User talk:Traveler100/outlinetousable

Tackling the large number of outline articles
Currently we have a large number (over 14,000) of articles tag as outlinecity. Some of these articles are lacking information, while others have enough information to be usable but need bring up to date. Although a monumental task to address all of these, I would like to propose an expedition to try and reduce this number and increase the quality of article on Wikivoyage. The idea is to pick a bottom level region and improve all the location (city/park) articles below it. This provides a clear, focused and achievable activity. I have tried a few myself in the past couple of months; takes more time than you would first think but the end result is rewarding. Draft expedition in my user space, if others think this is an idea worth pursuing I will move it into the Expeditions area for others to refine the idea. --Traveler100 (talk) 12:20, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Well we have got the number of outline cities to below 14000 for the first time in a while. But I guess my next goal is going to take some time :-). --Traveler100 (talk) 19:19, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've wondered if there might be a way to automate some of the work of populating empty articles, for example by using a bot to pull in a few hotel or restaurant listings. I'm guessing there would be license/copyright issues if we were to (for example) grab the contact information for the top three restaurants and hotels for a destination from Tripadvisor, but are there any other options that might allow us to automatically fill in some articles without the need for manual updates to 14,000 articles? I'd be willing to write a bot if we can figure out some guidelines. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 19:35, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Not sure I like the idea of automating adding new listings. A lot of the articles have enough information to be usable articles, they just need the listings checking and cleaning up. One of the tasks that does take time is correcting bad web links, either changed address or the establishment is closed. Do we have tools for listing broken external links? Also could we automate checking to TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google to see if a restaurant/hotel is marked as closed (I am finding quite a lot of them)? Another cool thing to be able to do would be extract coordinates of listing automatically or semi-automatically, this is also a time consuming task. --Traveler100 (talk) 19:43, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * User:Koavf created a list of broken links back in April - http://dmoztools.net/wikivoyage/ - although it is probably fairly out of date by now. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 22:38, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I didn't make the tool originally, just initiated the conversation about those links. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:45, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
 * After sorting out the articles of Pembrokeshire, the whole of Wales now has less than 100 article with Outline status. --Traveler100 (talk) 19:17, 12 February 2015 (UTC)