marine) at Olango_Island#See are handled as listings in the island article and the marine reserve around Apo_Island is just mentioned in text, not even a listing. That's fine since for any of them you'd stay & eat on the island, or perhaps in some nearby area.

Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, though, certainly deserves its own article even though there is no accommodation & nearly all visitors come on live-aboard boats. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a national park, a popular destination, & on several lists of the world's top dive sites. Pashley (talk) 05:42, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Can you sleep there (and would you) allows for sleeping in a tent. How would a boat be different? If it's a place where you'd stay several days it is probably worth an article. Anyway, I'd say the traveller comes first: if you go there from several locations, you'd otherwise need to link one of those articles for the description, and the article may be overwhelmed or the long description otherwise feel inappropriate. Linking a park article instead would be much more elegant, even if you have to link the surrounding cities for lodging. –LPfi (talk) 10:21, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore is extended till 15th March

Please help translate to your language

Greetings from Wiki Loves Folklore International Team,

We are pleased to inform you that Wiki Loves Folklore an international photographic contest on Wikimedia Commons has been extended till the 15th of March 2022. The scope of the contest is focused on folk culture of different regions on categories, such as, but not limited to, folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, etc.

We would like to have your immense participation in the photographic contest to document your local Folk culture on Wikipedia. You can also help with the translation of project pages and share a word in your local language.

Best wishes,

International Team
Wiki Loves Folklore

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:50, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Template for approval: Template:BOM

Title. Works similar to Template:Forecast and you can see its usage here in Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park#Climate or Mount Field National Park. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:15, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Disapprove until it has a header (in the form "|+ Some appropriate header here" with possible other features like styling, etc.) for accessibility reasons. Once it has that, approve. I suggest something like "+Weather forecast for {{subst:PAGENAME}}" and if the pagename is wonky, it can be manually changed. Great work and attractive! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:02, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

btw I should mentioned it only works for articles about Australia and the Australian Antarctic Territory. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:05, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Do we want such templates for all countries with forecasts? If so, we'd fill the template namespace with such abbreviations. As the template seldom needs to be inserted spontaneously, I think there'd be no problem to have a longer name. –LPfi (talk) 08:13, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

What about ForecastNOAA, ForecastBOM etc, or Forecast/NOAA, Forecast/BOM etc.? Or Forecast/US, Forecast/AU, etc. –LPfi (talk) 08:22, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

A simple typing solution could be to have a country-code hack and then something simple, like Template:aufcast for Australia and Template:uafcast for Ukraine, etc. Fairly easy to type and remember but also pretty obscure. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:23, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Easy to remember is more important than easy to type. If you are inserting it in many articles you can copy and paste, or use AWB or similar – but I suppose it should be used only on regions and places like national parks, where a good forecast may be critical. –LPfi (talk) 08:38, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

I can easily remember "au" = "Australia"; I had no idea that "BOM" had anything to do with Australia prior to this. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:55, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Few overseas travellers editing Australian articles would guess, when they see {{BOM}} in the wikitext. I first thought about the byte order mark, although you wouldn't need that in Wikivoyage articles. I think we should go for Forecast/AU & co. That wouldn't need changes if the bureau changes names or you get better forecasts from somewhere else (although parameter changes may be needed where it is used). If there are different agencies for one country, and you need to choose article by article, you can add a parameter for that. —The preceding comment was added by LPfi (talk • contribs)

So renaming to Template:Forecast/AU? Also, I think Template:Forecast should also be renamed. A brand new user interested in a non-US related article might be disappointed to find out a template which its name makes one think it shows a seven day forecast only works on articles about the US. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 10:41, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes indeed. The template is used on 67 pages, not too many to change manually, and we might replace it with a template doing something sensible (or nothing but adding a maintenance category) when no country is specified. –LPfi (talk) 10:49, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Visas for Equatorial Guinea

I was wondering, has anyone visited Equatorial Guinea in the past?

I must say, it has the most confusing visa regulations ever and there's no clear-cut information on how to get certain documents (like the invitation letter for instance). Roovinn (talk) 03:43, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

I checked one embassy's website (the Equatoguinean embassy in Washington DC), and it says that you need two invitation letters: one from the authorities, and one from an entity in the country. Roovinn (talk) 03:44, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Make working with templates easier: Several improvements coming to your wiki soon.

Hello! A few months ago, your wiki received these improvements from the Templates project by Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team:

• Finding and inserting templates became easier with an improved search and added warnings. (1)
• In VisualEditor, can now remove a template from a page via the context menu, just like removing a table or an image. (2)
• Also in VisualEditor, several fundamental improvements were done in the template dialog. (3)
• A new attribute “suggested values” was introduced to help you clarify what values a parameter may expect. (4)
• When using syntax highlighting, line numbers are shown in the template namespace. (5)
  A few wikis have these line numbers in all namespaces. If you want this for your wiki as well, please reach out to us.

On March 9, more improvements from the Templates project are coming to this and many more wikis:

• Matching brackets will be highlighted (when you use syntax highlighting). (6)
• The color scheme in syntax highlighting will be updated for better readability. (7)

These improvements have been tested on a few other wikis for a few months now, but we’d love to hear what you think of them on the talk pages of the project pages linked above ([1] - [7]).

A few weeks later, we’re also going to add a colorblind-friendly color scheme in syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension). You’ll be able to activate it via a user setting.

– Greetings from the Technical Wishes project, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 13:14, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

That sounds awesome! Definitely looking forward to it :) RayScript (talk) 05:22, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

@RayScript: Thanks for the nice feedback! -- Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 15:16, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

April 1st

Are we considering an April 1st item this year? Wikivoyage_talk:Joke_articles#April_2022

If given world events it's not appropriate to do one this year, I will fully understand. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 09:53, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

I support the idea of running one as usual. Humour (even our dreadful amateurish sense of humour) is an important antidote to worry. That said, I won't have a great deal of time this month to contribute as much as I would normally. So essentially, don't count on my input for ideas etc, though you're welcome to consider any of the previous ideas I came up with (on the joke articles talk page).--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 09:56, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I made a start on Da'nunder in my userspace, and would appreciate some other contributors :) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 19:41, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Map picture at Helsinki is obsolete

The map picture at the Helsinki article is obsolete. The large purple area shows the northern part of Helsinki and the entire city of Vantaa blended into one area. No such unified area exists in real life as Vantaa is a separate city and the northern part of Helsinki has no special autonomous status. The subarticle about the area was split to Helsinki/Northern suburbs and Vantaa over three and a half years ago. The map picture should be redrawn to show Vantaa in a different colour just like Espoo, or perhaps remove the colouring of Vantaa and Espoo altogether. JIP (talk) 00:36, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Ypsilon, do you still have the original materials for that map? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:17, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

The editable vector file of the map is here: File:Helsinki Capital region map.svg --Ypsilon (talk) 11:19, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Probably quicker to draw a new one, though. --Ypsilon (talk) 11:28, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Are tables too encyclopedic for a travel guide?

For many of our national park lists, such as Canadian national parks, South Australian national parks, Tasmanian national parks or United Kingdom national parks which use a table to list all the parks, I'm wondering if it comes off as too encyclopedic for a travel guide. I quite like the table format, it lets you put an image for every park, and it tells you the area of the park too giving the traveler a glimpse of how large the park will be, but not sure about the established date tho. Want other comments before I continue using table formats for our other national park topic articles. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:26, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

The description, such as in South Australian national parks, is essential. For me, in many of the tables, I think combining the name and description in one table cell would be beneficial, as you'd get double the width, which allows both not word-wrapping the name, and having more space for the description. I think the year of establishment is quite irrelevant – who would choose what park to visit based on that year? The area could perhaps be a parenthesis in the description.

In fact, I don't see much of an advantage in the table format. As the images are high, the other columns (except for the description) will be very sparse. With a clear before every park, you'd get the images aligned, and with a suitable standard format any information (area, location) will be easy to see:

---

1 Belair National Park established 1891, 8.35 km² (3.22 sq mi), Adelaide – South Australia's first national park, home to several historic sites and waterfalls. By today's standards, it's only a conservation park, but it remains for historical reasons.

2 Canunda National Park established 1959, 96.24 km² (37.16 sq mi), Limestone Coast – A park with coastal dunes, limestone cliffs and natural bushland.

3 Nullarbor National Park established 1979/2013, 323.10 km² (124.75 sq mi)/28,500 km² (11,000 sq mi), Outback – Vast openness with nothing in sight. From a travel perspective, it is often considered to be part of the same park as the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area. Unfortunately, its area was significantly reduced in 2013, where much of it is now part of the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area.

---

–LPfi (talk) 11:14, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

This format would take the same space vertically, but allow much more space for the description. In this format there is also no need to have just one paragraph; there could be a listing line, a description paragraph, and one more paragraph or line for some other information, whatever that'd be. –LPfi (talk) 11:19, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

That works and I like that format. I might try that out in Tasmanian national parks soon. As to the established year, I only included it because I saw it in Canadian national parks, but I could see the merit in including it if it was just designated in 2021 or a time sometime recent as the visitor facilities may not have been well developed if it is recently new. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 11:22, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

A variant:

4 Nullarbor National Park

• Outback
• National park 323.10 km² (124.75 sq mi), protected area 28,500 km² (11,000 sq mi)
• Established 1979/2013

Vast openness with nothing in sight. From a travel perspective, it is often considered to be part of the same park as the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area. Unfortunately, its area was significantly reduced in 2013, where much of it is now part of the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area.

–LPfi (talk) 11:25, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

The suggested format doesn't work in mobile. The names and first words of each entry are cut up and squashed by the photo.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 16:03, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Oops. Is it perhaps the same problem that I get on desktop with tables of content on Wikipedia, when some headings are long and there is an adjacent image? I think there are some other situations where "special" text clashes with images or maps. I assume this format not working is a bug, which should be reported and fixed rather than avoided (in the long term, at least). The only odd thing I see in this format is that the images don't have the thumb parameter. Would adding it help? –LPfi (talk) 16:15, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

5 Nullarbor National Park

• Outback
• National park 323.10 km² (124.75 sq mi), protected area 28,500 km² (11,000 sq mi)
• Established 1979/2013

Vast openness with nothing in sight. From a travel perspective, it is often considered to be part of the same park as the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area. Unfortunately, its area was significantly reduced in 2013, where much of it is now part of the Nullabor Wilderness Protection Area.

The thumb parameter reserves a little more space, which can be used for a caption. I don't see why a caption wouldn't be nice to have. The length of the list of parks wouldn't grow too much. –LPfi (talk) 16:18, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes, adding the thumb parameter appears to work. Good thinking!--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 17:00, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think the table format is a big problem (though it does seem to be unnecessary). However, I think that including the year of establishment is too encyclopedic. Sometimes dates are relevant context (e.g., "South Australia's newest", "Established at the end of the Great War") but most travelers really don't need to know that.

If you did stick with a table format, then adding a column for sleeping options (with content like tent, RV, cabins, hotels) might be useful for travelers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that tables per se are a problem, but please note that we should use best practices for accessibility and internationalization, see this edit for added semantics, color not being used alone for identification, and conversion of km squared to mi squared. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:40, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

We should include alt text for images as well. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:43, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

I prefer LPfi's table-free format, with descriptions, and volunteer to convert the Canadian parks article. The date of establishment feels very encyclopedic. It should be omitted. If the park is very new and doesn't have facilities, that should be included in the description, or better yet in the article. I don't think that issue needs to be addressed in the overview article. Ground Zero (talk) 22:33, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Aesthetics-wise, I don't have strong feelings, just when it comes to accessibility and best practices. Either way, great work. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:37, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

I started this format on Tasmanian national parks. Curious to see how it'll turn out. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 04:39, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

However, I can't seem to get the background color of #CFECEC to work in Tasmanian national parks. Is there a way to change the bgcolor? SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 04:46, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Never mind. Seemed I just forgot to add a |. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 05:50, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Finished the conversion in Tasmanian national parks. As a side note, does anyone know what's happening in the last box? SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:13, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Which site? The information about Macquarie Island isn't in the new tables formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

It's the Walls of Jerusalem one. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 19:58, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Managed to fix it. Don't exactly know what was causing it, but anyway it's resolved SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 02:48, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Background colours

I don't think that using background colours to denote UNESCO sites is beneficial or necessary. As I understand, using background colours reduce accessibility for visually impaired people. The UNESCO point can be made more clearly by including that information as text in the description of the park, rather than using the "code" of a background colour. What do others think? Ground Zero (talk) 12:12, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

The contrast in this case is probably strong enough that it meets the usual W3C accessibility standards. However, it would be better to indicate the UNESCO listing in text for the sake of people who are listening to the article (e.g., via 'smart speaker' or text-to-voice on your computer, in addition to people using screen readers).

As a broader opportunity, we could consider adding a special field for identifying UNESCO sites (or similar), so the listing templates displayed a little icon or standardized label. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, I don't really have an opinion on this. The only reason I coloured in the background of Banff is merely because the former table had it. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:54, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback about the Board of Trustees elections

The Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections is now closed. This Call ran from 10 January and closed on 16 February 2022. The Call focused on three key questions and received broad discussion on Meta-wiki, during meetings with affiliates, and in various community conversations. The community and affiliates provided many proposals and discussion points. The reports are on Meta-wiki.

This information will be shared with the Board of Trustees and Elections Committee so they can make informed decisions about the upcoming Board of Trustees election. The Board of Trustees will then follow with an announcement after they have discussed the information.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Call for Feedback to help improve Board election processes.

Best,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Zuz (WMF) (talk) 09:59, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Add "status" param to "marker" template?

IDK if this is worth it. Prolly a lot of bot activity to make it worthwhile. But I comped up an example of what this might look like from the Belize article. Basically you could add "status=outline" to the marker template, which would replace the bullet with a small icon representing the article status. The idea is that visitors will know a bit more what to expect before clicking a link. Whaddyathink? Oh and here is the CSS to make it happen if you're interested in that. --ButteBag (talk) 14:38, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

li { background: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Symbol_plain_grey.svg/15px-Symbol_plain_grey.svg.png'); background: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Start-icon.svg/15px-Start-icon.svg.png'); background: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Symbol_keep_vote.svg/15px-Symbol_keep_vote.svg.png'); background: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Symbol_support_vote.svg/15px-Symbol_support_vote.svg.png'); background: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Symbol_star_gold.svg/15px-Symbol_star_gold.svg.png'); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: .4em; background-size: 12px; list-style: none; padding-left: 1.6em; margin-left: -1.6em; margin-top: 0.2em; }

That could significantly lessen the frustration of clicking through to outlines. It might be confusing until you get it, and it might make the articles look more cluttered regardless. I cannot judge, but the outline frustration has been a big frustration for me when I have wanted to read about some specific region not well covered. Perhaps redirects could be kept as links (to ease creating the articles) with some similar means (a different colour for the link?). –LPfi (talk) 07:56, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

That's fun: I like it. Good thinking. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:59, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

• Support, but hold it – it's a good idea, and I'm all in favour for it. However, I would want to hold it off for now for two reasons:

• There's a discussion to rename guide status
• There's a discussion to add a new status between usable and guide.

Once they're all resolved, I'm all ready to support. That being said, it will take a lot of work to do, but I support the concept. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:06, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Ok, nice! Yeah if we do go forward with this, I'd like to see some new icons, maybe monochromatic or something to reduce the visual noise. I also have no idea how to do the bot programming, so we would need help with that. For me it doesn't matter so much if guide is being renamed, or if a new status is included. If there's a bot to do this, shouldn't be a big deal if status taxonomy changes. ButteBag (talk) 14:10, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Do you have the code somewhere? I didn't find it in your recent contributions. What changes are needed to the articles themselves? Can the marker or listing template change the bullet at the beginning of the line? If you need to include the bullet in the marker/listing for this to work, and thus the ordinary bullets need to be removed, this could cause all kinds of problems. There are also issues if you use javascript to remove the bullets at load time or just after, or to add some class to them. –LPfi (talk) 14:39, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I just "sketched" this out in the browser with CSS (as shown above). There's no code other than the CSS. Adding post-render JS is a bad idea IMHO. I thought it might be possible to add a class to the li element. Something like `has-status has-status-${status}`. We seem to be adding a `vcard` class to a span in there, so I guessed it might be possible. I was guessing someone would need to write a bot to update any marker templates. This would be VERY noisy, so figured it would need pretty wide community acceptance. ButteBag (talk) 15:19, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

OK. The problem is that the <li> is just a "*" in the wikitext, identical to any other bullet. The template comes after it, so I don't see how to add classes or styles to the bullet according to something in the template, other than by javascript executed when the template has been loaded. However, I haven't really been coding CSS or javascript, so there may very well be some clean solution that I don't know about. –LPfi (talk) 15:37, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Could a <div> around the list do something sensible? It could at least add a common class to the bullets and loop through the list items. I think we still need to overwrite the bullets with ones that know the status of the linked article. –LPfi (talk) 15:40, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

If we can guarantee that the icons use the same width and height as the bullets, I think overwriting wouldn't be that problematic. –LPfi (talk) 15:45, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I tried to come as close as I could to the wxh of the bullets. But yeah, I'm getting what you're saying now about the "*", sigh. Didn't notice that. The only template I see that does kinda what we want is {{regionlist}}. So we'd have to create a {{markerlist}} template I guess. I don't love how cumbersome that template is (or adding another template), but on the plus side it would make these sections more consistent. ButteBag (talk) 17:23, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Ugh ok, so @LPfi, here's the JS & CSS if you want to play around with it. Why did I do this? This expects the marker template to be formed like so

HTML

<span class="vcard" data-status="guide">[...]</span>

JS

document.querySelectorAll("[data-status]").forEach(status => status.parentNode.classList.add(`has-status`, `has-status-${status.dataset.status}`))

CSS

.has-status { background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 0.4em; background-size: 0.8em; list-style: none; padding-left: 1.6em; margin-left: -1.6em; margin-top: 0.2em; }

.has-status-stub { background-image: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Symbol_plain_grey.svg'); }

.has-status-outline { background-image: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Start-icon.svg'); }

.has-status-usable { background-image: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Symbol_keep_vote.svg'); }

.has-status-guide { background-image: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Symbol_support_vote.svg'); }

.has-status-star { background-image: url('//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Symbol_star_gold.svg'); }

I guess the JS isn't too crazy, but yeah it might be better to create a new template rather than doing it this way if people are interested in doing this. ButteBag (talk) 17:51, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Could the background size be specified in ems instead of pxs? Mixing the two isn't too good in general, and here we want the icon to fit the space reserved for the bullet, otherwise line-breaks may shift, making the article jump back and forth. A problem is that the icon is of a fixed size, but perhaps the parts not fitting in the box can be made transparent. I suppose few are using fonts with 1 em < 15 px, but you'd never know. Perhaps it doesn't matter too much, but a guarantee is better than an expectation. –LPfi (talk) 18:20, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Ok LPfi, updated. There's still a bug in the JS in that it's expecting the marker to be in a list. I can fix later. Still think I might prefer to have a template, but not sure the implications. Thanks! --ButteBag (talk) 21:13, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Aren't the bullets always put in lists by the MediaWiki software, even individual bullets? But anyway, yes, the code can be tweaked later, if we get consensus on using it. The main thing for now is to check that the code can be written in a way that doesn't cause disruption. –LPfi (talk) 21:33, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Happy Women's Day

Hello Lady Wikivoyagers! I wish you a very happy women's day! Today, we celebrate your political, social, cultural and economic achievements around the world. Cheers! :-) --Haoreima (talk) 08:13, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Invitation to Hubs Global Conversation

Hello!

The Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation would like to invite you to the next event about "Regional and Thematic Hubs". The Wikimedia Movement is in the process of understanding what Regional and Thematic Hubs should be. Our workshop in November was a good start (read the report), but we're not finished yet.

Over the last weeks we conducted about 16 interviews with groups working on establishing a Hub in their context (see Hubs Dialogue). These interviews informed a report that will serve as a foundation for discussion on March 12. The report is planned to be published on March 9.

The event will take place on March 12, 13:00 to 16:00 UTC on Zoom. Interpretation will be provided in French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese. Registration is open, and will close on March 10. Anyone interested in the topic is invited to join us. More information on the event on Meta-wiki.

Best regards,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Zuz (WMF) (talk) 09:59, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines ratification voting open from 7 to 21 March 2022

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

More languages • Please help translate to your language

Hello everyone,

The ratification voting process for the revised enforcement guidelines of the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) is now open! Voting commenced on SecurePoll on 7 March 2022 and will conclude on 21 March 2022. Please read more on the voter information and eligibility details.

The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a baseline of acceptable behavior for the entire movement. The revised enforcement guidelines were published 24 January 2022 as a proposed way to apply the policy across the movement. You can read more about the UCoC project.

You can also comment on Meta-wiki talk pages in any language. You may also contact the team by email: ucocprojectwikimedia.org

Sincerely,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Zuz (WMF) (talk) 11:53, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

Strange symbol link

This is probably a stupid question, but what is does the tree/graph symbol at the bottom of the Xico article mean? Clicking on it brings me to a create category screen. Thanks, Brycehughes (talk) 02:09, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Not stupid at all. It's generated by {{IsPartOf}} and that should make Category:Veracruz, but as you can see, that category used to exist and has since been deleted. Instead, what should happen is that the city should be marked as part of a larger region. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:19, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Gotcha. Thanks. Brycehughes (talk) 17:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Ukrainian DotM

As a small symbolic gesture in favor of the Ukrainian population, the Italian community of Wikivoyage has decided to collaborate to push one Ukrainian city as Destination of the Month.

The choice fell on Lviv because from a touristic point of view, among the interesting historical Ukrainian cities, Lviv is the one furthest away from the current conflict and therefore (we hope) the one that will suffer the least damage and changes.

Do you think this Wikivoyage community could also be interested in a similar initiative? --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:23, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I love it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:44, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Me too. I know that some will object on the basis that people should not travel there, but we can put something in the blurb about how we are raising awareness about this beautiful city.... Ground Zero (talk) 17:59, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

We didn't do this for Iraqi or Syrian cities when they were getting destroyed by IS, we haven't done this for Yemeni cities, etc., etc. I would be fine with doing a special 1-day feature, but as an international guide, we should be careful about showing too much bias toward Europe and away from every other conflict zone. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:34, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Agreed that we should all care more about various Arab peoples. Also agreed that we should care about all oppressed peoples. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:54, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

So another alternative is, we run a month on a Ukrainian city, a month on a Yemeni city, a month on a conflict-riven city in The Congo, maybe a month on Mekele...the issue is that we aren't likely to run out of wartorn cities or zones any time soon. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:09, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I'd say let's just not go there. Let's not make Wikivoyage more Western-centric than it already is. What's happening in Ukraine is terrible, but so is what's happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, somalia, etc. So let's just stay out of controversy and not feature any destinations within active warzones. The dog2 (talk) 21:27, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Ideally it would be nice, but we should not be advocating travel to any warzones at this point and I agree with The dog2, Justin and Ikan that we should not be featuring warzones. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 21:41, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Also, it's worth noting that Addis Ababa was slushed because of the warzone. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 21:49, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

So DotM, OtBT, FTT, and JDGT? The city where you should have gone in time. But the pandemic was depressive enough, I don't think we need to read about the horrors Man is capable of here. They say that the "helping phones", where people can call when in need of someone to talk to, have all calls mentioning Ukraine these days. Sure, we have a 1000+ km border to Russia, but there is little military on the other side at present, and I don't think they will see a new war as a good idea anytime soon. Still, Ukraine is what people are talking and thinking – and quite a few acting – about.

I thought about putting the Ukraine flag on my user pages the day after the invasion, but generally political statements have been banned from user pages, and keeping to principles might be even more important now that some break them so blatantly that Russia has done. I'll try to join the next demonstration instead, and perhaps I can lodge a family of refugees (from Ukraine or Russia, we get hundreds of both).

–LPfi (talk) 22:43, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I would support creating general travel topics relating to Ukrainian culture, for example Kievan Rus', Ukrainian cuisine, National parks in Ukraine, Cossacks (currently a redirect), Castles in Ukraine, etc. rather than feature a war zone on the main page. Gizza ^(roam) 00:42, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I've created Ukrainian national parks. Unfortunately, we do not have many park articles of Ukraine, but I suppose we can possibly revive cotm (though I have not been here long enough to know how it works) in creating articles for Ukrainian national parks. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 00:59, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

The previous COTM phase from 2017 to 2020 was quite successful but was more effective at maintenance tasks like fixing dead links and formatting than making substantial improvements to articles. We could also create a Ukraine Expedition. Gizza ^(roam) 02:14, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Yeah, I would avoid featuring a Ukrainian destination right now. In a few months’s time, who knows what the situation will be in Ukraine. I think the situation could continue in active war for months but the situation could still change within hours, and Russian-sourced attacks are taking place across the country. Let’s stay away from featuring Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus articles throughout the conflict and sanctions. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 02:50, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I fear months is optimistic. But one comment on DaGizza's suggestion: I would not oppose the creation of a travel-related informational article about Cossacks, with proper context, but I would vehemently oppose running it on the basis of sympathy with Ukrainians. Those guys were notorious rapists and murderers of my - and President Zelensky's - people. It would be as bad as running a feature about the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis on a similar basis, and unfortunately, there were many of them and they were among the most murderous and fanatical Nazi collaborators. Ukraine has clearly changed drastically since those days, given the landslide election of Mr. Zelensky, and we should respect and honor that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:00, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, and there are still Neo-Nazis in their National Guard. I would support abstaining from making official Wikivoyage statements on the invasion, such as a Ukrainian DOTM. The exception is safety concerns due to the invasion. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 03:51, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't know if I would go so far as to ban the featuring of Russian destination. As deplorable as this war is, the vast majority of Russian citizens have nothing to do with it, and we should be careful not to conflate Russian history and culture with the actions of the Russian government. Somebody can love the Russian people, their culture and their history while objecting to the Russian government's actions in Ukraine. And besides, there was no ban on featuring American destinations when the U.S. was bombing Syria and Libya. So let's be careful not to conflate travel and politics. The dog2 (talk) 05:13, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I'll just add my very insignificant opinion to this, because I happened to click here. I think one of the core advantages of the en-wiki-websites is that they move as slow as molasses on big issues. So we tend to average out the cultural mood-of-the-day and therefore become a lot more of a reliable source for regular people (e.g. most travelers). I am a westerner, and I find the Kremlin's actions absolutely abhorrent. But that seems to me a different realm. This physically pains me to say, but are we really living up to our goals as a quality travel guide to feature cities that are likely to be decimated? Do we really feature the top restaurants in Kharkiv? Even Lviv? Is this a good time to go, innocent traveler? To me it seems crass and contrived, sadly. Also there's the whole consistency thing... Burma? Syria? Yemen? It opens a lot of advocacy rabbit holes, which we might not want to be probing, lest we lose sight of what this website is for. Brycehughes (talk) 05:52, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh god I even got indent-ignored haha. Brycehughes (talk) 14:56, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

While the the vast majority of Russian citizens have done nothing wrong (and this can probably be seen within Wikimedia), Russia at this point is still a highly politically restricted area and it was a similar reason why we slushed Addis Ababa. At this point, I think we should just avoid all features of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Transnistria and possibly Poland and Romania for the time being. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:21, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Besides, you'd have trouble flying into Russia from most places now, and their economy is a disaster area. It's very reasonable to hold off on featuring Russian destinations for now. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:13, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Selfie City, let's be fair: there are neo-Nazis in the U.S. military, too. Ukraine is clearly nothing remotely close to a fascist country today; it's clear to me which side is fascist and aligned with anti-Semites and white supremacists in this war. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:54, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I agree that we should think carefully before featuring any Russian destinations in the foreseeable future, but I wouldn't condemn travel to Russia. I am very sad to hear fewer people here are going to study Russian; I think we need all contact that can be had with Russian people, and all understanding we can get about the regime (I was happy to hear our President had a conversation with Putin the other day) and political situation. But travel to see Russian churches and enjoy oneself in nightclubs is not what we need, we need people getting deep acquaintances. A number of very good Finnish journalists have left Russia and might not return for many years, or ever, as they feel the threat to them now is significantly worse than when reporting from Chechnya. In such circumstances, I don't know for whom I can recommend travel there. Getting in is no problem, though: fly to Finland and get on the train to Saint Petersburg. There are extra trains because of Russians fleeing the country. –LPfi (talk) 10:42, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Oops, the trains are for nationals only, because of COVID-19 restrictions. But I suppose the marshrutkas drive as before, and you could walk across the border from Lappeenranta. –LPfi (talk) 10:44, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek:To be clear, I was referring to the units that openly embrace the Neo-Nazi label, such as the Azov Battalion, which I don’t think you would find in most countries so openly.

As for featuring articles in Russia, I would be opposed on the practical grounds. The sanctions are already making travel there difficult, and if anything, the pressure to add sanctions will only strengthen as the war goes on. I’m sure many people have ethical concerns about tourism in Russia as well, and it would seem insensitive to the current situation to feature destinations from these countries. I support our current course of (in)action regarding featuring articles or making statements during this war. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 11:36, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ If there's practical reasons to hold off on featuring a place, then that's fine. But let's just not do that for political reasons. Featuring Russian destinations may be offensive to Ukrainian readers, but so is featuring Israeli destinations for Palestinian readers, featuring Saudi destinations for Yemeni Houthi readers and so on. It's true that the Ukraine crisis is getting more coverage from the Western media, but as we speak, there is an equally bad, if not worse, humanitarian crisis going on in Yemen because of a war the Saudis and Emiratis are waging against the Yemeni Shia Houthis with America's blessing, but gets hardly any coverage in Western media because Saudi Arabia and the UAE are U.S. allies. Two wrongs don't make a right, but for the sake of being a truly international guide and not a Western-centric one, I'd say we should just focus on the practical travel aspects and not base our decisions on the political situations. The dog2 (talk) 15:25, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Featured articles are a marketing (ugh) aspect of this website. And, while we should strive not to be a western-centric guide, we also always will be a western-centric guide. Western readers form the vast majority of our audience. So our featured articles, as opposed to the content at large, are anchored by both practical and political considerations. Is it a good "practical" idea to feature Ukrainian articles at the moment? No. Is it a good "political" idea to feature Ukrainian articles? Probably yes, given the marketing aspect, but it's not practical. Is it a good practical idea to feature Russian articles at the moment? Perhaps not, given the difficultly of traveling there for a westerner. Is it a good political idea? No. Brycehughes (talk) 16:19, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Is it so obvious that "we also always will be a western-centric guide"? Aren't a majority of English-speakers in Asia and Africa? I agree with The dog2 on political considerations and sensitivities. Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:41, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps not so obvious, but I'd argue that it is the case, yes. Would be interesting to see traffic metrics on this. I'd expect that they conform to the typical patterns of english-language websites. Ergo if we agree that featuring articles is marketing (perhaps we don't), then we have an audience to consider. Brycehughes (talk) 16:50, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

The people of Ukraine deserve all support they can get from the international community right now. That said, it is customary to rule out Dotms which have major emergencies. The featuring of Portland (Oregon) was on hold for one year due to riots, and Addis Abeba has been slushed due to an ongoing insurgency. When it comes to human rights concerns, the only reasonable choice is to leave the judgment to the individual traveller. The thing we could provide, is relevant safety warnings concerning the conflict. As the conflict is based on national identity and historical claims, we should make sure that travel topics such as Russian Empire and the Soviet Union put the conflict into context. /Yvwv (talk) 20:22, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we should feature any Ukrainian or Russian articles at the moment. Ukraine was the 3rd most read page on the site in February (and 8th yesterday).

Many Ukrainians are travelling at the moment, and editors may wish to help them by expanding our coverage of border areas, both in Ukraine and in neigbouring countries. We may want to think about relaxing some listing policies for border cities so that facilities of use to refugees can be listed. AlasdairW (talk) 21:09, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Wikimedia's statistics on the number of page views by country to the English Wikivoyage and English Wikipedia in the month of February 2022 show a combination of native and non-native English speakers visiting these wikis. The top ten countries visiting the English Wikivoyage are the United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Germany, Australia, Russian Federation, France, Netherlands and Philippines. Native English-speaking countries with smaller populations like New Zealand and Ireland seem to be dwarfed by more populous countries where it is a common second language, whether Western or non-Western. Gizza ^(roam) 23:27, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Per AlasdairW's suggestion of listing facilities of use to Ukrainian refugees: I would support this if it would be useful, but do you really think this site is likely to have the most up-to-date listings of that type? Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:20, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

DaGizza, thanks. I thought about how to adjust the thrust my argument based on your info but I don't think I will, because my argument is for not featuring Ukraine articles and also not featuring Russian (etc.) articles. So, India is a pretty salient example here. Pretty high support for Russia among its foreign policy circles, and a suspicion of the fickleness of the West, particularly the United States, and this trickles down somewhat to the general population. From my admittedly lame perspective, by promoting Ukraine we might gain western support but might lose non-western support, which seems like a wash at best. I don't like the word "support" but I don't have anything better at the moment. On the Russia side, by featuring Russian articles we risk possibly-intense blowback from western readers. By not featuring Russian articles we mitigate this risk, and we lose nothing from more pro-Russian readers, as this is a form of inaction, not action. There is also of course a moral question here – what is right? – but I think this applies less to what we choose to feature on the front page, and that rather deliberative caution is the best route here. Brycehughes (talk) 00:36, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

To expand on Gizza's comment, recently, page views came from these countries: 32% US, 7% Great Britain, 7% India, 5% Canada, 4% Germany, 3% Australia, 3% Russia, 2% France, 2% Netherlands, and 2% Philippines. All other countries were 1% or less. Those ten countries are about two-thirds of our traffic right now. Total page views were around 1.9 million per month. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:09, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Point taken about India. And in fact, most of the non-Western world is more or less backing Russia on this; the only non-Western countries to sanction Russia are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. I'm fine with listing places that are of use to Ukrainian refugees, though if that is the case, we should also allow for the listing of facilities that are of use to Yemeni/Syrian/Libyan/etc. refugees. But I wouldn't feel comfortable with a travel site boycotting any country (not listing warzones does make sense though because there are practical reasons not to travel to warzones), and I certainly don't want this site to get bogged down in politics. If we boycott Russia for their invasion of Ukraine, then that begs the question of whether we should boycott Saudi Arabia and the UAE for their bombing and blockade of Yemen, or boycott Israel for their bombing of Syria (and all these bombings are still ongoing and killing civilians, except that they are being done with America's blessing, so you don't hear of them in the mainstream Western media). The dog2 (talk) 00:51, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

The weak coverage on e.g. Yemen over here is only partly due to the USA being involved. We just have weak domestic coverage of those areas. I have one journalist to thank for what I read about eastern and central Africa in domestic media, except what AP & co choose to report. I haven't noticed any expert on Arabia in the domestic media I follow (the main one reporting from Syria was in Afghanistan in the autumn, and I think he now is in Ukraine). Small country, small resources. A paper with a circulation of 30,000 cannot afford too many journalists abroad. –LPfi (talk) 07:14, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

[edit conflict] More to the point: I understand that boycotting every country involved in mass murder and war crimes isn't realistic, such is the world. Still I think we can avoid the most obvious cases, such as with Addis Abbeba. There was the additional problem of the city becoming unviable as destination, but I think avoiding featuring important destinations when people are associating them with condemnable actions is a way to avoid giving signals that we do not care. As the conflict continues and media look elsewhere, the association isn't clear any more, and it is about whether to cover "bad" countries in general, and I think our mission includes that coverage, and showing that by featuring such destinations is only natural. To what degree to cover the morality of the regimes hasn't been subject to extensive discussion and I think it is to some degree random. –LPfi (talk) 07:30, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the dog2. We should just not pick a side about this, and just mention whatever benefits travelers. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 07:27, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Not featuring Russian destinations right now is not a "boycott"; it's because their economy is in freefall, thousands of people demonstrating against the war have been arrested, foreigners may be subjected to arbitrary arrest, etc. It's an unstable, threatening situation. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:00, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@The dog2: I'm going to ask "citation needed" on your "most of the non-Western world is more or less backing Russia on this" statement. The voting at the UN shows that most South American, Asian and all Pacific Island countries voted against the Russian invasion. I don't know where and how you get the impression that most non-Western nations back Russia on this. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 03:17, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited: Well, it's a fact that only four non-Western countries have imposed sanctions on Russia; Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Not a single African, Latin American, Caribbean or Pacific Island country has sanctioned Russia. And in Asia, it's only those four. Southeast Asia has 11 countries and Singapore is the only one to sanction Russia, which means 10 others are not. The dog2 (talk) 03:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

How many countries voted against the General Assembly resolution to condemn the Russian invasion? 5 including Russia, I think? Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:54, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Russia, and Syria: the dream team. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:22, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

It's not really surprising. Belarus is really just an extension of Russia (and it's literally in its name), Russia is a pretty obvious one, and so is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea). SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 06:29, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

And Syria has been a client/vassal state of the Soviet Union and Russia for decades. Eritrea just said, "Hey, all the other wildly repressive autocracies are banding together, so why not?" —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the users above that we should hold off on featuring destinations in Russia or Ukraine right now, for practical reasons. I also agree that we shouldn't exclude countries from featuring because we disapprove of their governments.

By all means let's improve articles about border towns and other places that might be relevant to refugees. People fleeing conflict are by definition travellers, so providing information to help them is within our scope in principle (though whether anything we write will be of practical use for this situation is another question). —Granger (talk · contribs) 18:07, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes, soliciting someone to go to Kyiv now would be just plain irresponsible, but having useful information for refugees or having topics featured here about Ukrainian culture, etc. could genuinely be helpful to someone (e.g. working on the phrasebook). Also, I don't know that anyone argued that we shouldn't feature topics because we don't like a government: actually traveling to Eritrea, North Korea, or Syria is tremendously perilous and is not in the interests of your standard traveler. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:55, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ In Syria, Aleppo was a major tourist destination before the start of the Arab Spring. If the political situation stabilises once more and it becomes safe to visit again, I don't see why we should not feature it. Eritrea and Ethiopia just signed a peace treaty in 2018, and the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments are actually allied in the civil war with the TPLF within Ethiopia right now (which is interesting, considering that Eritrea and Tigray share the same language). It's probably not safe to visit now given the ongoing civil war at their border, but if the violence dies down, I don't see why we can't feature Eritrean destinations. The dog2 (talk) 15:45, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

For sure, there are beautiful, historic, incredible places to visit there and in North Korea too. This was exactly what I was trying to say before: as facts on the ground permit, there would definitely be reasons to visit those places and it would be great if we could provide useful information to travelers and even feature them and put our effort into making high-quality guides. In the meantime, the facts on the ground are that it is not wise to go to those places and it's not wise for us to try to feature them or prioritize our limited resources in a travel guide to North Korea or Syria, but creating a comprehensive travel guide and spotlighting these locations in the future if they are appropriate are good long-term goals. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:42, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

We would want to know what survived in Aleppo before suggesting it as a tourist destination. Lots of the city was reduced to rubble. So it might be a more appropriate destination for relief workers than tourists for some time to come. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:48, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 ends tomorrow

International photographic contest Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 ends on 15th March 2022 23:59:59 UTC. This is the last chance of the year to upload images about local folk culture, festival, cuisine, costume, folklore etc on Wikimedia Commons. Watch out our social media handles for regular updates and declaration of Winners.

(Facebook , Twitter , Instagram)

The writing competition Feminism and Folklore will run till 31st of March 2022 23:59:59 UTC. Write about your local folk tradition, women, folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, folklore, and tradition, including ballads, folktales, fairy tales, legends, traditional song and dance, folk plays, games, seasonal events, calendar customs, folk arts, folk religion, mythology etc. on your local Wikipedia. Check if your local Wikipedia is participating

A special competition called Wiki Loves Falles is organised in Spain and the world during 15th March 2022 till 15th April 2022 to document local folk culture and Falles in Valencia, Spain. Learn more about it on Catalan Wikipedia project page.

We look forward for your immense co-operation.

Thanks Wiki Loves Folklore international Team MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

"Seealso" phrasebooks

Should we insert that template in every country article? I feel like it's unnecessary if the language name is linked, but I guess it really doesn't hurt and might help. I was about to delete it from San Marino when I looked at some article for larger countries, some of which had the template and some of which did not. What do you all think? Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:20, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

When I first looked at the Singapore page, I was first confused in seeing four "see also" articles linked. I think they should just be inline links, in a short paragraph saying "Wikivoyage has phrasebooks on xxx languages". SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:47, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

The normal way to do it is to just link the languages, either in the lead of the talk section or in the paragraph discussing each language. For those reading the Talk section I think this is quite enough and easy to grasp. The see alsos are a bit distracting, but may be handy for those just looking for a link to the phrasebook.

In Singapore#Talk the inline links to the languages are a bit hard to find, as the section doesn't have a logical structure: The first paragraph begins with a link to Malay and an unlinked mention of English, while the paragraph mostly discusses Singlish. Only at the end of the section other languages are discussed and linked. If the languages were presented and linked in the first paragraph, and language names in bold where they are principally discussed, they'd be easy to find without the see also – and most readers should read the discussion, not only the phrasebook.

A problem with the see also is that it presents the languages as equally useful, while mostly their usefulness varies greatly. If people who should read the discussion clicks on a see also link, perhaps due to prejudices, then we have done them a misfavour. I don't know whether the shorthand aspect is worth that problem.

–LPfi (talk) 08:44, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Leadership Development Working Group: Apply to join! (14 March to 10 April 2022)

More languages • Please help translate to your language

Hello everyone,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the feedback period for the Leadership Development Working Group initiative. A summary of the feedback can be found on Meta-wiki. This feedback will be shared with the working group to inform their work. The application period to join the Working Group is now open and will close on April 10, 2022. Please review the information about the working group, share with community members who might be interested, and apply here if you are interested.

Best, Zuz (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

List of currencies

Can someone please point me to where the list of currencies recognised by the currency exchange module is maintained? I was thinking that including the exchange rate for Vietnamese dong will be useful for the Laos and Cambodia articles, since many people pass though them on overland journeys between Thailand and Vietnam. The dog2 (talk) 17:49, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Is Template:Exchangerate/list what you are searching for? I found it via {{EUR/doc}} –LPfi (talk) 08:48, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @The dog2 is it Template:Exchange rates that you're referring to? It does not have a Vietnamese dong parameter, but it can easily be done. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 08:50, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

@SHB2000: Ah yes, it's that one. I guess we could add the conversion rate of 10,000 Vietnamese dong to other currencies. The dog2 (talk) 18:41, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

@The dog2 Done. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 23:42, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

April 1st -Da'nunder

I've now got a reasonably mature draft for a an April 1st item.

I'd appreciate some feedback from other Wikivoyagers, as I don't want to think I am writing it entirely by myself.

The relevant draft:- User:ShakespeareFan00/Da'nunder

Thanks. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:51, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I like it. Maybe add a reference or link to w:The Last Continent? Pashley (talk) 14:46, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Feel free. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:06, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Are these duplicate disambiguation pages?

Are these disambiguation pages duplicates? Glacier_National_Park and Glacier_National_Park_(disambiguation) Wolfgang8741 (talk) 16:56, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes – thank you for drawing attention to this. I've merged them. —Granger (talk · contribs) 17:56, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Bolton

Can an admin have a look at Bolton/Bolton (England) and Talk:Bolton/Talk:Bolton (England) please.

• There seems to have been a cut and paste move in 2013[1][2] see User talk:Nicholasjf21#Bolton
  • Bolton (England) was deleted and then re created in 2014[3]

The deleted edit history of "Bolton (England)" should be merged to "Bolton" and the edit history of "Bolton" prior to the cut and paste move should be moved to "Bolton (disambiguation)".

• Talk:Bolton is newer and is at the correct location however Talk:Bolton (England) contains older discussions, nothing appears to have been deleted however the edit history of "Talk:Bolton (England)" should be merged with "Talk:Bolton". Thanks. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:24, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Bolton (England) only has discussions in 2013 and earlier. I have added a link to Talk:Bolton, so the old page can work as an archive. AlasdairW (talk) 14:11, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

I am now fixing the history etc. Will report when ready. –LPfi (talk) 16:34, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Done. I did not touch the talk pages. –LPfi (talk) 17:11, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Update on Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines ratification vote (as of 18 March)

Dear all,

About 11 days ago the ratification voting for the Enforcement Guidelines of the UCoC started. There are three more days left before the voting closes. So far, 1569 voters from across several projects have cast their votes.

Out of the 42 eligible voters on En Wikivoyage, none of these have cast their vote yet. If you haven’t voted, now is the time. Please vote or share your feedback on the guidelines from the perspective of this project here]

Best, Zuz (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Abolishing the "don't delete real places" policy

While we have had this rule of "don't delete real places", I think it is time to abolish that rule. To be honest, I had never understood the purpose of that policy in the first place, and even more so with the deletion requests. At the moment, the only reason that we've been using to delete real places is because of a copyright violation, but with the recent Nigeria Expedition, many articles have also been deleted because they are just barebone skeletons or because they are copied from another article or Wikipedia without attribution, also making it a copyright violation but fixable. Then there has also been the Lake Como stub creating IP who also had many of their articles deleted.

Oba Akoko is a good example. As of Special:PermaLink/4348076, it has nothing but section headers, and the only reason that we have to not delete it is because of the "don't delete real places" rule. Otherwise, it's stubby, it does not serve travelers and a new user is much more likely to start a fresh new article than convert a redirect into an existing article owing to the preloaded skeletons that pop up when starting a new page.

And then we have the user who has created a bunch of Lake Como stubs, most of which are copyvios, but even if they weren't, they were stubby and they do not help at all. IMO, the traveler should come first, not new users.

Therefore, I propose to just abolish the policy that real places cannot be deleted and they can still go through the process through vfd should they be deleted (except in cases of page creation vandalism by the one Australian user who we all know). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:52, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

It sounds like you prefer m:Immediatism to m:Eventualism. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:16, 18 March 2022 (UTC)