Wikivoyage/Lounge/Archive/2016-02

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Experiences with Wikivoyage writing workshops

Hi everyone,

I've a general request. Does anybody have experiences with Wikivoyage writing workshops? I imagine it as a place where authors and people who haven't contributed to any wikis yet meet. They write travel guides about their city, take pictures and publish it on Wikivoyage. Did anything similar to this happened so far? How was it? What did you learn out of it? Pointing me to related discussions and pages would also be nice.

Warm regards, — T.seppelt (talk) 18:30, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

We planned one writing workshop at the WikiCon 2015 in Cologne, but as it was announced too late, noone attended. :-/ I think, of course with more time for planning, that conferences of the wikimedia movement are a good place to begin. There you are able to reach out to wikipedians, who haven't thought about Wikivoyage that much, but also to those, who have prejudices. --Timmaexx (talk) 20:29, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Maps for Wikivoyage

Dear Wikivoyage community, I would like to update you on the progress with our Maps efforts, and make a small request.

Our maps service has been running without problems for many months. It is a stable and secure map tile platform, capable of much higher web traffic than our current labs OSM service, which is slow, unmaintained, and has crashed on numerous occasions. You may include new maps on every Wikivoyage page without causing any server overload problems.

Very soon we plan to roll out Kartographer extension to Wikivoyage. You can try it here. Kartographer supports many styles of marks, with icons and auto-numbering. Kartographer also has Visual Editor support.

While we are getting ready for the release of Kartographer, we are asking the community to help switch to this new maps tile service. The English and Russian Wikivoyage projects have already moved to this service (Here's an example - Albany). With the benefits we mentioned, we are asking projects to switch for one important reason. Right now, any visitor viewing a page that contains a map not hosted by the WMF sends information to a third-party (for example, Mapquest). This violates our privacy policy. Visitors may choose to switch to an external map, but they should be aware of that decision. For more information, please see the discussion below about this important topic at the English Wikivoyage.

The Wikimedia Maps service may not be perfect, but we think it is important to not compromise user's privacy by just visiting a page.

There are two places that need to change:

  • In the Template:Mapframe, change data-layer="{{{...|O}}}" to data-layer="W".
  • In the Template:PoiMap2, change &layer={{{...|M}}}& to &layer=W&.

The new maps service will be further improved with the upcoming Kartographer extension. While we are not ready to deploy Kartographer just yet, we also ask to help review the extension ahead of time. Please help review Kartographer extension documentation and our demo, and see if it meets your needs, or if anything should be changed. Please leave us a note on the Kartographer extension talk page if you have any feedback.

Relevant discussions at English Wikivoyage

CC: CKoerner (WMF). --Yurik (talk) 02:27, 24 February 2016 (UTC)