From Wikitravel

Get around would seem to also include things one needs to know about the street system, asking directions, no? It would not seem to belong to Understand. Also, it looks like Respect has shown up in the San Francisco article and perhaps belongs here as well. Notty

So, two things: you should probably read Wikitravel:using talk pages and figure out how to sign your posts. Secondly, I personally think Respect probably should go in region or country pages, not city pages. Third, I don't get what you're talking about w/r/t Get around. --Evan 17:19, 8 Feb 2004 (EST)

I know how to sign posts, I just tend to forget to. I suggest you take the respect issue up with Maj, as she moved smoking from Understand to Respect. For what I'm talking about with regard to city streets, you can see an example in the Get Around section of San Francisco Notty 00:44, Feb 9, 2004 (EST)

Number of districts

I think we need some sort of guideline for how many districts a 'huge' city should have. Currently some places, like Rome and Berlin, which aren't actually "absolutely huge" on the scale of a Tokyo or New York City, are split into a very unwieldy number of districts.

The two easy ways to guide this would be...

• per population (eg. one district per 500,000: Helsinki gets 1, Rome gets 6, Tokyo 20)
• per page size (split off once guide reaches X kilobytes, target size Y per page)

Note that both are intended as maximum guidelines, eg. we don't need to split Dhaka into 18 districts if there isn't enough content to go around. Opinions? Jpatokal 05:20, 8 Feb 2005 (EST)

The second method is definitely easiest as it's already implemented. If you click "edit" and get the 32kb warning, you're looking at a huge city article. (= a huge article about a city, if not an article about a huge city.) -- Paul Richter 05:52, 8 Feb 2005 (EST)

The criterion I use (specifically, when considering Seattle) is if Lonely Planet can publish an entire 100-200 page printed guide on a city, it's absurd for Wikitravel to put (potentially) the same amount of information on a single web page. By this criterion even Hanoi is a huge city, so there's leeway, of course. -- Paul Richter 06:10, 8 Feb 2005 (EST)

What is the Huge City criteria

This question has been nagging me for some time. What is it that makes a city a Huge City for Wikitravel purposes?

I can readily accept that some of the major cities of the world, with several to tens of millions of people are huge cities. However, what is the criteria for deciding that a city is really a Huge city?

• It certainly is not just population!
• Is it both population and geography?
• Is it multiple city administrations?
• Is it clearly identifiable suburbs, each with a CBD?

Perhaps it's my insular view of the world from New Zealand but the distinction escapes me when I start wanting to say Auckland and Wellington metropolitan areas are huge cities. I was recently told that Greater Auckland has one of the largest land areas of any city in the world. Although the populations are only a million, or less, these cities are very spread out with 50 - 100 km trips needed to get across the city. In international terms is this huge and does this qualify as a Huge City? -- Huttite 05:06, 18 Dec 2005 (EST)

I think the answer is none of the above, and Wikitravel:Article templates already has the correct answer: for cities so big that they must be broken up into districts. In other words, a city becomes Huge when it has way too many attractions to fit into a single article.

As for your particular examples, Greater Auckland sounds like a region, not a huge city. Population doesn't necessarily translate into article template: Dhaka may have 13 million people, but as long as no tourist in their right mind visits it, it's likely to remain as a pathetic small city article-wise for a long time. Jpatokal 10:00, 18 Dec 2005 (EST)

I agree that Greater Auckland sounds like a region, but that is really the Auckland Region. My dilemma is that Auckland refers to four adjacent cities, North Shore, Waitakere, Auckland City and Manukau, which have no clearly definable boundaries other than lines on a map. At present these four cities are separate city articles, rather than being a single huge city article with 4 districts, one for each city. I am thinking of changing the Auckland and Wellington articles into the huge city template and wanted to get the criteria straight before plunging forward. I can understand having a big article that you want to break down, but what about lots of little city articles that go together as a metropolitan set and everyone keeps misinterpreting one as being the overarching metropolitan area because they do not understand the local government structure. Should we even be bound by the local government structure? -- Huttite 05:27, 19 Dec 2005 (EST)

We should not be bound by local government structure, but we should explain it. Ie. we do not organize London/Westminster and London/City of London as separate cities. In Copenhagen, Frederiksberg is organized as a district even though is an island municipality within the municipality of Copenhagen. If you asked some friends in Greater Auckland to recommend some good restaurants in "Auckland" would they give you restaurants in Auckland City or in Greater Auckland? --elgaard 10:39, 19 Dec 2005 (EST)

Huge Citys and Districts - Where do listings go?

Moved from Wikitravel:Travellers' pub Hypatia 08:59, 21 September 2006 (EDT)

Apologies if this has been covered somewhere else. I'm working on Prague at the moment and have been moving some of the content into the district pages that were largely empty. Looking at other huge cities like Berlin and San Francisco there doesn't seem to be a concensus on whether listings should stay on the main page or be moved into their districts. In my opinion, it's really confusing to have some on the city page, some in the districts and some doubled up. Should it be..

• All individual listings under their district page, with the city page giving an overview of the scene and pointing out highlights and good districts?
• All individual listings on main page, eat/drink/sleep sections in districts empty and/or deleted?
• All individual listings on BOTH the city page and districts pages? (removes point of having districts)?
• All individual listings on the districts pages and a random selection of listings on the city page?

The first option makes the most sense to me but that doesn't seem to be how districts are working at the moment. What does everyone else think? Thewayoftheduck 20:07, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

The first one. Maybe a little of the fourth. The second and third would be counter-productive. The purpose of district articles is to take unwieldy See/Do/Buy/Eat/Sleep/Drink listings out of the main article and parcel them out to the districts. Those sections in the parent city article would then be overviews (like in a region or country article), with maybe one or two must-see/-do/-drink/-etc bullet-point items, which refer the reader to the district article for the full listing. See Wikitravel:Huge_city_article_template for a better description of this than I can manage. -Todd VerBeek 21:09, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

San Francisco and Berlin aren't really our best examples of big city guide organization yet. Perhaps look at Paris instead. -- Mark 03:43, 21 July 2006 (EDT)

Ah, perfect. Thanks both of you. Paris looks fantastic btw. Thewayoftheduck 07:00, 21 July 2006 (EDT)