Wikitravel:Welcome, Wikipedians

Welcome to Wikitravel! This article is specifically for people familiar with Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikitravel's format was inspired by Wikipedia, and we also use the MediaWiki software to run our site. If you're used to Wikipedia, you should feel right at home—although you should still probably check out the Welcome, newcomers page.

There are some important differences in our sites, read below for the details. Also note: Wikitravel is not a Wikimedia Foundation project; we're not legally or technically associated with Wikipedia.

Cooperation

While Wikitravel and Wikipedia have different goals, we do have overlap in some of the content we produce, and ideally, we will be able to take advantage of our Creative Commons licensing to share that content.

If you are looking to mine Wikitravel for content that Wikipedia could use, take a look around our collections of maps on—we create a ton of SVG country, region, and city maps that can be of use to anything geography-related on Wikipedia. Wikitravel Shared also hosts a very large quantity of open content photos of places around the world, which you could grab to illustrate the encyclopedia articles. Similarly, if you know of good images or maps on Wikipedia that would be useful here, by all means, upload them to Wikitravel Shared!

It is also now possible to share text between Wikipedia and Wikitravel, but this should be done with greater caution. Wikipedia and Wikitravel have distinct goals, and forking large amounts of content from one project to the other creates wasteful duplication. In most cases, linking from one to the other would be a better choice.

Any significant copy-pasting of Wikipedia text to Wikitravel is not encouraged, since we prefer to have lively, non-encyclopedic and original writing with the traveler in mind.

Goals

In reviewing our goals and non-goals, a couple of things stick out:

• Wikitravel is not an encyclopedia. We don't want immense, detailed articles about anything and everything. Articles in Wikitravel are references for travelers; subjects not directly or indirectly related to travel should be avoided.
• Unlike Wikipedia, Wikitravel is targeted towards print versions. We want travelers on the road to be able to print out a copy of an article —say, a map and list of hotels in the town they're in—copy it, give it to friends, etc. Please keep this in mind when authoring articles—the print version matters!

Fair use

No, no, no, a thousand times no! Please do not drop copyrighted pictures, text, or other media into Wikitravel under some fuzzy notion of "fair use". Fair use is specific for the user, and we really, really, really want to keep Wikitravel free for everybody.

Style differences

Here are some things you should look out for stylistically:

• We really prefer an informal tone, not an encyclopedic one. Lively writing is welcome... and encouraged!

• Unlike Wikipedia, we encourage original research. We want you to contribute both first-hand factual information as well as your subjective opinions, but first-person accounts should be avoided.

• Wikitravel does not follow a strict encyclopedic "neutral point of view". Instead, our guiding mantra is "be fair". Fairness means that descriptions provide a balanced summary of the experiences of Wikitravellers. For Wikitravel, the traveler comes first; the needs and priorities of others—such as local residents, travel agents, or the local propaganda ministry—are given less weight.

• It's a common thing on [[Wikipedia]] to [[Wikilink]] practically every [[noun]] you write. Because Wikitravel is aimed at providing a practical travel guide rather than a massive collection of general knowledge, most terms will never become articles here. Unless it's the name of a destination, an itinerary, or a travel topic, it shouldn't be Wikilinked.

• Specifically, our regional hierarchy doesn't always follow the "official" breakdown. Frequently, it is much flatter than in Wikipedia (and than official breakdown)—because we only add a level of regions when there are too many cities or too much content in the existing breakdown.

• Wikitravel articles do not have an External links section. Instead we incorporate certain kinds of links into the article itself (see Wikitravel:External links for the specifics), and that's it. In part this is to discourage well-meaning contributors from just linking to information instead of actually including it in Wikitravel articles. It's also so that spammers don't have a handy place to dump links to their sites.

• Wikitravel articles do not use references. It's fine to point to authoritative primary source external sites for additional information (eg. visa sections are usually linked into the country's immigration website), but individual claims are not referenced. If a claim is dubious or in dispute, it's best to hammer out a reworded consensus on the Talk page, not try to "prove" that it's true.

• For English Wikitravel, we have a slight preference for American spelling. Although different spelling variants are encouraged for topics related to a particular region (e.g. British English on topics about Britain), if there is a region which has no cultural or linguistic association with English, use American spelling.

What is an article?

If you read What is an article?, you'll see that individual articles in Wikitravel tend to be bigger and more comprehensive than articles in Wikipedia. Because one of our goals is to have printable guides that someone can take with them to use at a destination, we tend to try to write articles about a particular city, region or country all in one place. We try to balance this with the need not to duplicate a ton of information all over the place.

Article templates

Wikitravel articles are a lot less free-form than Wikipedia articles are.

The great majority of Wikitravel articles tend to be about cities, countries, and regions. (That's not all, of course—see other ways of seeing travel for some more ideas.) We think having these articles organized somewhat the same makes it easier for readers to use the guides.

If a reader wants to find restaurants, they look in the Eat section of the article, whether it's about New York City or Bombay. The hotels and hostels go in Sleep, the museums and monuments go under See.

In our manual of style we have a set of article templates that show the preferred format for each kind of article. These are guidelines, of course—people can add information to an article however they want. That's the wiki way. But editors come through later and try to shape the articles to look more and more like the templates.

Links to and from Wikipedia

We use Wikipedia:InterWiki links to link to Wikipedia. You can see how to make these work on our links to Wikipedia page.

You can use templates or Interwiki links to link from Wikipedia; You can see how on links from Wikipedia.

Note also that interlanguage links ([[ro:France]] and the like) link between language versions of Wikitravel. This linking system was formerly used on Wikipedia until the creation of Wikidata.

Wikitraveller Userbox

You can add a Userbox to your Wikipedia user page to say that you contribute to Wikitravel, too. Just add "Wikitravel" to your Babel box, or use Wikipedia:Template:User Wikitravel.

Behavioral norms

Perhaps because of our relatively small size, Wikitravel does not have the same problems with vandalism, edit wars, and other unwanted edits that Wikipedia does. For this reason, we tend to use SoftSecurity as a tool to handle unwanted edits much, much, much more often than technological means.

Other than old user talk and deprecated policies, we have very few protected pages (particularly for license text that must remain verbatim), very few page deletions (outside of obvious spam), and almost zero user bans. We'd like to keep it this way.

Consensus

We determine virtually everything by consensus. No decisions are made on this site by majority-rule voting. So far, we've been lucky to avoid much conflict that couldn't be resolved through discussion.

For this reason, we don't have a lot of intercommunication overhead—committees, votes, arbitration, mediation. We try to keep our processes for making decisions very informal and casual.

Terminology

Some terms you may be used to in Wikipedia have analogs in Wikitravel. Some things you might be looking for:

• "be bold" → plunge forward
• "NPOV" → be fair (not quite the same thing!)
• "sandbox" → graffiti wall
• "stub notes" → Article status notes
• "Village pump" → travellers' pub

Real names and credit

When you sign up, you can set your "real name" in the login page. If you don't fill it in, or you want to change it, you can set it in the user preferences page. This option is turned off on Wikimedia sites.

Your "real name" is used by the MediaWiki software to give you credit for your contributions on each page in an on-page credit block, usually at the bottom of the page. If you don't give a real name, you'll be credited as "Wikitravel User user name", and if you don't log in at all, you'll be credited as "an anonymous user of Wikitravel". This option is also turned off on Wikimedia sites.

What constitutes your "real name" is up to you, but it's nice if you can put the legal name that you would receive postal mail with. If you're going to use a pseudonym, it's probably better to make that your user name, and just leave your real name blank.

See also

• Welcome, newcomers
• Welcome, business owners
• Welcome, tourism professionals