Guide projects

Hey everyone,

I was just browsing through our travel guide and noticed it's been a while since we've updated the Featured guides on that page. I think we should feature some new articles / locations. To make this happen, maybe we should revive the idea of guide projects. See Project:Central for reference.

We could set a country or region as our project and tackle it for a round of updates. Usually there are things to clean up (broken links, outdated prices) and probably a bunch of missing places that we still could add.

An alternative to a location would be a theme that we could create a collaborative article behind. Like the Famous Festivals / Famous Bridges ones but something new.

I'm open to suggestions on what would be a good project (or maybe more than one) that everyone could get behind.

Cheers, Peter

p.s. nice to see more contributions being made to the guide as well.

I'd be interested in getting involved, especially with collaborative articles. Is the idea to then get them featured somewhere to generate publicity for TP?

As to themes, what about the following:

Striking modern buildings
Best places to photograph wildlife
Castles and palaces
Best small museums
Unusual places to stay

We used to do something similar on VT. The admins would think of a theme (they were usually Top Tens, e.g. Top Ten roadtrips) and ask for our contributions based on our existing tips. They chose some to feature and the member got a name-check and sometimes (if published online) a link to their pages. I'm sure other VTers could help me remember more of the themes we had in the past, if we run out of ideas here.

I'd feature them on our main Guide page .

If they are on topics that are searched a lot (or maybe not searched huge amounts, but with little competition) , then it can bring in a lot of traffic through Google. Our Famous Mountains article for example was for a long time in the top 3 in Google for that term and brought in a bunch of people. The Caribbean ferries one is in 2nd spot for that phrase which is why it's the most read article in the entire guide.

I like the themes suggested so far! Definitely the kind of stuff that could be of interest to people.

Another couple came to mind for me as well

• Travel 101 - For first time travellers
• Packing for a trip to <xxx> (ie, the snow, the tropics, Eastern Europe, etc)

We already have a very generic packing list which in the past ranked no.1 for "Packing list". If we follow on with that theme, then I can link up the guide articles from that page as well. I would expect some of those could bring in good traffic and be a pretty useful resource to point people to from the forums as well when questions along those lines come up.

Generalized pcking lists are a tricky matter in my eyes, because they depend not only on the destination but, at least in some parts of the world, also on the season - and just as much on the individual's travel style and planned activities.

How about
- Christmas markets
- Carnival traditions
- Bird-watching spots
- Public transport and how to use it
- Historical small towns of the beaten path

Quoting Kathrin_E

How about
- Christmas markets
- Carnival traditions
- Bird-watching spots
- Public transport and how to use it
- Historical small towns of the beaten path

I like all of these except perhaps the public transport one, as it seems to me to be specific to each destination?

More from me:

Best boat journeys
Best train journeys
Special beaches (i.e. off the beaten path)
Dark tourism (controversial maybe?)
Hidden gems in popular tourist cities

And some from me:

Medieval cathedrals.

Famous battlefields (broken down into period and/or continent?)

Unusual museums (e.g. the phallological museum in Reykjavik, the pencil museum in Keswick, UK)

Archaeological sites (broken down into era/culture e.g. prehistoric, Viking, Roman, Mayan etc etc?)

Ugliest architecture.

Vineyards to visit (seems to be a popular thing).

Best street-food to try.

[ Edit: Edited on 25-Apr-2018, at 05:14 by leics2 ]

Some great suggestions here.

One is already in existence, Famous Trains is basically the "Best train journeys" article.

I particularly like Famous Battlefields as it ties well into the existing Famous category of article.

So, to help us decide, I built a survey with all the responses (except the train one because that already exists).

What should be our next guide project

For this survey you just need to drag the items into the preferred order with your most preferred one at the top.

I've done the survey - good idea

I rated the Christmas markets and carnival ideas relatively low but only because they are seasonal and would be best done in the run up to their respective seasons.

Good point Sarah. I rated them highly because they are good topics for this format I think, but we can put them up as a project later in the year perhaps.

By the way, the 'train one' is still in there