Wikipedia:WikiProject Virtual Tour
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WikiProject Virtual Tour is a Wikipedia project that lends itself directly to Wikipedia. Whereas Commons hosts individual images of places and things with articles on Wikipedia, Project Virtual Tour would host "virtual tours" of these places/things.
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[edit] Mission
The purpose of the project is to build a collection of virtual tours of places (and possibly things) which have articles on Wikipedia. The project will develop and standardize the navigation system, guidelines and policies, and other content related to providing virtual tours. Example subjects include castles, museums, caverns, mountains, historic trails or popular tourist destinations, college campuses, typical mosques or churches, archaeological sites, etc.
[edit] Reasons
The reasons for this project include:
- Visual detail — While Wikipedia articles can be very detailed textually, articles are lacking with respect to visual details. For places, this is bad if the place is generally notable for its visual appeal (castles, musuems, or any popular tourist destinations).
[edit] Vision
With Virtual Tours, a person sitting in front of his computer could take a European tour in the morning, walk along the Great Wall of China in the afternoon, and explore the Grand Canyon in the evening.
The basic idea is as follows: a person takes numerous photographs of a place as he moves through it, and uploads them to Commons. On Commons, he starts a new page which will serve as the main page for the tour of that place. That page would provide an overview of the place, quick links to interesting spots on the tour, and a starting point for the tour. For a building, the main article would have a picture of the front of the building to serve as the starting point.
Subpages would then be organized under the main page, and the navigation system would be used to connect the subpages into a working tour of the place. After organizing the tour, an interwiki link would be added to the place's Wikipedia article.
[edit] Navigation system
Navigation would be similar to that in Myst, Riven, or other graphical adventure games. The navigation system could be as simple as Forward, Backward, Left, Right (or using arrows). It could also include an overhead map of navigable locations, similar to the dungeon maps in Legend of Zelda. This could be done using CSS, so that tourists could skip to interesting parts of the tour.
[edit] Other possibilities
While this is mainly focused on providing tours of places, users could also submit photos of an object from various sides/angles/distances.
For art galleries, the tour could instead consist of previously uploaded images of paintings/sculptures, which are organized into a single page, representing the contents of a specific art gallery. Navigation could allow for close-up views of detailed painting or other works of art.
