On 27 June 2012 18:39, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:

That would be lovely.

I've reviewed all of the pages and comments, it appears to be a solid proposal with clear backing from a very large majority of all the users that have participated. The issue I see to have cropped up a few times is that of NPOV as the guide will be written with a "the Traveller always comes first" mentality. There have been strong arguments to show that, contrary to popular belief (!) the Wikimedia Foundation is not solely responsible for the English Wikipedia and as such the NPOV guidelines do not always apply to all of the Foundation's projects (and thus Wikipedia's Sister Projects), indeed Commons and Wikiversity do not have specific NPOV guidelines from what I read on the pages. However, that is not to say that we should allow the site to have completely biased articles or those that don't fall in line with our generally agreed BLP policies, pharaphrasing an example use, "Poor customer service" would be better than "The staff were useless fools who should be left to rot in prison", - an extreme example to illustrate my point. Wikitravel already seems to have some guidelines for this, http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Be_fair as an example.

I'm sure cross-wiki members are aware, all of our projects are subject to vandalism and spam. We also need to bear in mind that business owners are more likely to edit articles about their own businesses or deface those of competition, Wikitravel again has a policy for this, http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Don%27t_tout, but we could consider putting some Abuse Filters or similar in place to help alleviate issues with this.

Overall, it is clear that there are people dedicated to making this "Travel Guide" (I know the name is still being decided on) a successful Sister Project, and as a member of this Committee, I am happy to endorse the proposal. I also note that if this proposal is approved by the Board, I am happy to volunteer with any of the administrative work including setting up the wiki, adding interwiki links in various places, reading over policies etc as I'm sure many of the other members of our community will be.

Yes, that would be a good precedent to set. It can be a very
easy-to-translate message. We should try to get the intro paragraph
of the proposal translated into major langs as well. Maybe we can wait
a few days for initial translations and allow other translations to be
sent out as they are done?

I know we're running a bit behind for this, but did you still want to get a message up and sent? It would be cutting it quite close but it might be an idea to see if there is any opposition from anyone, although I take into account that Village Pumps and/or Community Portals might not be as effective as we would like them to be for this purpose.