User:Ravikiran r/Wikitravel:Help build Wikitravel

Wikivoyage's success depends on the active participation of Wikivoyagers like you. Wikivoyagers contribute content, organize the articles and also decide policy, all through consensus. This page aims to be a useful list of the ways in which you can help Wikivoyage achieve its goal of being a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide.

The list is grouped into
 * Content
 * Structure
 * Community and Policies

While this list aims to be exhaustive, a couple of items may have been missed out. If you find such items, please add them &mdash; this is a Wiki, after all!

You will find that some of the items in this list have a * against them, which means that only an administrator can do them. Those restrictions exist only because some actions are difficult to reverse and only experienced users can be trusted with them. However, such items are few and far between and are not special privileges granted to administrators. Admins exercise those powers only with the approval of the community and in accordance with policy.

Structure

 * Add links to the Main Page. The Main Page is the entryway for most new readers to Wikivoyage, so we like to have it look great and have great articles on the page. We have a set of guidelines for what should and shouldn't go on the Main Page. But if you know something that should be there, and fits the guidelines, please do add it!

Community and Policies

 * Welcome new users. When new users come onto Wikivoyage, it's nice to leave them a brief welcome message pointing them to important parts of the site. We normally wait until folks have created a user account and possibly set up their own user page. Welcome messages let new contributors know that they're part of a community, and also make sure they have pointers to important tools for contributing.
 * Clean up the travellers' pub. The travellers' pub, as the default place to put discussions about Wikivoyage, tends to get a little crowded at times. For this reason people take turns moving discussions out of the pub and into the archives or to more specific talk pages. It only takes a few minutes, it helps make discussions more clear, and it's easy to do.
 * Make or edit policy and style guidelines. The policies and manual of style define how we work together to make a great travel guide. If you're working on Wikivoyage and think there's ways we can make a better guide, or we can work together better to achieve our goals, by all means start a new policy or guideline page! We try to make decisions by consensus, so there's no guarantee that your idea will be accepted, but it definitely won't be if you don't suggest it in the first place!


 * Add logbook entries. The logbook is for keeping track of new news about Wikivoyage. If you know of something that's going on inside Wikivoyage, or someone who's talking about Wikivoyage, feel free to add a logbook entry. The latest three logbook entries also go on the Main Page.
 * Archive the logbook. Each month we move old logbook entries to a new page. Make sure the logbook entries on the Main Page are copied to the logbook first.

Old content
On many kinds of community Web sites, most participants have a very limited set of tasks they can accomplish. On those sites, special participants called administrators do most of the rest of the jobs to keep the site going. Although this keeps "normal" users from maliciously or inadvertantly messing up the site, it also makes a bottleneck where important jobs aren't done until an overworked administrator finds the time to do them.

Wikivoyage, like most other WikiWiki sites, is not like that. We have administrators, but the list of things they can do that other contributors can't is really really short; mostly they're things that can't be easily undone. But most jobs that would traditionally be done by "admins" or "sysops" on other sites are done by regular contributors here. Wikivoyage works better if every Wikivoyager participates in the "janitorial" jobs that need to get done to keep the site going.

This page lists some important jobs that need to get done that new Wikivoyagers may think they're not allowed or not supposed to do. Probably the fact that a lot of administrators are also "old hands" who know what jobs need being done, so they get them done, makes it seem like only administrators should do them. Not true at all! Please feel free to plunge forward and make these things happen: Wikivoyage needs all the help we can get!

de:Project:Aufgaben aller Benutzer