On 25/11/12 06:12, Alexander Tsirlin wrote:
We are in the endless process of image transfer. I
think it will take
ages, so the question is: when shall we have enough images to start?
And how much is "enough"?
Anybody's guess... there seem to be plenty of images waiting and marked
"move" or "nowCommons" but the substitutions haven't been
completed.
This is important as links like {{wikivoyage-inline}} are currently not
being displayed in the external links section of Wikipedia's articles
because WV editors wanted to complete image migration first.
A few other items to watch:
* Number of users on the respective sites. [[special:recentchanges]]
shows only a few live users on WT, many spambots, some IB staff where WV
shows an active community. Alexa rank seems to have WV growing in
popularity and now in the top 59000 websites, but still a long way to go
(WT is dropping but still in the top 3000 until search engines realise
it is duplicate content - and that depends on getting inbound links from
external sites - both Wikipedia and third-party - updated to point to
the new version)
* There are third-party efforts to package the travel data for offline
use on mobile devices (such as Android and iOS).
en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Database_dump#Applications mentions
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/lessons-from-the-dramatic-slow-motion-deat…
where the author of WikiSherpa announced that app will switch to WV data
in the future, as well as
http://code.google.com/p/oxygenguide/ (a
bundle of web pages for mobile use) that already made the switch. WT
users have asked in vain for years for downloadable data
wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Wikitravel:Database_dump&oldid=1…
so the relative ease of downloading Wikivoyage means that third-party
mobile bundles will use Wikivoyage.
* Normally, external links from Wikipedia are marked with rel="nofollow"
so that they are ignored in calculating search engine results.
Wikitravel was able to avoid this for years; that loophole was closed
here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Wikitravel#Edit_request_on_9_Nov…
* The template to advertise a link to Wikitravel (which appears as
{{wikitravel}} or {{wikitravelpar}}) was voted for deletion here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012_No…
and the initial test run made for what soon will be a replacement of
these with {{wikivoyage-inline}} by a robot script on approximately
3000 English-language Wikipedia articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Hazard-Bo…
* The links to Wikitravel have also been removed from the
French-language Wikipedia
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_mod%C3%A8le:Wikitravel/Suppression
and the Simple English Wikipedia (although far fewer pages are affected
there). Many other language Wikipedias have rel="nofollow" but the
templated links to WT still need to be removed.
* A User:IBobi (an Internet Brands employee) has been trying to find
support on Wikipedia's en: and meta: to retain the hyperlinks to WT, but
so far has only managed to get blocked for operating as a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-purpose_account on
en.Wikipedia. Clearly WT has been benefiting for years with a "free
ride" in terms of publicity from these links and is beginning to realise
that is about to come to an end - if WMF already has the data locally,
why link to a direct commercial for-profit rival?
* Internet Brands is continuing to censor and blacklist all mention of
Wikivoyage from user pages on WT;
wikitravel.org/en/Special:AbuseLog?title=Special%3AAbuseLog&wpSearchFil…
might make the picture a little clearer. Given their insistence (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/IBobi and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/IBobi ) that
"Wikipedia is and will continue to be linked to from all of Wikitravel's
content pages, and we expect this reciprocal relationship to be
maintained as it has been for many years"
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Interwiki_map&diff=pre…
when trying to avoid the removal of wikitravel: links from WP, putting
the name of a WMF project into an automated abuse filter is a bit
hypocritical.
My guess is that nothing is going to happen overnight. It will take time
for Wikivoyageurs to complete image migration, it will take time to
clean up the thousands of links to Wikitravel articles and point them
all to Wikivoyage (Wikipedians prefer to discuss a change that will
affect a few thousand pages, then discuss the 'bot that will make the
change, even if the outcome is inevitable). It will take even more time
for the search engines to properly identify Wikivoyage as the main site
and Wikitravel as what is now merely an outdated copy (as the algorithms
for Google and its rivals look at number of inbound links). Ultimately,
however, links in the English-language Wikipedia tend to get tracked
into other-language translations of those same articles, onto the
countless mirror sites which reproduce Wikipedia content and into a lot
of unexpected places across the web.
Nonetheless, we are already seeing a number of longtime Wikipedia users
turning up on Wikivoyage. Certainly there are differences between the
two projects and their methods of doing things,
(
http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Welcome,_Wikipedians lists a
few key points) but the fact that so many of WT's users (or former
users) are using other wikis (Wikipedia being the largest) means that no
amount of censorship on WT's own site can keep these users from finding
out (on Wikipedia if nowhere else) that Wikitravel is now merely a
pointless duplicate of a Wikimedia project, its days rather numbered.
Once the images are done and the Wikipedia links redirected away from WT
and to Wikivoyage, the rest is just a waiting game with only one
possible outcome.