Wikivoyage:Cooperating with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a wiki-based online encyclopedia project started in 2001. Wikivoyage and Wikipedia are sister projects that are both run from servers owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Guide for Wikipedians
We have a special Welcome, Wikipedians page to introduce our project to people familiar with Wikipedia.

Sharing content
Many of the contributions to any language version of Wikipedia may be re-used on Wikivoyage, thanks to the fact that the content on both sites works under the same copyleft license.

Am I free to take anything from Wikipedia and post it on Wikivoyage?
While sharing text between the two projects is legal provided the text is properly attributed, because the goals of the projects differ it is not a practice that is encouraged. Copying large blocks of text, or failing to properly attribute anything taken from Wikipedia, will usually result in the edit being reverted. Some specific guidelines:


 * 1) Copied text MUST be properly attributed. When copying text from Wikipedia (or any other CC-SA site) you must provide attribution to the original authors. Attribution is generally provided by pasting the URL for the source article version (see below) into the "edit summary" box, and/or you can use the wikipedia template. It is a violation of the CC-SA license to copy text from Wikipedia without providing attribution, so be absolutely sure that attribution is provided.
 * 2) Wikivoyage is not an encyclopedia. Since the goals of the two projects are very different, in most cases copying text from Wikipedia to Wikivoyage is not appropriate. In some cases it may make sense to distill portions of a Wikipedia article into a few paragraphs that can be included in a Wikivoyage "Understand" section, but copying more than that is probably too much. Before you copy and paste it to Wikivoyage, read it through and see if the information really is useful for a traveller. When in doubt – leave it out, and let readers follow the article's wiki link to Wikipedia if they want more background information. In any case slight (or not so slight) rewriting is probably better than direct copying.

Text
If you post text from Wikipedia on Wikivoyage, you should paste the full URL of the Wikipedia article revision being copied into the edit summary box (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Article_name&oldid=605001532; this permanent link can be found in the tool box in the left margin of the article, or in the revision history), and you are required to post a specific template on the talk page of the guide on Wikivoyage. The template should go at the very top of the talk page and may not be removed (unless the Wikipedia content is removed from Wikivoyage, that is). Add the template according to the instructions here. This way, you attribute the contributors who participated to the work on Wikipedia. Please note that if you want to copy something from Wikipedia (in your language version) to Wikivoyage in the same language (if there is one), you have to create a template in the actual language. Use the template provided here and translate it.

Remember that Wikivoyage, even if it is a Wikimedia Foundation web site, also is a project wholly independent from Wikipedia, and one of our principal goals is to enrich the world through that ever elusive online original content. Copy-pasting blocks of text from Wikipedia is very much discouraged, is heavily penalised by search engines and will often be reverted. The best use of text from Wikipedia (or any other source with a compatible Creative Commons license or Public Domain status) is when you are having a mental block and grab phrasing from elsewhere.

Illustrations
If you want to post a Wikipedia illustration of some kind in a Wikivoyage guide, you do not have to use the template. Instead, just use the same file link, as Wikivoyage uses Wikimedia Commons for most of its images just like Wikipedia does. Some images, however, are uploaded locally on English Wikipedia. These have to be reuploaded on Wikimedia Commons or Wikivoyage. The reason for local uploads may be that the image has copyright restrictions that prohibit upload to Commons; if there is a fair use template on the image description page on Wikipedia, it probably cannot be used.

Links to Wikipedia

 * Main article: Links to Wikipedia

When to link
Linking to Wikipedia allows people to access encyclopedic information that doesn't fit into the framework of a travel guide. For example, the entry on the United Kingdom should have a thumbnail sketch of the country's history, but detailed information on Henry VIII is inappropriate. A link to Wikipedia's UK article would allow readers to find non-travel related information about their destination of choice, without stretching Wikivoyage beyond recognition into an "everything you need to know about everything" guide. However, don't use links as an excuse to be lazy. Wikivoyage entries should be useful and self-contained; links should provide additional information. Writing "Everything you need to know about France is here, except that there's a good bagel place in Lyon" is not helpful.

How to link
If there's a page on Wikipedia that covers exactly the same subject as a page on Wikivoyage you can link to it.

Wikidata is the usual mechanism to link articles on the same topic across multiple languages of Wikipedia, Wikivoyage or other Wikimedia projects. Each article may be associated with only one Wikidata item. Easiest method is to click on the Wikidata item link in the sidebar of the Wikipedia article and add the Wikivoyage article name in the Wikivoyage section using en and the language code.

If there is no direct equivalent article Wikipedia but it would be useful to reference one or more Wikipedia pages then the RelatedWikipedia template can be used.

As an alternative, on Wikivoyage, you can simply place:

near the end of the article, where article name is the name of the Wikipedia article you are linking to.

See the draft proposal Sister project links for more details.

Templates
You can link to Wikipedia (and Wikidata) using the relevant parameter(s) in the listing template (or any of the templates which are a wrapper for listing, such as see and do).

Linking from Wikipedia

 * Main article: Links from Wikipedia

If there's a page on Wikipedia that covers exactly the same subject as a page on Wikivoyage, you can link from it to Wikivoyage. A Wikidata link will generate an "other projects" link in both directions. On Wikipedia, you can simply follow the instructions in w:Template:Wikivoyage or in w:Template:Sister_project_links, to place a box with a link back to Wikivoyage from the Wikipedia article.

Links in Wikipedia not only assist readers to get directly to Wikivoyage, they also promote Wikivoyage by improving its ranking in search engines. When search engines index Wikipedia pages containing the Wikivoyage template, they see the direct link to the Wikivoyage article, not the template code.

Specific projects
There are always various projects in the works at Wikipedia, similar to Wikivoyage's concept of Expeditions. Some of these could be used by both Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. See, for example, the work being done on maps.

Importing articles from Wikipedia
Articles may be imported from Wikipedia by an administrator using the "transwiki" process. This process can be executed from this page: Special:Import — select "w" to import from Wikipedia.

The transwiki process should be used where a Wikipedia article is appropriate for use in a Wikivoyage article. The transwiki process imports the edit history of the Wikipedia article into Wikivoyage to ensure appropriate attribution of the content.

Wikipedia identifies candidate articles for transwikiing on this page: w:Category:Copy to Wikivoyage. Articles must meet Wikivoyage standards for content to be eligible for being imported — many articles identified by Wikipedians are not appropriate for Wikivoyage and should not be imported.

Articles imported from Wikipedia must be adapted for Wikivoyage within a reasonable time or they may be deleted. This includes formatting and content changes. In particular, details that may be appropriate for encyclopedia should be removed to focus the article on information that travellers need. The text should be modified to reflect the more informal wv:tone used in Wikivoyage. All references should be removed, along with wiki markup not used in Wikivoyage.

The person importing the article should remove the "Copy to Wikivoyage" tag from the Wikipedia article.