From Wikitravel

[edit] Newspaper Archives

Moved from Wikitravel:travellers' pub by Evan

Is there a place on Wikitravel for links to newspaper article archives? For example:

• New York Times travel article index
• Chicago Tribune National Park Series
• Chicago Tribune Great American Drives Series
• Washinton Post travel article index

Or does that fall under the heading of non-goals?

Well, Wikitravel is not a Web directory (see Wikitravel:goals and non-goals). We use external links, but mostly to primary sources (see Wikitravel:external links). On the other hand, those archives may be useful for contributors doing research. Maybe we need a Wikitravel:contributor research links page? Other opinions? --Evan 18:24, 28 Jan 2004 (EST)

Those are all big newspapers... if you want to use them for research, it's trivial to find them. Putting these somewhere just means we'll have to start maintaining another page. Let's leave this part of the job to google and yahoo. -- Nils 04:40, 7 Apr 2004 (EDT)

[edit] Travel Guides

I know we should only include primary sources in articles, but there are a few travel guides that actually have some useful information in them about places that can be picked out from amongst the trivia and advertising. I thought it might be useful to list them here, with a suggestion of what content they contain. My thought would be that these should be quality guides, with interesting content, not just an advertising portal for tourist operators and service providers to advertise their address and phone number. -- Huttite

I'm not really happy about this. I don't think we should encourage contributors to copy from other guides, nor should we look like we're encouraging that. So, I'm going to remove that section unless there's a compelling reason not to. --Evan 20:53, 7 Jan 2005 (EST)

My thoughts about this section were to provide links to some websites that had interesting information that was more than just adverts for hotels, etc. A number of contributors have been posting pages on these websites as links to individual pages and Colin deletes them because they do not comply with the primary source guidelines. Some keep coming back and I wanted to identify the good ones. I put them here because I felt there was nowhere else for them to go.

An alternative to this list might be to write an article about using the internet to research and book travel and allow these guides to be listed there. That way these websites would be disassociated from article writing and associated with travel research that travelers might do. It now occurs to me that this would be a good place to explain the benefits and disadvantages of the different types of websites too and what makes Wikitravel so good.

I have no strong objection to removing the list. I merely observe that some sites seem to have useful information that can assist contributors. -- Huttite 21:29, 7 Jan 2005 (EST)

[edit] World wide emergency numbers

[Moved from Wikitravel:Travellers' pub by Hypatia 18:17, 2 Jan 2005 (EST)]

• http://www.911dispatch.com/web_graphic/graphic1.html

May be useful to incorporate this information into the various country pages. -- Nils

Probably should be added to the Contact section of each Country (or City), possibly even as a templated text. Although standard emergency numbers exist in many countries, the number and type of service provided may vary significantly. -- Huttite 17:45, 26 Dec 2004 (EST)

[edit] Wikipedia

Archived from the Pub:

Just bringing up something I've noticed in the deletion discussions, I see the words "according to wikipedia" rather a lot, and wonder why we have to treat it as the number one factual account of everything? I get the distinct impression that's the case anyway. MiddleEastern 07:09, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Well, since Wikipedians like to create articles for every stupid place and thing imaginable they're a good measure for deciding if a place is noteworthy. I.e. if Population-of-Three Town in Jumbobo doesn't have it's own article, then we can say with some certainty that the place is not noteworthy. Of course, this isn't always the case, but it's normally a good measure. -- Sapphire 06:36, 16 February 2007 (EST)

I'd quite like to call them sad... but I'd probably be killed, I was once actually blocked on Wikipedia for asking an administrator why he seemed to spend 18+ hours a day watching the encyclopedia... --MiddleEastern 09:19, 16 February 2007 (EST)