Talk:Visitor attractions in Paris

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 26 September, 2006. The result of the discussion was keep.
France Portal
Visitor attractions in Paris is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale.
(If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments, explaining the ratings and/or suggest improvements.)

[edit] Better as a category?

I think this would be better as a category than an article. Cordless Larry 13:14, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

In fact, the category already exists as Category:Visitor attractions in Paris. Cordless Larry 13:15, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Disagree: The category should be for ALL attractions that have an article, and this page for the most notable/prominent ones, with a short but useful description that can't be given in a category. The usual difficulty is to find a source or an objective criteria for selecting what goes into this short-list of notables, but difficulty is no reason to destroy a page. My suggestion would be to select 3 prominent tourist/travel sites (from, say, the U.S., Russia, and Japan) and list attractions that feature in at least 2 out of 3 of such lists, or some such criteria. — Komusou talk @ 11:34, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Transformation into an article

Okay, how to go about this? First off, if it is to become an article, it needs an introduction... perhaps something "Paris and its immediate region has many attractions to offer..." ... but it shouldn't sound like a sales pitch. For the rest of the article, perhaps the attractions could be divided into arrondissements - or areas? - with all of the attractions described in-text (not as a list) if possible... sound reasonable? Any other ideas? THEPROMENADER 07:12, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Some of my thoughts to get us started:

  • You're right it needs an introduction. We should try hard to follow WP style for this. (For example: "The many visitor attractions in Paris comprise monuments, historical buildings, churches, museums, parks, etc. These attractions are found throughout the various arrondissements of Paris itself and also in the surrounding region.")
  • Moreover, it needs a new name. It won't be List of... any longer. It could be Visitor attractions in Paris (of course) or perhaps Tourist attractions in Paris. I say this, because there is an article here on tourist attractions, but not one on "visitor attractions." Ought we to be consistent? Are there negative connotations to "visitor" or "tourist"?
  • As to the order: hmmm... could be alphabetical, by type (museums, historical bldgs, monuments), by arrondissement, by importance in tour books (introduces subjectivity problems I know).
  • Agree with you, this should not look like a list... not a bulleted list anyway. I think perhaps one paragraph (of three to five sentences) describing the significance of each attraction would be appropriate.
  • Most of the attractions in the current list already link to existing WP articles. We should look to be consistent with each of these articles (at least not say things that conflict). Perhaps we simply extract our paragraph from the first few paragraphs of these articles.
  • We could illustrate our article with thumbnail photographs of each attraction. Clearly the Paris article has no room for this, but it might look very nice in this one. Have a look at this article. I do not like the list in it, but I do like the photo layout (the mark up uses a tag called "gallery").
  • We'll might also rework the Monuments and landmarks subsection in Paris, perhaps reducing it to a bare minimum.

I believe we can make a beautiful article and have fun doing it. Hult041956 19:08, 20 September 2007 (UTC) (Some edits made to my own remarks) Hult041956 19:17, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Please, by all means, go ahead - you're the first new contributor to Paris-based articles since ages, so your work and input is more than welcome (to all of them!). I have little time these days to do more than check up on those articles I have contributed to on my watchlist, but of course I will lend a hand should you need one; all the above sounds like it would be a reasoned definite improvement to both this and the Paris article, so please, go for it! Cheers. THEPROMENADER 07:38, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
I do have one idea for transforming this into a useful article suitable for reference purposes: dividing its contents into "sections of interest". For the monuments in particular, I would categorise them into eras... Louis XIII-XIV's Porte St. Denis and porte St. Martin for example, just to give them a bit of historical context that may contribute to a more "article" content. I also imagined a section consecrated to talking about "Paris nostalgia" attractions - such as the Lido, Café Procope, etc - so there we can describe the origins of their "visitor value" - again creating context for more "article-like" content, and escarting the need for repetitive explanations ("famous in the 1920's", etc). THEPROMENADER 10:54, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Weasel words

This article is plagued with weasel words, most likeley added by an over excited tourist or french national, this damages the quality of the article. Please, would anyone intrested help me by removing them on sight. Thanks, Zanusi 11:39, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

After major rewrites - I have eradicated them. Zanusi 11:49, 17 October 2007 (UTC)