[Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Delphine Ménard]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Peter Coombe
<thewub.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
[snip]
>
> No Original Research shouldn't be an issue, we already have Wikinews
> accepting original reporting.
>
> Neutral Point of View might be a more delicate area. You probably
> couldn't write a travel guide using the same standards of NPOV as used
> on Wikipedia, and if you could it would most likely be very dull. As
> far as I know all the existing projects follow some form of NPOV, but
> it isn't actually enshrined in the Foundation's mission statement,
> vision or values.


I was thinking about this idea of NPOV and I'm thinking that trying to
apply NPOV to a travel guide (and here I'm just thinking about the
"what to visit" part of it, rather than "which hotel to stay in" or
such can go in two directions.

First, I can imagine, as you say that using some kind of NPOV might
make the travel guide dull, because it'd end up listing about 300 tiny
things to see in one small location, and you'd lose the edge of
knowing "what to really see". On the other hand, I can imagine that
allowing not-so-known locations to be integrated in a travel guide
because of NPOV (everything gets to be there, if it exists, basically)
could be also extremely interesting in allowing people to travel
differently, and bring them to admire that
never-mentioned-in-a-normal-travel-guide monument or go and see that
extremely-interesting-for-its-time-but-made-by-a-nobody statue that no
other guide bothers to list because well, it's not a Michelangelo
thing.

Something of an attention to detail that I can see Wiki communities
having as opposed to larger established travel guides that keep on
telling you to do the same things everyone else does.

I am not advocating for or against NPOV for a Wiki travel guide, I'm
just thinking outloud at what would be the challenges of taking it in
or leaving it out.

Cheers,


Delphine
-- 
@notafish

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