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-death... 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=1899705 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_Nove...

* 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_Nov... 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-Bot...

* 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&wpSearchFilter=12 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=prev... 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.