Wikivoyage:Featured collaboration

The Featured collaboration is a way to get many contributors working on one project at once, either a specific article to get it ready for an upcoming event or a nomination for destination of the month, or on a type of correction or improvement across a range of articles. While anyone can edit any article at any time, this provides a way to highlight specific projects in Wikivoyage allowing many contributors to work on them together.

Current featured collaboration
There is no active featured collaboration.

Nominate
A collaboration does not have a maximum time limit — a collaboration is featured for at least one month until another collaboration is featured.

Any user can propose a featured collaboration, which is discussed for a minimum of two weeks. If a collaboration is completed without a new one being proposed, it will be removed and there would be no featured collaboration.
 * If after two weeks, there are no major objections, the proposed collaboration is featured for a minimum of a month.
 * After one month, it van be replaced by a new collaboration that has been discussed on the talk page for at least two weeks.

Think carefully before making a nomination. Nominations most likely to be collaborative successes are those that have clearly defined areas for improvement, are of interest to a wide range of people, and that are already pretty well developed. Particularly good choices for nomination are articles that could quickly become options for the Destination of the Month, or Off the Beaten Path featured articles.

When nominating, describe exactly what you hope would come of a Collaboration. Explain why you think it would be a successful collaboration. (Not why you would like it improved!) Then leave a list of several bullet points detailing exactly how other contributors can help with the collaboration. The bullet points should be very concrete, and should detail basic tasks that anyone can help with.

Take pains to avoid listing tasks that require either a significant committal of time or in-depth knowledge of the destination from individual contributors:


 * 1) research beyond basic information (like contact information for a listing),
 * 2) original writing,
 * 3) map making (aside from more simple region maps),
 * 4) devising new districts.

These are tasks for contributors with a special interest in a particular destination, not for contributors simply interested in devoting a small amount of time in support of the collaboration. If these types of tasks are to work, the nominator will have to volunteer to do them, or find someone beforehand who is willing.

Archiving
After nominated entries have been a featured collaboration, move the original nomination and other comments to Project:Previous collaborations and add title to tabled list. Accomplished goals mark with Done or Partly done, failed goals with Not done or keep with to do.

Move unsuccessful nominations to the Project:Featured collaboration/Slush pile.

Populate "Connect"
First as a general point, any nomination should have a prominent early line "How travellers will benefit: - ". This keeps our minds focussed on the public readership.

My proposal is to populate "Connect" with mobile coverage, for all areas where this can be swiftly done using info from Nperf. A sample entry might read: "As of July 2023, Strelsau and its approach roads have 4G from all Ruritanian carriers. 5G has not reached this area".

The benefit to travellers is that many use their mobiles to get around abroad, and indeed may have to: railway timetables and the like nowadays are often online-only. Connection coverage is therefore mission-critical, but many existing WV pages either have no Connect info, or obsolete stuff about an internet cafe that closed years ago.

This task is well-suited to collaboration because updating a city takes only a couple of minutes, a single contributor can knock off an entire region in 20 minutes, but thereafter it feels like drudgery and is better as a shared task. One approach would be to pick country by country in turn where Nperf is a reliable source (ignore the others), post the regions, and let editing commence - let's say France first up. Some simple rules on pre-existing content are wanted if this proposal goes ahead. Grahamsands (talk) 14:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Convenience link: Nperf.com. –LPfi (talk) 10:35, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * A more direct link is by country, eg Nperf France. Grahamsands (talk) 09:53, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd be willing to contribute to this effort. What are those "simple rules on pre-existing content" that you have in mind? We should keep in mind that Nperf is not necessarily a reliable source for areas like small towns in rural areas because there's simply not many people there likely to be testing their connections. Mrkstvns (talk) 14:09, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed, I suppose Nperf can be helpful to confirm that "Strelsau has 4G", but I would be very careful about "Fluppingen has no mobile network coverage" (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). China, for example, has excellent mobile coverage, but looks like a blank spot on the Nperf map ... El Grafo (talk) 08:40, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * ... And Finland has coverage only along the roads, according to Nperf. One person driving around gets a lot more points than a hundred people measuring connections at home. –LPfi (talk) 10:27, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Important point this. Any area where we are not confident of Nperf (or positively sceptical, as for China), let's just leave it alone and skip on to one of the many areas where we are confident, and cover as much ground as possible in a short time. However rural areas may be mapped in enough detail for the limited granularity of WV. Thus for Rovaniemi in the far north of Finland, does it not suffice to say 5G in town and 4G along the main road from Kemi, and leave it at that? We can't describe every back-woods or moor around it any more than we'd describe signal in individual city streets. Grahamsands (talk) 12:24, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd say that you have 5G in some parts of any Finnish city and 4G along most highways. You will probably have at least 3G off the roads also unless you go into the backwoods (where you do find areas without any coverage). I don't think the Nperf reports add anything to that unless you do a careful analysis of them. So: probably useful where there are lots of people and relatively weak coverage, but not somewhere like Finland, where it is the other way around. –LPfi (talk) 17:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)


 * GSMA is another site that shows mobile coverage. On the downside they only show GSM, 3G and 4G (LTE) coverage. Ypsilon (talk) 13:11, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I sometimes refer to that where Nperf is unhelpful. But it's less informative or user-friendly, so I recommend sticking with Nperf alone, a standardised approach.
 * Examples of editing rules of thumb might be: be inclined to include coverage even for poor outline pages, but if it's near empty just skip it. A single entry will suffice for most metropolises. If existing content is dated 2021 or later, leave it be, but be inclined to delete anything undated. Thus for Rovaniemi I'd certainly delete the hotel lobby, they must be fed up with freeloader non-residents, but I'd look to see if the library was still available, since I guess you could print. "Wifi is widely available in public places" covers the rest of it.
 * Not to assume your sign-up, but perhaps the rest of you are sufficiently curious to give this a go, then we take stock? Then within France, Hauts-de-France has 18 cities, Lower Normandy 19, Upper Normandy 7, and Brittany 30. Try these? If France is completed I'd propose somewhere in another continent then another, to avoid bias. Grahamsands (talk) 17:29, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * 3.5 days later, no edits have been made in the suggested regions, so this project looks stalled. If folk find the task tedious, daunting or low-value it would help to state those reasons. I only proposed it as a quick win; timing myself over Bouches-du-Rhone averaged 3 min per page, half of which was squinting at a sea of purple and brown on the Nperf map to find the villages. As it stands, WV has a credibility problem: visitors in Normandy are being directed to the post office and those in Rovaniemi to try to cadge a connection at the Santa Claus Hotel. Grahamsands (talk) 10:48, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Adding Understand section headings
When wandering from article to article looking for interesting things to add to WV:Discover, I every now and then see that the Understand heading is missing from destination articles. The heading is part of the standard template for all types of destination articles (except city districts), and most other types of articles too, so these articles should have it.

Interestingly, the destination articles where the heading is missing often have a quite long lead section, which makes it look like there was once an Understand section heading but someone removed it and merged the content with the text in the lead section. Ypsilon (talk) 09:53, 27 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Seems probable. I was in the belief that the heading was indeed missing for small cities, although I myself has tried to include it when creating articles (and it seems it was in the template already when I joined). –LPfi (talk) 10:32, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Understand was added to the small city template in 2009, so any cities created in the first 5 years only have it if it was added manually. It has been part of the big city template since 2004. AlasdairW (talk) 22:12, 27 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Except for district articles (and maybe IDK dive articles?), they are a standard section, so it does surprise me when many articles omit this section. -- SHB2000  (talk &#124; contribs &#124; meta) 13:21, 27 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Another interesting thing; when you notice one article without the Understand heading, go up one level to the bottom-level region and then check out all the other articles listed in the region and you may find some more articles that need this fix. I just did it for cities in Mississippi Delta and Go next places in Odense, and found a great deal of them. --Ypsilon (talk) 15:19, 27 July 2023 (UTC)


 * From memory, this was tackled about 4 years ago, or rather there were three intertwined initiatives:
 * - that each city page should state its population, rather than use vague terms like "large".
 * - that any city over 10,000 population, and any higher-level region, should have an Understand section. This became embedded in the page templates.
 * - that any city of usable or better quality should have a lede of more than 100 characters, and is the preferred place to state the population.
 * Any city with a bulky lede but no Understand probably predates these initiatives; the obvious fix is to divide the content. Grahamsands (talk) 17:43, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

your proposal sounds like a worthy project, but I should caution you that my attempt to revive collaborations has not had much success. Since posting the above collaboration here, I don't know if anyone other than me has worked on this articles. Consequently, I don't have any problem replacing it with a new collaboration. Group projects always seem like a good idea, but my experience with here and in Wikipedia is that there is usually more interest in defining the project and determining how to do the work than in doing the work. I don't want to discourage you from this, but prepare you for the likelihood that if you want something done, you should plan to do it yourself. Ground Zero (talk) 11:59, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I reached that conclusion long ago for life in general as well as for WV, but wanted to support the revival of CoTM. I can think of other proposals but conceive no reason why they wouldn't likewise flop. Yet WV has in the past run collaborations, expeditions and the like, so I don't know if any change in the contributor base is working against this. Grahamsands (talk) 21:16, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's probably worth swapping the Featured Collaboration out with your proposal as an experiment to see if a different project will attract more interest. If it doesn't, then I think we should shut down this page. If it does, then it's so much the better for Wikivoyage. Let's hope it works. Ground Zero (talk) 22:29, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I usually do take a look at this kind of collaborations and check a number of articles for the weaknesses suggested. In that way the projects aren't totally wasted on me. I suppose I should tell about such efforts to encourage those who suggest the projects. However, I usually don't make them my focus for any longer time, just pick some low-hanging fruit from the closest trees. –LPfi (talk) 06:42, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Updating the featured collaboration
To update the featured collaboration you should:


 * 1) Remove the current collaboration from this page and move the next one up.
 * 2) Move the current collaboration to the Previous collaborations page.