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Moved from Talk:Thousand Islands by Evan

Maj, why did you unlink Lake Ontario? I had the impression that we could link them in order to have an article about the lake's region. The lakes are linked on the Great Lakes page too. So, what would be the best way to have articles on these regions? Akubra 16:22, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

So, a couple of things: Lake Ontario isn't a region in our geographical hierarchy. We have other region criteria for this part of the world, like states on the US side and provinces on the Canadian side. Contrast Lake Tahoe, which is a region in California.

We don't have a way to deal with bodies of water yet. I'm extremely wary of it, but I realize that it's one of the other ways of seeing travel. Maybe we need to start a MoS section on bodies of water and see where it goes. --Evan

Well are yout talking about the Lake Ontario region? or the lake itself? The St. Lawrence river I think is pretty clearly not a destination under Wikitravel:What's an article?, but lakes as regions _might_ be different. But wouldnt there be a lot of overlap between a Lake Ontario Region page and the pages about the actual places in the region? I know someone is going to bring up sleeping on boats next... Majnoona 16:39, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

Evan, I know Lake Ontario isn't one of "our" regions. That said, it could say a little about what's common about the places bordering the lake. I would find it very strange not to have articles about large or well known bodies of water on Wikitravel. (Think about Lake Titicaca and its possibilities: staying on the reed islands with the Uros Indians, to name something.) IMO, the least we can do is link to the appropriate regions.

Maj, I honestly don't understand what you mean by saying I know someone is going to bring up sleeping on boats next... Think of Amsterdam and its canals (where you can sleep on boats), think of Leh and its houseboats... Secondly, I'm also not convinced that the St. Lawrence is not a destination. It could be an itinerary. For example, I would expect the Amazon to give me information on how to get from Belem to Manaus and further (or vice versa). Trips are also done on the Mahakam river in Borneo. And there are many more examples. I don't know if there are trips offered on the St. Lawrence?

As a general note, I realize we should have a certain amount of guidelines, but sometimes I get the feeling we're just too strict, and by being so we cut off certain possibilities or aspects of travel that can give an added value and can differentiate us from the classic guidebooks. Akubra 17:11, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

I absolutely grok that. I think there's a couple of different factors at work. One thing is that every word of text on Wikitravel costs attention and effort from the rest of the community. So exploration, which is personal, becomes a community issue.

Second, one thing I've noticed is that there's a cascading effect with any change. Contributors copy what they see on Wikitravel far more than reading stuff out of the MoS or whatever. So small diversions become large ones -- which also take effort to clean up if we decide they're not what we want. I think that might be why we make a big deal out of small issues.

I think there's a massive balancing act between encouraging creativity and exploration and keeping the project on-target for our goals. If we make Wikitravel a total boring straight-jacket, nobody's going to want to do it. But if it's a complete free-for-all, we've just got another Wikipedia or Everything2.

Somewhere in the middle we've gotta find a place for Wikitravel. It takes some work. --Evan 23:56, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

I agree when you say Wikitravel should not be an environment where rules rule. I also agree that anarchistic rampage should not be tolerated. But I think that more than a few travellers are by nature "adventurous" and like to look at the world from different angles. I also like to look at Wikitravel from different angles, and as a contributor I regularly find myself wondering: "what would I expect from this article" or "what articles would I expect to find here". And bodies of water are one of the things I would expect to find. Of course, and following the same guidelines as for any other article, the pond on the other side of the block from your house does not really count...

So what does count? Right now I'm seeing three main criteria that could be used (obviously, there may be more):

• Large, important bodies of water (eg. Lake Superior)
• Well known bodies of water (eg. the Nile)
• Bodies of water that have an intrinsic touristic value (eg. Loch Ness)

Bodies of water that are mainly accessed from a city or region should be mentioned in the appropriate article, with a redirect from the body of water.

In general, I think we should follow about the same guidelines as with individual attractions (Angkor, Disneyland, ...) Akubra 16:14, 8 Apr 2004 (EDT)

My two main things are this: 1) Wikitravel is a travel guide, not an atlas. We don't have to have an article for every major geographical feature of the Earth. 2) Just because something is well-known or important, doesn't mean we need a Wikitravel article about it.

Anyways, I want to be proven wrong on this. Maybe someone(s) can start working on a body of water page separate from the kinds listed on bodies of water (that is, not an itinerary, travel topic, or region-with-a-b.o.w.-name)? I wouldn't be too into changing every single article on Wikitravel to have 8 links to nearby b.o.w.'s, but maybe we could start experimenting a bit. --Evan 20:06, 8 Apr 2004 (EDT)

I never meant to say that bodies of water which are not itineraries, travel topics, or regions-with-a-b.o.w.-name are suitable subjects for Wikitravel articles. Well, I guess the idea I did comes from my three criteria. Now that I read them again I understand how you came to think so. Actually, the third criterium is the most important. But in many cases, a large or well-known body of water almost automatically has value for tourists. You may just as well drop the first two. Akubra 17:02, 9 Apr 2004 (EDT)

[edit] How should bodies of water be classified?

Moved from Wikitravel:Travellers' pub by Evan

In New Zealand we have a number of bodies of water, such as lakes, rivers, harbours, and the sea that are seen as tourist attractions in their own right. In particular, Cooks Strait is travelled daily by hundreds, even thousands, of people. Others go there to fish, sail or even swim it! While some material can be included in city and regional articles, I think some bodies of water, like the English Channel deserve their own articles. Can anyone suggest how to best approach these situations? -- Huttite 03:58, 4 Apr 2004 (EDT)

In general, we don't have articles for geographical features of a place, like mountain ranges, deserts, or bodies of water. We haven't needed to so far. Sometimes we've used the name of a prominent body of water for describing a region, like Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border. But that's about the towns and national parks ringing the lake, not about the lake itself.

I think describing bodies of water is an important way of seeing travel, and would have some use for, say, sailors or divers. I'm just worried that it's a slippery slope. Wikitravel is not an atlas, after all. --Evan 14:41, 4 Apr 2004 (EDT)

I agree that only very prominent bodies of water should be listed, and in many cases they will have a town or region of the same name. But there are a few (a very few) places I can think of where there is no region that has the same name and/or coverage as the body of water AND travelling into, across or along the body of water is something a traveller would do and want to know about. Ferries and other ways of crossing a narrow strait (like the English Channel) would be one situation. Travelling along navigable waterways like canals and rivers like the Panama and Suez, or those in Britian and North America might be another. While sailing could be a whole cluster of articles before one even thinks about a destination. A lot of these articles could be written as itineraries, but there are a few bodies of water where the water is a destination in itself, and being on, in and under the water, away from any land is a destination. I see the English Channel as being one place and Cooks Strait as being another. Both lie between areas of land and separates both of the land regions, but neither of the land regions includes the body of water. There might be a few other places in the world like this. - Huttite 09:21, 6 Apr 2004 (EDT)

[edit] About this page

So, I got this page started based on two different discussions going on on different parts of the site. I thought there were some excellent points made, and I wanted to pull together our ideas about them into one place.

I've written up what I think is the current state of the guide and what's my opinion about how we should handle bodies of water. I tried to grab some of the great suggestions that have come up about itineraries, travel topics, regions, etc., too.

I'm personally still unconvinced as to why we need English Channel. Could we write an article about all the ferries across the English Channel, its breadth, its history, islands in the channel, nice places to see it or be on it? Definitely. Does it fit into a travel guide? That I'm not sure about.

One of my big problems with bodies of water is this: I hate the idea of having an incomplete Ontario (province) page because a contributor added most of the coastal information to the Lake Michigan page instead. I would hate for us not to have good ferry information in Dover#Get in because it was put on the English Channel.

I'd like to make it real easy to get important information in one "right place", even if that means forcing some admittedly arbitrary ideas of where that "right place" is. --Evan 23:56, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

[edit] islands in a lake that are attractions

In Skadar lake, there are several small islands that are attractions by themselves. The Skadar lake can be explored by boats that can be rented from multiple towns around the lake. Where is it best to stick info on that attractions / islands? --DenisYurkin 19:57, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

BUMP :-) --DenisYurkin 04:50, 29 June 2008 (EDT)

[edit] decision procedure on large lakes

How do we decide whether a specific lake can be a separate article? My question is about Skadar lake in Montenegro. --DenisYurkin 10:13, 29 June 2008 (EDT)

Basically it boils down to this: if the lake is a region, then it's OK, otherwise it's not. So eg. Lake Biwa in Japan is OK, because it's in a single prefecture, hemmed in by mountains and there's no other sensible way to group the cities on the rim -- but eg. Wikipedia:Lake Superior is not, because it's surrounded by two countries and four states/provinces. Jpatokal 12:16, 29 June 2008 (EDT)