Talk:Wy/la/Pagina prima

Towns/cities

Is it useful in categories to distinguish small places from big places? I.e., should "oppida" be a different category from "urbes"? If so, of course, question 2: what is the dividing line?! Andrew Dalby (talk) 15:20, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Since I'm not sure how to answer question 2, I'm inclined to say "no" or at least "not now" to question 1. A. Mahoney (talk) 16:12, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd begun to feel the same way. Thanks Andrew Dalby (talk) 17:23, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Infobox for towns/cities

Not sure if these are necessary (apart from German, other Wikivoyage languages don't seem to have them). Anyone interested, please look at Wy/la/Paroecia Pari (a small town) and consider what details would really be useful in the infobox. Possible ideas: official (tourist or administrative) website; telephone number series; postcode series; airport three-letter code; ...? Andrew Dalby (talk) 15:20, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

German has a picture, a map, number of inhabitants, and area. If I want that kind of information, the Wikipedia article will give it to me. The kinds of things you suggest are more useful, when they exist, particularly the city's official web site if it has one. But do we need an infobox to organize this information? As you point out, English and French WY don't use them. I suppose it depends on how one feels in general about infoboxes, and the continued maintenance thereof. Strikes me as overkill for the moment, but I'm open to persuasion. A. Mahoney (talk) 16:12, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Makes sense. For the country pages it is possible to copy infoboxes from French with little change, but for cities it would be new work. Better to add text. Andrew Dalby (talk) 17:23, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Phase 2 of Wikidata (phase 1 is about centralizing interlanguage links and is planned to become active on en.wikipedia by the end of February and on other wikipedias in March) will deal with data typically to be found in infoboxes. Although I do not know an exact time schedule to phase 2, the advent of this project might be a reason not to invest too much new work in designing new infoboxes now, when we will hopefully be offered the new infobox and data repository system within a few months. --UV (talk) 23:31, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Shape of an article

The other Wikivoyage versions have a formulaic shape for an article. For a city, districts (names of main neighborhoods, with links to detail articles); understand (background, history); get in; get around; talk; see; do; learn; work; buy; eat; drink; sleep; stay safe; respect; contact; cope; go next. Some of these may be omitted -- that list is from voy:Paris but I note voy:Chicago, considered a "star article," omits talk, perhaps because the principal language of Chicago is English! French has similar topics in a slightly different order. What topics do we want, and how do we phrase them in Latin?

A proposal for sections, with options for Latin titles:

1. Viciniae, partes urbis, structura urbis
2. Historia, intellegere, cognoscere
3. Inire, adire, advenire
4. Per urbem ire, visitare
5. Monumenta, visenda, visitanda
6. Agenda, agere
7. Universitates et scholae, discere
8. Laborare, munera
9. Commercia, coemere, mercari
10. Edere, comedere
11. Bibere, tabernae
12. Dormire
13. Salvi sitis, salvus esse, se salvere, salus
14. Communicare
15. Quotidiana agere (the Fr. "gérer le quotidien" makes more sense than the En. "cope" for what's here)
16. Alia loca visitanda, ubi nunc?, proximum iter, proxima itinera

English, French, Dutch use verbs; German has mostly but not entirely nouns; Italian has nouns and phrases. I like the idea of using verbs but couldn't come up with good ones for all the standard topics. Comments, improvements? A. Mahoney (talk) 16:12, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I like verbs too. Will give it some thought ... Andrew Dalby (talk) 17:23, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I've numbered the list. I'd like to suggest a shorter model for cities/towns, and a different shorter model for countries. When the very long models are pasted in without text they make the page look dead. How would you feel about this?

For cities/towns: I would omit 1 (for most towns, most travellers are interested in the centre; suburban visitanda will be described in 5 anyway), include 2-12, and omit 13 (as regards most towns this is a national, not local issue; for world-scale metropoleis the section will be inserted anyway) and 14 (ditto) and 15 (ditto). I'm doubtful about 16: it overlaps with 3 (you go on to the same places others arrive from), it is addressed mainly to backpackers (those with a reason for travelling have a reason for their destinations too) and it's better handled in articles about countries/regions. I know I'm over-generalising ... but that would leave nos 2-12, a total of 11 headings. [PS -- reinstate 13 again: that's where the hospital has to go, and when you want it you really want it.]

For countries: I would include 1-5, 10-11 and 13-15, a total of 10 headings. 1 would be provinces and regions; 4 would be national travel. The material for 16 would instead appear in 1, 4 and 5.

Shoot me down. I'm still thinking about the Latin subheadings. Andrew Dalby (talk) 18:53, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Countries, sure: fewer headings, with lists of major regions, states, provinces, whatever's appropriate (for example "New England" in the US article is probably more useful than six separate pointers to states). I conceive of the country articles basically as an organizational framework for the city/destination articles, so they've got basic background but not specifics on what hotels to book or what museums to visit. So these may well be rather shorter.

As for cities, I thought 1 was about neighborhoods in the city rather than suburbs -- "the North End" or "Midtown" or "the 5th arondissement" or "the Latin Quarter," for example. In :en the larger city articles are then organized that way, so you get links in the main article to the sub-articles about the North End, Charlestown, South Boston, and so on (taking my home city for example). This makes sense to me because it's familiar: print guidebooks are often set out that way too. Yes, for some cities you care most about the center, but not invariably; in particular, it's always worth looking for hotels in cheaper parts of town! But if my main goal is to have a list of neighborhoods with links to sub-pages, perhaps that could go into an infobox.

I agree that 13 is probably national in scope, and we could put hospitals in 15 if we keep that. I don't think 14 is national: it's where to find library branches (and whether you can get internet access there), what local newsmedia there are and what they're like, the local phone info, and so on. Similarly 15. In both cases there are national conventions but there are also city-specific differences. For example, I know that in an American city there will generally be a public library, you don't need a card to walk in, it will have open stacks you can browse, it will have a photocopier you can use for a fee, and it will probably have some computers you can use. I don't know where the library is in, say, Seattle or whether it's different from what I'd expect. I know about USA Today or The New York Times (which would be under "communicare" in the national page), but if I want local movie listings for a city I've just arrived in, I need to know which local papers are worth picking up.

As for 16, with judicious use of categories and maps, we don't need a separate section for this, and pointers in 1, 4, and 5 are appropriate. For example, under "Paris" you want to know that Chartres or Versailles is an easy day trip; under "Boston" you want to know that Cambridge is so close it shares the same city transit system. As long as we include such information, I'm content.

It's probably obvious that my frame of reference is large cities, and particularly the ones I know best -- Boston, New York, Paris. Most of my own travelling is to good-sized cities, whether for conferences or for vacations, so I have a sense of what's useful in a guide to such a place (or useful to me, anyway), but this may not generalize to smaller cities or to different countries.

You're right that a page with all its headings in place, but no text, is unpleasant; CheckWikipedia even flags a heading with no text as a high-priority error. My own practice is to put the headings in, but then comment them out, so I've got the framework in hand when I'm ready for it, but it's invisible. la:Symmetria is an example where I've done that.

More on this next week, maybe even over the weekend; I'll give the section headings some more thought too. A. Mahoney (talk) 21:23, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Interesting points. True, you were thinking of large cities, I was thinking of little ones (Parikia, where my daughter lives, doesn't have a Left Bank). OK, if we agree to comment out empty subheadings, I'm less set on reducing them.

I hadn't considered what a "communicare" paragraph would deal with: I spent twenty minutes homing in on the library in Salisbury when we were last there, yes, exactly, to find an internet corner where they would let me plug my tired laptop into a power socket. Andrew Dalby (talk) 14:15, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Right, there's no need for every article to have every heading; sometimes all the section would say is "see the city/province/state/country of which this is a part," so we'd just leave it out. New point: do we want a specific section on Latinitas in the various places? Or should we just include that in discusion? A. Mahoney (talk) 18:35, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Strongly agree that this information should be included. Also, where it's possible to list a source of further information in Latin, geographical or encyclopedic, we should do it. The more clearly signalled this information is, the better, because it'll part of the evidence that we are serving a community that the other Wikivoyages don't serve. Andrew Dalby (talk) 15:42, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Quotations

Other Wikivoyages don't seem to do this, but I suggest brief direct quotations can be useful (I have just one tongue-in-cheek example so far, at Tellus). If the footnote links to a Vicipaedia article, no harm in that. Other views? Andrew Dalby (talk) 14:24, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Complete agreement -- and I like the one you've already used, too! :-) A. Mahoney (talk) 18:33, 1 February 2013 (UTC)