From Wikitravel

[edit] This is Spam so please revert it immediately

A spambot really likes to edit 1st sections of certain pages on our wiki including this one.

That's cracking me up. Way to set up a honeypot, Colin! --Evan 22:14, 26 Jan 2006 (EST)

Actual it's Mark's idea [1]. :-) -- Colin 23:01, 26 Jan 2006 (EST)

[edit] General Discussion

So, to start off, I just wanted to put up a page here to capture the fact that categories aren't working on Wikitravel sites yet. As with most new features in MediaWiki, I'd prefer to think them over first as a group before enabling them. What's good for Wikipedia isn't necessarily good for Wikitravel.

My main problem is that I think there is too much metadata to be put into Wikitravel pages to be shoehorned into the Mediawiki category framework. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few things:

1. Type of article (destination guide, itinerary, travel topic, other...)
2. Type of destination (continent, country, region, city, district, ...)
3. Parent destination (for making breadcrumb lists; by saying Sydney is in New South Wales, we can make something like "Australasia -> Australia -> New South Wales -> Sydney")
4. Status of article (stub, to be deleted, copyvio, destination of the month candidate, needs attention, ...)
5. Copyright and license info (original author(s), source, license, ...)
6. Geographical location (latitude and longitude; great for something like http://geourl.org/)

I guess I just don't think that saying Phoenix is in category "Stub" and that it's also in category Arizona is really useful. I'd rather have two different ways of saying those two different things.

I have some preferred ways of doing this -- my main one is to use Turtle to embed metadata information into a page. I think this makes things infinitely flexible while retaining some understandability. I plan on implementing this for MediaWiki 1.X, where X is the version after 1.4.

But I'm wondering if anyone has good ideas for what we can use MediaWiki categories for. Where would they work? Should we just use them for all the information above? Or a certain subset? Or not at all? My feeling is not at all; we've gotten this far without them, and I'm not sure implementing them now is worth the effort. --Evan 17:39, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)

[edit] Parent Destination

I've never used Categories, as this is the only wiki I've done any work on, but when I first heard of their existance, I thought this might be a way of improving navigation by being able to move up the geographic hierarchy (as you've suggested in #3.) Having looked over the meta-wiki page on categories now, they don't seem to be the greatest way of implementing this, but it may well be the only way (without customizing the software, which then makes it an even bigger hassle to upgrade).

It is an ability that I think is sorely lacking at the moment, and if categories is the only way to implement it, I'd kind of like to see it done. I see no reason to use categories for any other purpose, though.

-- Neil 01:01, 11 Oct 2004 (EDT)

How about Templates as an alternative to categories for the purpose of navigating? Like this example that could be on each of the Paris arrondisement articles: {{Navbox| subject_name=5th Paris arrondisement| previous=Paris/4th arrondissement| next=Paris/6th arrondissement}}

Other templates could simply list all the (major/interesting) cities in a state, the countries in Europe? I have used Categories on Wikipedia, but I also don't think they would fit here and they tend to get over complex and too hierarchical. Although it would be nice to click on something that shows all the related articles. -Wikibob | Talk 20:01, 2004 Oct 13 (EDT)

That's an idea, but instead of different articles at the same level, I'd much prefer something simple like:

Europe | Ireland | County Galway | Galway

But that doesn't work nicely as a template, because it changes significantly depending on exactly what page your looking at. Maybe there's some fancy template design method that might work, but I'd need to be directed to some instructions on how to make such things happen, and I'm not really sure how it could be set up.

Maybe what I want just can't really be done simply with a wiki, but if there is a way, it the first thing that I felt was missing when I started working on articles here.

--Neil 03:05, 14 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Categories would be ideal for your example, but let's see what's possible with templates; here is what one would type into an article: {{Navlevel|subject_name=Galway|county=County Galway|country_state=Northern Ireland|continent=Europe}} Which should produce this: {{Navlevel|subject_name=Galway|county=County Galway|country_state=Northern Ireland|continent=Europe}} This is awkward to copy-and-paste into articles, but it might be possible to use Template:Nav_lincolnshire which holds another Template, Nav_england, nested inside: {{Nav_lincolnshire|a=Lincoln}} produces this: {{Nav_lincolnshire|a=Lincoln}} Rather messy, unless someone can see a way to cleanup the layout and syntax. -Wikibob | Talk 12:17, 2004 Oct 14 (EDT)

• Categories. This was developed for Wikipedia, and it's not clear that it's useful for a travel guide. I'd rather see some discussion about what we'd use categories for than leave them enabled and just have the idea develop willy-nilly. --Evan 15:48, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)

I think "categories" would be a great idea, but not in their current form. Is there any way to adapt them so that we could use them like breadcrumb navigation? This could be done with subcategories, even though, like you, categories were developed for Wikipedia (and I don't particularly like them there either) and it would seem strange for a travel guide. With subcategories, we could have, for example, a category for Romania, a subcategory for Transilvania and then the article Cluj-Napoca. But then how would this show up in the article? Currently, it would show up at the bottom, which is not convenient! Ronline 10:21, 8 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Yes, I agree that additional metadata on articles (what region is this city in? What is the lat./long.?) would be useful. But the really creaky categories feature in MediaWiki isn't the way to do that. --Evan 12:32, 8 Oct 2004 (EDT)

[edit] Categories are Metadata

From their use on other Wiki's, my impression of Categories is that they are used to enable people to classify wiki articles in ways that are not stated in the text of the article. That is Categories are Metadata, not data or content. WikiTravel has probably not needed categories so far because the template format that most articles follow makes their classification relatively easy as all the necessary data is in the article.

In an encyclopedia, the Categories feature would be very useful because an article can be linked to its master index and thus be found easily through a what links here page. Explaining this categorisation in the article text may be difficult and possibly disruptive to the flow of knowledge.

In WikiTravel, most categorisation information should be mentioned in the article. Consequently, there is going to be relatively little metadata associated with articles as it is mostly included in the data already. A few wikifying links of a few (added) names will normally add value and improve an article. Unless Categories can add real value to articles above and beyond improving the article, I suspect they will be more trouble than they are worth. -- Huttite 17:30, 26 Dec 2004 (EST)

[edit] Type of article

(destination guide, itinerary, travel topic, other...)

WikiTravel articles fall into only a few different categories:

• Places - The vast majority of articles are destination guides.
• Itineries - A few favourites.
• General topics - Some advice.
• Project articles - WikiTravel: and User: namespaces, etc.

[edit] Type of destination

(continent, country, region, city, district, ...)

WikiTravel articles should have an appropriate template. Template layouts will indicate the type of destination.

[edit] Parent destination

(for making breadcrumb lists; by saying Sydney is in New South Wales, we can make something like "Australasia -> Australia -> New South Wales -> Sydney")

WikiTravel articles should mention which country, city or region an article is associated with. In particular the parent region should be given, so that one can get out etc. I do not think that breadcrumb navigation is necessary, and if it is then there are other ways to do this.

I'm strongly for using categories in order to build destination hierarchy trees. First of all they makes it easier not only to navigate but to efficiently access the correct information. When preparing a trip to a particular region I could simply go to the right category and have easy access to all the information on that area presented in a structured manner. Currently there is no mechanism for this and some information can be easily missed. Secondly, the wikimedia categorisation mechanisms allows to build hierarchies automatically. Face it: WikiTravel does not currently have any hierarchy that would scale up well. Above all: it allows for alternative hierarchies to coexist at the same time. This gives the travellers more flexibility in their browsing the information. Seriously, I don't see many cons here and the sooner we start the better (and easier) it's going to be. Wojsyl 13:34, 1 Jan 2005 (EST)

[edit] Status of article

(stub, to be deleted, copyvio, destination of the month candidate, needs attention, ...)

All these articles should have an appropriate notice added to them.

[edit] Copyright and license info

(original author(s), source, license, ...)

Surely this is adequately handled by the copyright notice at the bottopm of each page.

[edit] Geographical location

Are we talking about a map reference? If so, then that should be given in the article too.

[edit] Categories for books

As discussed here, I think it's time to start seriously looking at enabling categories for creating books. This way (for example) every article about Italy would be in Category:Italy, every destination in Sicily would be in Category:Sicily, etc. Then you could just create your Italy book by fetching every article linked to the Category:Italy page. Opinions? Jpatokal 09:38, 5 Sep 2005 (EDT)

The only downside I can see to categories would be that they should be implemented with very clear guidelines on how they are created and used, otherwise we will end up with a really messy hierarchy that could potentially include a lot of cruft. I can't imagine that there would be too much benefit in breaking things down to a "Category:San Francisco/Mission District" level, so perhaps an initial rule could be that geographic categories would be limited to a continent → country level, with a further level for state / province in large countries like the USA, Canada and China (and other selected countries, as defined by the category guidelines). Border areas could be handled by using a rule that only the smallest category that completely contains a region should be used, thus addressing places like the Rocky Mountains (North America).

Provided the geographic hierarchy works well we can later look at how to create hierarchies for travel topics, itineraries, and other items that don't easily fit into a geographic hierarchy. Thoughts? -- Wrh2

I agree completely. Jpatokal 09:04, 6 Sep 2005 (EDT)

[edit] Further Arguments For Enabling Categories

• Some countries and regions have deep hierarchies; travelers who are not so familiar with the subdivisions of a region have difficulties to find the site of interest.
• There are several writings for a lot of sites especialy in countries with non-latin languages. Maybe travellers do not know which transliteration was used. An index will help to find it. A very simple example is Cairo (English writing): Kairo (German), Le Caire (French), al-Qāhira, al-Ḳāhira (scientific transliterations). Other cases become more complicated, for instance if a source uses older (historical) writings.
• It is not always usefull to add categories to the text.
• Authors who edit a lot of sites must use otherwise the "Watch this page" option or http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=ARegion function to get an overview of articles already written.
• The index lists will be automatically generated, often authors do not know if a special "hand-made" list is already existent or not. These lists must be edited by hand at any time.

Restrictions:

• Categories should be restricted to regions, countries and sub-country regions.
• Categories should be inserted as links of the home page of that region.
• Maybe Categories should be added as link below th toolbox window.

Because a lot of countries and regions consist already of a lot of articles all types of categories (not only geographic) should be allowed to prevent multiple addition of Categories. I do not know if a breadcrumb trail hierarchy is necessary (in all cases).

But please start to enable it... Unger 10:31, 19 Sep 2005 (EDT)

[edit] Categories

Swept in from Wikitravel:Travelers' pub:

According to me, there should be some new categories. Like a "theme park" category and a "capitals" category.

[edit] Turtle

Hello Evan, can you give me some examples how Turtle could work? Thanks --Roland2 16:14, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

Can you be more specific? Do you want to know how the feature works, or what it is useful for? Or are you particularly interested in how Turtle could be used to define categories of articles? --Evan 16:24, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

First I'd be interested in examples how the code within the articles could look like. Maybe sort of this?

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix wt: <http://wikitravel.org/turtle/> .

<http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar>
  wt:title    "Vienna" ;
  wt:type     "city" ;
  wt:parent   "Austria" ;
  wt:currency "EUR" ;

--Roland2 16:56, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

Oh! There's a couple of examples here: Wikitravel:15 November 2005. I should probably get started on Wikitravel:RDF soon. --Evan 19:06, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

Oh, strange title for that topic ;-) For example, how can I get a list of stubs? Can I combine several RDF attributes in a query? For example: A list of Austrian cities which are stubs? --Roland2 20:00, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

I don't have it set up yet to allow user queries of the Rdf data. We'd probably have to use something like SPARQL to make that work. What I was planning to do was build special pages for each kind of query, but I agree that a general-purpose query page would be really interesting and useful. --Evan 23:34, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)

On review: the RDF library I'm using, RAP, uses RDQL rather than SPARQL (at least for now). Right now the RDF is on a per-page basis, but with a few tweaks that'd be fairly easy to change. As for your original question: we haven't actually defined how to say that something is a stub, nor really how to say that something is "in Austria". But, yes, that's a query that's not only possible but quite useful. Also: I've started a page on Wikitravel:RDF that's probably worth your time. --Evan 19:30, 17 Nov 2005 (EST)

Thanks for your efforts. I've been missing categories, however, RDF is more powerful. --Roland2 11:09, 18 Nov 2005 (EST)

[edit] Categories extension wanted

Swept in from the Pub:

I was looking for the extension some of you wrote for showing the sub-categories in the begining of every article. We couldn't find it on the site. Will love to have it!

Thanks-

F16 11:02, 10 Jan 2006 (EST)

See breadcrumb navigation. It's not using categories but RDF. The RDF code is in the extensions module in CVS; I haven't packaged up the breadcrumbs module but I could if you really needed it. --Evan 11:11, 10 Jan 2006 (EST)

Started reading about RDF, can't say I really understand it's wide capabilities at the moment. Anyway, I'de love to get the breedcrumb Navagation module. F16 12:03, 10 Jan 2006 (EST)

[edit] Categories re-enabled in 1.6 -- ok to use on ja:?

So categories were (unintentionally?) re-enabled in 1.6 and over on ja: Shoestring promptly used it to create a category of hot springs. Is this acceptable or not, and if the answer is "no, use RDF", how can destinations-that-are-hot-springs be tagged? Jpatokal 22:57, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

{{tag|hot springs}} . See Template:Tag, Wikitravel:RDF_Expedition/Tags. Yes, that was unintentional, and apparently the flag that turns on categories has been hard-wired on.

Categories are a feature that I've never turned on, since most folks wanted them for geographical hierarchies, and I thought we could do better. I'm not going to go to a lot of trouble to disable them, but I hope that people have the good sense not to use them when we have more targetted features in the RDF toolset (e.g. breadcrumb navigation, geo-tagging, etc.).

The only thing I'd ask is that if ja: folks want to dive into categories, they do it thoughtfully and carefully. Using a feature just because it's there is a bad idea. Make sure it meets a real need.

Also, I'd recommend wrapping categories in a more semantic template to future-proof changes. We've done that on Shared:, for example. Like, say, for specialties of a destination, make a Template:Specialty that contains '[[Category:{{{1}}}]]', and link to it with {{specialty|hot springs}}. That'll make sure that if there's a more specific markup for specialties of a destination. --Evan 23:36, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

Hmm. How loudly would you object to sticking [[{Category:{{{1}}}]] into the Template:Tag code? That way the tags would be easily visible now, but the categories can be easily deprecated in the future if you add more behind-the-scenes magic. Jpatokal 00:05, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

Can we constrain categories to things that "tags" are for: adding little bits of subject information for destinations? I'd rather not see categories bleed out into other metadata (see Wikitravel:RDF Expedition for details -- I'm thinking article type, article status, licensing, geographical hierarchy, etc.), since I don't think they work well there. I think that if we have other ways of marking articles that are more specific, we should use them.

Tags also tend to be short and small, and have meaning in combination -- like glbt, bar, karaoke, cheap. Wikipedia, at least, has really deep hierarchies, and long category names like "Wikipedia:Category:Educational institutions established in the 1850s" that sum up all their parent categories. I'd rather see "taggy" stuff in tags than long hierarchical categories.

Lastly, can you paint a picture of how this would work? I'd love to know that this is going somewhere useful. I've always been underwhelmed with categories on Wikipedia. There's an immense amount of effort that goes into implementing, organizing and maintaining them, and I don't find the navigational advantages all that useful. I think the main reason people add them is because they can, but the second reason people add them is to capture some semantic data ("The subject of this article is a university; it was started in 1850; it is in France"). I think that there are other, better ways of doing that. --Evan 09:16, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

I think it better to use RDF (such as “bread crumb navigation”) when we want to navigate some topics hierarchically, because it is suitable to categorize them “vertically”. On the other hand, I think we have some wikitravelers or visitors who want to navigate the topics “horizontally”, by using the key words such as “hot springs”, “world heritage”, “natural parks in Japan”, and so on. And when we want to do it, the category is one of the best and most useful ways to describe them, because the category is one of the suitable ways to grouping some pages “horizontally”. In addition, if we can use such horizontal ways as one of our device, we can make Wikitravel more useful, and I believe it will meet our policy to make “complete” “reliable” guidebook, and it will also meet the demands of readers as well.

I fully agree with the idea that we should not duplicate navigation system, and should not put wordy category, but I think we can be segregated those “vertical” and “horizontal” system, and handle them well. If you worry about the chaotic situation by bringing category methods into our site, how about the idea that we make “Wikitravel:policy for using categories” at first, and pluck the inappropriate categories away from the pages?Shoestring 22:24, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

I agree that we should probably do that; I think Wikitravel:Categories is probably a good place to do that!

For national parks in Japan, I'd say we'd use a travel topic page like National parks in Japan, rather than a category. I think also having separate tags, like {{tag|national park}}, {{tag|mountains}}, {{tag|hiking}}, plus more accurate geographical info like geocoding and the hierarchy info in Breadcrumb navigation, gives us a more flexible faceted classification than [[Category:National parks in Japan that are good for hiking in the mountains]], which would have to be built into some kind of hierarchy to be useful. --Evan 12:24, 15 April 2006 (EDT)

Thank you for your response. Well, I have no intention to stick to the specific measures as “Category” at all, actually I don’t care which method we chose, only if we can achieve what we are aiming on this site (although I have not yet fully understand the difference between [[Category:hot springs]] and {{tag|hot springs}} (^_^;)…).

Speaking of List of the National Parks in Japan, Umm… I think it is a little bit inconvenient to describe the “horizontal groping”, because it will work only when the readers can notice that page. On the other hand, We can put categories and tags (probably) on every related page, so it is much easier for everyone to notice that function. Probably the “tag” you’ve mentioned is the best solution so far. If you are preparing it, go ahead, please. Then, when will it work on wikitravel-ja? Hmm,…may be Jpatocal-san will tell us when…Shoestring 08:30, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

[edit] let's use categories for Babel tagging of users

Presently, there's no way to find users who live in specific area or city for considerable time--so now we can't easily find people to recruit for collaboration (or discussion) on specific area--like we need in Saint Petersburg#Stay Safe, for example. Let's allow people to easily specify what areas they can give really expert opinion on (or at least can check something on request)--and encourage them to tell that when they register. To start with, can we just allow categories for Babel so we can use language knowledge as a rough criteria for finding people who live in specific country? This is another 10 cents into retaining users. --DenisYurkin 12:21, 28 November 2006 (EST)

I think the "expert advice" bit is being done pretty decently by Wikitravel:Docents. And we also have a list of Wikitravellers by location that anyone is free to sign up. -- Ricardo (Rmx) 13:31, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Then, we should promote the listing and adding themselves there--like we need to promote Docents idea to the community. On the list-by-location, I've added a short note to Wikitravel:Tips for new contributors, Wikitravel:Welcome, newcomers and Wikitravel:Help; I also created a Wikitravel:How to tell about yourself, but that doesn't seem enough. Where else can we encourage people to add them to the list? --DenisYurkin 23:53, 28 November 2006 (EST)

[edit] categories already used?

I just found that categories are enabled and in use already, for example in Template:Usable and Template:Stub. Is it intentionally? Can we encourage contributors to use it wider already? --DenisYurkin 18:15, 29 November 2006 (EST)