[Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki

[Thomas Morton]

>
> > What I think would be important to avoid is too much subjective
> information
> > from one individual; for example, where I to write about York, UK I would
> > recommend not going to the Jorvik centre (a main attraction) because I
> > thought it overpriced and boring.
> >
>
>
> > Whilst my viewpoint on this is subjectively valid, it may not reflect the
> > overall viewpoint of travellers to York (I know plenty of people who
> loved
> > it)! NPOV aims to make sure that the most mainstream of these viewpoints
> if
> > reflected - and any other viewpoints (i.e. "hate it") are given space if
> > deemed appropriate.
> >
>
>
> The whole point of a travel guide is subjective information from
> individuals!


Is it? I'd define it as "useful advice for travellers".

Subjective information from only a few people can be useless, because most
people will have different viewpoints (for example; I would write about the
beautiful historical parts of Amsterdam, but, say, a younger person could
just have easily been looking for information on drug tourism).

The point of "NPOV" is balancing these personal priorities to make sure the
readers gets lots of useful information. Rather than say "Don't bother
walking up to the Sacré-Coeur, it's a long climb and not worth the bother"
you'd say "The climb up to Sacré-Coeur can be a long one".



> However, there are travellers with different interests. Jorvik
> actually works out pretty well for travellers with children, for instance,
> but for (young) adults travelling on their own it's pretty overpriced, and
> not so interesting so that's what the guide should say.


Well I went as a child; and would recommend families not to bother
(overpriced, not all that interesting). Which possibly hihglights the point?



> I don't think
> that's NPOV though, because the Jorvik probably think they're pretty
> awesome for everybody.
>

Well, yes, but that's not "NPOV" because the Jorvik centre's view is
demonstrably biased :) (i.e. not a travellers perspective).



> > So in summary I don't see that there is any real difference in our stance
> > on this - it might just need a bit of rethinking.
> >
>
> We'd like to express it as "Traveller's Point of View".
>

I think this is a good name for it.

p.s. I read your "fair" link with interest - I think that is a good way to
resolve the issue with clashing of personal experience. However one thing a
bigger community brings is a difficulty in resolving these problems (or,
they crop up more often). On Wikipedia we can use sources so that
uninvolved people can voice an opinion and help resolve the situation - but
where this relies on personal experience that is simply not possible. Do
you have an approach to help scale this form of dispute resolution?

Other questions I had:

- What sort of size is the WT community at the moment?

- What are the policies/approach to copyright violations and other issues
such as slander, etc?

- What is the policy r.e. advertising and promotional (quite often, when I
use WT, I see a lot of content that seems quite promotional in quality -
e.g. for a particular restaurant).

Cheers,
Tom