How you can help Wikivoyage

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This article describes our project.

There are as many ways to help Wikivoyage as many there are Wikivoyagers. This article is for those who like the idea of Wikivoyage, but are not sure how to start contributing.

  • Proofread. This is one of the easiest ways to get started with helping Wikivoyage. While you're reading an article, watch for spelling mistakes, grammar errors or typos. When you notice one, edit the page and correct it. Wikivoyage is now that much better - thanks to you! You can have a look at the recent changes or the new pages to find out which articles have just been edited or created. The special page "Random page", as the name suggests, will take you to a random page. Usually, you can find something to improve in any page.
  • Reformat articles. Wikivoyage has a manual of style for giving a consistent look-and-feel to our content and making it easier for travelers to find and use information. Just as with proofreading, you can do a lot of good just by reformatting or restructuring articles to match the manual of style. Articles that need reformatting are typically stub articles, which usually lack standard headings and outlines. The dead end pages, which is a list of articles without any links within them, is also worth a look.
  • Check the article about your home town. Navigate to the article about your home town, either by going through the directory on the Main Page or using the search box on the left-hand side. If the article is there, take a good look to check if everything is correct. Make sure that major attractions are listed, and see if you can fill in any details (hours, prices, phone numbers) for any of the entries there. If there's not an article on your home town, start one! You can repeat this exercise for your home state or province, region, country, or whatever.
  • Expand listings. It can help a lot to pick out short restaurant descriptions, attraction descriptions, or other listings and fill them out. Contributors will often leave out crucial information about an attraction, such as its address, phone number, hours, or price. Often, this information can be found on the World Wide Web (see contributor research links for some starting points).
  • Check for articles about places you've visited. As with your home town, find articles about places you have visited. Check them for accuracy, add information, or start them from scratch, if they don't exist yet.
  • Don't limit yourself to things you already know. You don't have to have firsthand knowledge of a destination or topic to contribute to the article! Find articles that need work and do some research - on Wikipedia, on the Web, or with other reference media - to get started working on that article.
  • Make outlines. Don't be discouraged by the task of writing all of the article about Canada - just get it started with some basic information in a stub. People are much more likely to change or add to articles than to start them from scratch. If you only know a tiny little bit about a subject, go ahead and add it in.
  • Watch for wanted articles. The Special:Wantedpages feature of our software lets you see which articles have been linked to but not yet written. These are excellent places to get started - you're filling in what is an obvious need for the travel guide.
  • Follow red links. While you're reading articles, if you see a red link for an article that's not there yet, follow the link and add in some information. We're nowhere near close to covering all the info we need to have – when you start a new page, we're that much closer.
  • Take Wikivoyage with you. Before you go on a trip, try to find articles in Wikivoyage about the destinations you're visiting. Print them out - or download them to your PDA or notebook - and take them with you on your trip. Keep notes on what's right, what's wrong, and what's missing. If the destination you're going to, isn't in Wikivoyage yet, take notes for a new article to start when you get back.
  • Translate articles. Some articles exist in only one language version of Wikivoyage. Translate the information into your mother tongue or from it into another language you speak well, and add it into the corresponding article.
  • Join an Expedition. There are several tasks for making a real travel guide that require special skills and talents. We've created special subprojects called Expeditions to organize the efforts of people who have these talents. Do you know a foreign (non-English) language? Help out with the Phrasebook Expedition. Can you draw? Try your hand at the Mapmaking Expedition.
  • Promote Wikivoyage. The more people read and contribute to Wikivoyage, the better it becomes, and the closer we get to our goal of making a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. There are a number of ways to promote Wikivoyage; check if you can do one or more of them.
  • Help new contributors. New users contributing to Wikivoyage can have a lot of questions and problems. Your experience with Wikivoyage can make their learning curve a lot easier. Watch for questions in the Lounge or on talk pages and respond helpfully. If you see the same question over and over, add it to the FAQ. You can even add to the Help index for more complicated questions or issues. If you find help topics in a place difficult to notice, maybe you can help make that information more visible by reorganizing the help area.
  • Cheerlead. Nothing makes people feel better than knowing their work is appreciated. When you see a good piece of writing, or a great picture, or whatever, let the Wikivoyager who made it know that you liked it. Just a bit of encouragement on the article's talk page, or on the user's user talk page, can make a world of difference.
  • Shape the community. Our project is still young, and many cooperation concepts still remain untested. If you have ideas for how to work together better, please suggest them as new Community policies. It doesn't matter how long you've been a Wikivoyager: you just might have an idea that will make things work smoother. At worst, you'll make explicit some policy that's currently implicit; that's a good thing. If there are policies already in place that people aren't following, maybe you can help get that information out by reorganizing the policies area.
  • Keep contact with related projects. It is important for us to establish and maintain contact with projects the goals of which are at least partially similar to our own goals. In the best case even an collaboration can be considered. For this it is important to have contact persons within the concerned project.
  • Welcome new users. When new users come onto Wikivoyage, it's nice to leave them a brief welcome message pointing them to important parts of the site. We normally wait until folks have created a user account and possibly set up their own user page. Welcome messages let new contributors know that they're part of a community, and also make sure they have pointers to important tools for contributing.
  • Clean up the Lounge. The Lounge, as the default place to put discussions about Wikivoyage, tends to get a little crowded at times. For this reason people take turns moving discussions out of the pub and into the archives or to more specific talk pages. It only takes a few minutes, it helps make discussions more clear, and it's easy to do.
  • Work on MediaWiki. The software we use for Wikivoyage is called MediaWiki. If you know the PHP programming language, contributing to MediaWiki really helps Wikivoyage. Fixing bugs or adding features makes it easier for other Wikivoyagers to add great content.
  • Help us with the development and adaptation of the software. We sometimes need customized extensions for the MediaWiki software or even completely independent own programs. If you have knowledge in these fields you will find your place on the wiki for technical stuff.
  • Support the server administrators. We need people having expert knowledge in server administration. If you come up with ideas for improvement or if you are interested in details, let us know.
The namespace index provides an overview on all meta articles.
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