User talk:Piotrus

It is possible I will not log in to this account for weeks. Please leave me a message on en-Wikipedia - I log there everyday.

Hi!

Welcome to Wikivoyage, Piotr!

Thank you for your interesting contribution to our Pub.

These pages may be interesting and relevant to your question there:

http://wikitravel.org/en/Special:Statistics

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

To help you contribute, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about our policies and guidelines and our house style as well as some important information on the way your contributions will be licensed.

However, even more important than following every guideline is to PLUNGE FORWARD and write something useful – someone might be along to help with the proper formatting later!

Add your home town, or a place you know well or write some insider tips - but don't use first person pronouns.

We're looking forward to seeing you again here on Wikivoyage! -- Alice^✉ 03:46, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Contributions

Hi Piotrus. I noticed your message on Jjtk's talk page. I understand that you may be upset about how users have undone your edits. It is practice here to undo edits and leave a summary that quotes the policies and reason for the revert. Some policies are quite contentious right now, such as the one about not linking to Wikipedia, but it is current policy and we must enforce it. The use of the word "Captain Obvious" may have come across as rude, but that is actually the name of the policy at Wikivoyage:No advice from Captain Obvious.

We'd love to have you edit here, and I can see from your Wikipedia page that you are a great contributor. You may want to reread some of our policies and the Welcome, Wikipedians page so as to avoid future misunderstandings. If you understand the second link especially well, I think you'll enjoy your time editing here :) JamesA ^>talk 11:49, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Links to Wikipedia

Hi, Piotrus, and thanks a lot for updating and adding content to articles about Poland! When you do, please keep in mind English Wikivoyage's policy on links to Wikipedia, which I understand is different from some other Wikivoyages' practices. Generally speaking, inline links in text are not allowed on this site.

Also a side point: The word "characteristic" doesn't apply by itself to any type of architecture. Characteristic of what? Perhaps the word is a false friend with a similar-sounding word in Polish, as it is in some other European languages, and as "typical" is relative to Italian "tipica" ("cucina tipica" != "typical cuisine").

Best,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:38, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek: By all means please remove the links that shouldn't be there. I do wonder how, if at all, an we link to former landmarks that are mentioned in the text? I am adding wikidata/etc. listings for modern stuff, but if we mention that there was a former palace, is Wikivoyage generally not going to link to the Wikipedia article about it? Also, characteristic, hmmm. I guess we can say famous, but it is not world famous, just Poland-famous I guess. As in, en:Spodek is the most recognizable building in Katowice, commonly appear on tourist magnets and like because of its unique design. Feel free to suggest a better wording. (Btw, Katowice is my hometown, I figured I should finally c/e that article a bit). --Piotrus (talk) 06:03, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

"Iconic" might work.

On former landmarks, these no longer exist, right? I don't think we provide links to articles about them if nothing at all remains and something else was built there, but if there are ruins people visit or if there is an empty space where a building used to be, I think it could be reasonable to provide markers with geographic coordinates and a Wikidata link. But the thing is, I'm not positive, so it might be good to ask this question in the Travellers' pub. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:54, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Chorzów

Hi Piotrus, thank you for starting the Chorzów article. Just to let you know, there are still significant gaps in our coverage of Poland. There are currently 5 Polish cities with a population of over 100,000 which do not have an article on English Wikivoyage.

• Dabrowa Górnicza
• Rybnik
• Tychy
• Włocławek
• Zabrze

It would be appreciated if you can create articles on these cities whenever you have the time :) One of Wikivoyage's goals is to bluelink every article that appears on Wikivoyage:World cities (consisting of capital cities and cities with a population over 100,000). There are also South Korean cities on the list which are red. Gizza ^(roam) 01:20, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

@DaGizza Took me a while, now that I am mostly finished with Chorzow and Katowice, I'll work on other missing stuff from the region. Started on Zabrze today Piotrus (talk) 07:31, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Prefs

Two suggestions for you about prefs:

• First, did you show your students how to set their prefs to Korean? I assume you want them to use English as much as possible, but they might be more comfortable and productive if they're more confident in what the buttons say.
• Second, if that box at the very top of this page isn't just a relic of days gone by, you might want to check Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo-echocrosswiki to make sure that you're getting cross-wiki notifications.

I am really happy to see your students here. One of them has made a lot of good recommendations at Wikivoyage:Banner suggestions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Glad to hear that! Which student? They'd be very happy to be named :) I think most of them are using a tool that translates the website (all websites) without going into the preferences. New generation... And yes, I check my cross wiki notificaitons, they should work. Piotrus (talk) 07:24, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Hojong9474 has made many suggestions. I like the enthusiasm. RonanHoogmoed has already finished the whole process and successfully changed the banner for the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:37, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Happy holidays, Piotrus! Hello Piotrus, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! It has been a pleasure to have you as a fellow Wikivoyager this year. Wherever you are, enjoy the festive season and stay warm (if you're north of the Tropic of Cancer)! Your help in maintaining, improving and expanding Wikivoyage will always be appreciated. Greetings from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. --SHB2000 on 11:53, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

User:CHENG SHIYI

Hi, Piotrus. I'm posting this just to let you know that this student is ignoring their user talk page and edit summaries and edit warring, so they're likely to be blocked for 3 days soon. See User talk:CHENG SHIYI and Zhuzhou: Revision history.

All the best,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:22, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek Thank you for the ping and sorry for the trouble. I'll leave them my own feedback shortly, but a 3 day block would be educational unless they improve the quality of their edits; in fact a 7-day long one may be better (students have do weekly edis, if you hit the period of 3 days they are inactive they may not even notice a block at all). Piotrus (talk) 07:35, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for posting to their user talk page. As a rule, we block for an initial period of 3 days, followed by a 2-week block if necessary. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:42, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek At this stage in the course, a 2-week would be ok, but from the overall course timeline, hmmm. A week block and another identical one if needed (which I hope it won't be) might work better for educational projects. Btw, note this is a team project (two students), the other one editing this article is Zhongxxin. I hope we can avoid any blocks, of course, and that the students read my messages and improve the quality of their edits. But if not, well, I did warn folks to read talk page messages and avoid repeating mistakes, telling them that otherwise they may be get blocks on their accounts and have trouble completing assignments. Piotrus (talk) 08:15, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Since we're not Wikipedia, I'm open to being a bit flexible and only giving them a 7-day mainspace block if it escalates to that point – but that's just my opinion and I don't get to singlehandedly decide the duration of the block. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:21, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

China editathon?

Swept in from the pub

We've lately had new users here who've been editing and creating articles about places in China. That's great, but editathons, student assignments and the like nearly always come with the predictable downside of new users copying and pasting encyclopedic content from other sites, creating articles that should be listings, customizing standard section headers to fit their desired structure, and most problematically, ignoring edit summaries and their user talk pages and starting to edit war without comment.

Is there anyone supervising this editathon that could talk to the participants about the basics of Wikivoyage, or at least explain to them that it's important for them to read their user talk pages? I really don't want to discourage potentially valuable new users by having to start suspending their editing privileges.

Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:16, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

You might want to ask User:Piotrus if he/she has anything to do with this since he/she was supervising an editathon by Chinese and Korean students last year. STW932 (talk) 09:27, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Nah, I highly doubt this editathon is hosted by Piotrus – they're usually on top of things and lets us know well in advance. Most likely, we'll have to do some digging on Meta. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:47, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Weeell, thanks for the kind words, but it might indeed be related to me. I am quite busy with many things IRL (I did not even notice the ping in this thread and was about to post a new one and information about the 2023 edition of my Wikivoyage/Wikipedia course: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Hanyang_University/Understanding_Small_and_Big_Data_with_Wikis_(2023) ). Same as last year, my students will try to improve ~two dozen locations primarily related to China and Korea.

And as before, I will do my best to explain things to students but, well, they are students. I am writing here having just finished offce hours (plural, more to come in few days), and, well. Ikan is totally correct students will do all the things he mentions, despite my tutelage. As a reminder, most of my students are ESLs, and increasingly this generation English skills are... problematic. They rely on machine translation a lot (which is to say, a portion of my class probably does not understand what I say at all). And well, some pay attention to my explanations etc. but some obviously won't (or can't). I appreciate @SHB2000 speedy deleting Mount Laojun and I apologize for making you "work" (yes, that was my student edit), but well, I did not tell that student to create that page - this is just one of dozen cases of a student showing me a page and explaining, in broken English, that they want to chose this for their topic (denied, of course, I know this is out of scope). The syllabus tells them to chose a city/town level entity, but not everyone pays attention to these details, and we had an activity today about uploading/adding images, and well, one student created said empty page (weeks before they are supposed to start doing that), several other uploaded copyvios (despite last class having a 40 minute segment abotu copyright...). I like my job, but bottom line is, students will make mistakes. I hope the end result will be worth it, like last semester's contributions of https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Hanyang_University/Understanding_Small_and_Big_Data_with_Wikis_(Fall_2022) which I think created over a dozen of decent entries. But it will take few months to train this crop of new editors, as usual.

Anyway, please keep me informed of any problematic edits. Honestly, there shouldn't have been much. Last Friday we had the BEBOLDish activity of "make a constructive edit on Wikivoyage and show it to the instructor" - I have seen only a dozen edits and they seemed ok-ish, today we had the activty about adding an image (I expect some will be removed due to overcrowding an article, as of course some students just piled in on the same article that their buddy sitting next/in front/etc. chose...). Piotrus (talk) 08:57, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry about that (and no need to apologise) – normally, I'd have been less hasty with speedy deletions, but this one just contained an image and didn't think useful content will come out of it (and it can simply be recreated). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:01, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Piotrus, I'm glad the assignment is underway and I'm glad you're supervising this. As a some-time professor, I know that students don't always listen carefully or understand, but the most important thing I'd like you to emphasize is that they need to read any messages on their user talk pages. That's probably more important than anything else. All my best to you, Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:29, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek I did repeat this several times during one of the first classes. I will repeat again. For some reason, however, I find many students repeatedly ignore messages and pings, they don't even click on them. I don't know why. I tried stressing this semster this by telling them that if they miss important messages they may be banned/blocked and fail the course, but... I think plummeting language proficiency (reliance on machine translation) is becoming an issue here (as I said, some of my students are sadly not able to comprehend what I am saying at all - and no, I can't ban them from taking the course, sigh). Piotrus (talk) 09:34, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Ps. Feedback - yeah, this is one of mine too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hanyangprofessor2#Wiki_voyage Apologies. Student has good intentions but they jumped the proverbial gun by posting this. Piotrus (talk) 10:17, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

PS. In a week+ I'll post here a list of topics (articles about towns/cities) chosen by my students. Most of the course activity will be focused there, with the occasional exception of visiting the banner suggestion page and such). I am also open to any ideas if you have suggestions about pages/places to direct student attention to (some backlogs?). --Piotrus (talk) 09:36, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Early apologies. We had an activity "What do you think is a popular tourist spot in your country that is not covered on Wikivoyage? Extra point if you can improve it/create it during today’s class." but while I was distracting answering a question, some students created pages instead of listings as I intended. I told them to merge/copy content as relevant, and on Monday I will show them how to create listings. Hanyangprofessor2 (talk) 07:50, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Regarding copyvios, I found one on the Linyi article. The description of Wang Xizhi's former residence is actually a word-for-word translation of the first two paragraphs of an article on Baidu Baike. STW932 (talk) 14:14, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@STW932 I wish I could say I am surprised that students plagiarise; instead I can only apologize. Could you remove it and leave a warning for the student? I'll use it as an learning example in the upcoming class. Piotrus (talk) 15:03, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Sure, I'll probably do that tomorrow. I'm going to bed now. STW932 (talk) 17:03, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Done. STW932 (talk) 08:35, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Update: today we had an in-class activity "create a new article using the correct skeleton template, add at least two listings and a map". Hope there won't be too much cleanup needed - I noticed two city parks and one district that may need merger/deletion. Other stuff seems fine outside of the possible copyvio (if we are lucky, the text is copypaste translation from Wikipedia/Chinese wikivoyage rather than Baidu/some random webpages). And the usual, sadly, grammar/vocabulary issues (most of the students these days in my class are using machine translation and there is nothing I can do to prevent it, I fear). Do let me know if the quality of the entries created in this mini-editathon is acceptable or not worth it so I can consider how to refine this activity for next year. --Piotrus (talk) 07:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

List of articles that are "main projects to create and/or expand" for our class for those who want to watchlist them and offer feedback to students. Most but not all have been started alraedy or existed before. A few students have not chosen their topic yet but most have:

• Baengnyeoung Island/Baengnyeoung/Baengnyeongdo
• Boseong County/Boseong
• Dezhou
• Enshi
• Goseong (Gyeongsang) (see Goseong)
• Haenam
• Heide
• Heze
• Hezhou
• Huzhou
• Jianchuan
• Korean palaces
• La Toussuire
• Luanchuan
• Ma'anshan
• Namyangju
• Pengzhou
• Rizhao
• Seoul/East
• Tai'an
• Yuhuan
• Xinxiang
• Xinzhou
• Ya'an
• Yangyang
• Yichang
• Yongsan
• Yulin_(Shaanxi)
• Zhuzhou

Despite the appearances to the contrary, my class is in South Korea, not China (but as you can see, I have many Chinese exchange students taking my class). --Piotrus (talk) 07:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I notice some students working on China articles are getting their coordinates wrong. Please kindly remind them that China uses a different coordinate system from the rest of the world (See w:Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China#Coordinate_systems). STW932 (talk) 16:40, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

I hope it's OK that I edited your link to make it work. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:12, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

@STW932 @Ikan Kekek Interesting, I did not know about it (no student has ever reported a problem to me for Chinese locations). Are the some wikivoyage guides on how to most efficiently get coordingates for China and Korea? Korea has trouble too (Google or Apple maps cannot provide GPS coordinates). For now I am telling them to locate an object using commercial map, then try to find the right coordinates using our map and copy the coordinates from it. Piotrus (talk) 01:01, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

@Piotrus: For China, I find OpenStreetMap to be the most useful source for coordinates. There's some past discussion at Talk:China/Archive 2013-2018#GPS coordinates in China. —Granger (talk · contribs) 02:00, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

@Mx. Granger Thanks. Btw, I just wrote w:Restrictions on geographic data in South Korea in case it is of use to us to inform people about the problem. Piotrus (talk) 04:10, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Some places in China can be hard to find on OpenStreetMap. What I usually do is search for the location on Baidu Maps, then use an online tool such as this one. to convert the BD09 coordinates (Baidu coordinates) to WGS84 coordinates (standard international coordinates). STW932 (talk) 05:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Feedback for educational assignments best done this week

Swept in from the pub

Just a note that some of my students have asked (or will shortly do) for feedback at Wikivoyage:Requests_for_comment#Articles_and_travel_content. The course ends soon, and students being students, their motivations to edit (and check for feedback and reply/act on it) may significantly decrease one this happens (in about a week). When replying to students there, I recommend pinging both them and me. Cheers, Piotrus (talk) 04:11, 18 December 2023 (UTC)