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This page is great! Good job, Todd! --Evan 18:56, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

[edit] Good start

Despite my exuberance above, I think this kind of status is only getting started. Wikitravel's travel topics are our least-developed feature (or perhaps tied with itineraries), and it's not really clear what a star travel topic would be. The boilerplate text in this guideline is misleading -- it's unlikely that there are any listings in a travel topic, and the layout is not as strictly defined as for destination guides.

As usual, the main criterion for a star article is that it be of unimpeachable quality and professional grade. If I were put on the spot, here's what I'd suggest as star criteria for travel topics:

• Article is well-organized in a way that introduces the reader to the topic well, and gives them easy access to more advanced topics.
• Prose is readable, concise, informative, concrete, and active.
• Prose follows the section on "writing style" in the Wikitravel:manual of style.
• Divided into reasonable sections that aid in understanding the topic, and follow our rules for Wikitravel:section headers.
• Article is comprehensive; it covers the topic fully, either in geographic scope or in conceptual scope.

Comments welcome. --Evan 11:27, 5 January 2007 (EST)

[edit] Covering a topic "fully"

In the current debate about whether the Teaching English article qualifies as a "Star Topic," a key question has to do with just what it means to cover a topic "fully" as currently required in the guidance. Clearly, the business of teaching English as a second language is so complex that there are books on the topic, and one cannot expect any WT article to cover "fully" matters that really require a book. There must be plenty of other topics in this position. So does this mean that --

1. Some topical articles can never reach Star status, no matter how well they're written?
2. We should reassess just what a Star Topic requires?
3. I'm too anal-retentive about what "fully" means? :-)

Discuss, please... -- Bill-on-the-Hill 19:40, 30 August 2007 (EDT)

We certainly should not have star criteria that are unreachable by certain travel topics. Star status is useful as both a motivator for good work and as a pointer towards excellence worthy of emulation; it should always be a possibility. I've got only one reasonably clear thought in my head at present about how to get around this impasse:

Clearly delineate Teaching English as an overview travel topic. This would allow for more fine grained articles to develop related to specific aspects of teaching English, which could then be linked to the overview article. This would treat Teaching English as though it were the first chapter to a book on teaching English abroad, as an introduction. Having delineated the "topic" of this article as an overview/introduction, it would be easier to say that it covers the "overview/introduction" fully.

This would be a move towards having more systematic classifications for travel topics, which IMO would be a good thing. If we do categorize travel topics more strictly, we could even come up with star criteria specific to each classification. --Peter ^Talk 21:53, 30 August 2007 (EDT)