User:Ruud Koot/Sandbox/Proposal

Placing a "Travel guide" link to Wikivoyage next to the geographic coordinates in articles on cities and countries

Fig 1. Visitor traffic to Wikivoyage

Fig 2. Mock-up

Fig 3. Subtle version

Proposal

I want to propose to place a "Travel guide" link to Wikivoyage next to the geographic coordinates in articles on cities and countries.

We recently successfully launched our newest sister project Wikivoyage. During the week after its launch we ran a banner atop every Wikipedia article to inform the world about this endeavour. According to the regular editors at the site this resulted in a large number of constructive edits by new users. According to Alexa this promotional effort briefly put the site in the top 1000 of most visited sites on the Internet (see Fig 1.)

With the banner taken down a week later, visitor traffic remains far above what it was before the official launch, but nowhere near the level it was right after launch. Currently we link to Wikivoyage from our articles, as we do with most of our links to sister projects, from the See also or External links section. However, articles on cities and countries tend to be exceptionally long (Rome counts in at about 15 000 words) and readers are thus unlikely to scroll all the way to the bottom of these article and notice those links.

I propose we link to Wikivoyage from a slightly more prominent place: the top of the article. Mock-ups can be seen in Figures 2 and 3. I hope such a link will attract additional contributors to Wikivoyage and be helpful, or otherwise unobtrusive, to our readers. I would suggest starting out with the version in Figure 2 and move to the more subtle version in Figure 3 after we have managed to establish sufficient brand-awareness among our readership.

(The technical implementation would be realized by adding an additional field to {{infobox settlement}} and {{infobox country}}, and a small tweak to {{coord}} and {{coord/display/title}} to render the actual link.)

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