Hey guys, I do not really know what this page should be for except for guilty airline geek pleasures, but if so, I guess it should include more than just the four selected airlines, but rather the full scope of the multitude of national carriers serving European airports. I understand that, for some reason, there needs to be a separation of legacy carriers from low-fare carriers (I really don't know why, as it creates problems with "hybrid" carriers such as AirBaltic). Therefore, I would suggest to group the airlines by alliances, i.e. Star Alliance and then, as subsections, Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss, TAP, Brussels, LOT, Adria, Croatian etc., then SkyTeam with AF, KLM, CSA, TAROM and so forth, then Oneworld and finally a section for unaligned carriers.

Whaddya think? --PrinceGloria (talk) 05:52, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

My view would be, by all means, go ahead. Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:01, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Absolutely - go ahead! I just put those 4 down initially as something of a placeholder. --Nick ^talk 06:37, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the warm feedback above guys! I've had a great time for a while expanding the article, but after a while it occurred to me I am bordering on rewriting Wikipedia here. Most of the information that could be contained in this article is of purely geek / enthusiast interest in the form it is.

1. The sole fact of an airline's existence is of little relevant interest unless there is an itinerary where it could be used. The last place where one would look it up is a lenghty article on ALL airlines on a continent, or a myriad of articles on particular airlines / groups of airlines, should we split it
2. The fact that an airport is an airline's hub is more important if one looks it up from a city / country / region, not airline perspective
3. Details as to the airline's safety record and / or scope and quality of service could be useful, but we do not do ratings here on WV, there are dedicated sites who already do that better than we ever could
4. Details on fleet is hardly important unless we provide information on specific fleet types, and then still, to a casual traveller, the most important thing is the seating configuration (and how to choose the "best" seats), which is already covered better by specialist websites. Otherwise, it's geek's guilty pleasure, and still, covered better by Wikipedia and specialist sites.

I believe it is better to focus on general articles on advice on flying, which I still consider to be in terrible shape. E.g. there is an article on low-cost carriers per region, whilst the general advice per region is hardly any different. The only thing that differs are several parametres per airline (scope of service included in base price, multi-leg tickets (for connecting flights) issued), that can be summarized neatly in a table.

One bit of information that could be taken out of this particular article is a list of airports and / or airlines offering direct intercontinental connections to the Americas, sub-saharan Africa and the Far East (flights to Northern Africa and the Middle East should be considered mid-haul at best from most European airports). I have found this information rather useful when planning an inter-continental itinerary, and which I have never seen collected in one place.

What do you guys think? What is the purpose of this article as it stands on WV that is not better served by other media? PrinceGloria (talk) 21:51, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

An excellent question and not really one to which I know the answer! The truth of the matter is that articles of this ilk (Airlines in...) were only created in order to hold existing articles about specific airlines that really didn't fit with our aims. I only created this article in order to ensure it didn't look like we had a huge gap in our coverage (hence why I only put 4 airlines down initially) and to balance out the very large Airlines in the United States article. If we do continue I might suggest that we focus wholly on the usable information (frequent flyer programmes, hubs etc) and keep airline description to a single sentence until this article has some meat to it.

Perhaps Flying would make a good CoTM? --Nick ^talk 22:02, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Flying could make a good CoTM (as if a CoTM really matters to anybody, our DoTM Rotterdam still does without a banner and May is about to end), but we can start improving it right away. It's not in a bad shape as it stands, only a bit of a dump for personal commentary, redundant and unclear information and promoting travel agents to do the job most easily done without them.

I believe "Airlines in the US" was only created to collect geek stuff and personal commentary that either doubled Wikipedia or didn't suit its standards, but hardly made any difference to most travellers. I think this is a bad case of a bad example snowballing just because it is really hard to let go of a content that took hours and hours to type (which I know from my experience with everything I ever wrote, however bad it was objectively).

I can see no benefit to discussing frequent flyer programmes. They are, for the most part, almost identical, and meaningful to only a handful of travellers (this comes from a keen member of both Star Alliance and SkyTeam FFPs, fully realizing how meaningless and irrelevant the kinks thereof are to most travellers, and rightly so). They could be best covered in a single article on all frequent flier programmes (we don't seem to have one already - here's a good CfTM -> Collaboration for This Moment!), with perhaps a table comparing all / selected / most popular / known to editors FFPs with regard to several key parametres.

As for hubs, I discussed this above - this is being or should be covered in city and, for larger hubs, airport articles. The only really useful thing beyond that would be to collect info on what intercontinental flights are available to a particular continent / region.

Thanks for the above and further replies, this reignites the faith in me that this project is not dying away. PrinceGloria (talk) 22:19, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

To be honest, you're probably right - Flying needs a lot of pruning and this is just one part of that process. Maybe put a link to this in the pub as well just to draw some extra attention?

I do like the idea of a central 'Frequent Flyer Programmes' page where we could keep all this info. As you suggest, hubs could be integrated more effectively perhaps into existing city and airport articles.

...And don't worry, as the Wikivoyage anthem states:

(It's a work in progress...) :) --Nick ^talk 22:29, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I need to apologize. I somehow overlooked the brilliant work you did on splitting the Flying article and it seems it needs even less work as of now. I bow to you.

How about starting a small collaboration of our own selves at Frequent flyer programmes like, right now, to occupy the rest of the evening / night / morning wherever you may be? PrinceGloria (talk) 22:34, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

No need to apologise at all! Starting that page tonight sounds good to me (11:39 pm here)! Let's go! --Nick ^talk 22:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

By placing the template on this page I am fulfilling what was discussed and agreed at Talk:Flying#Organizing flying-related articles. Even though the discussion somewhat originated in this page (above), please do discuss that at Talk:Flying, if you want to, to keep the discussion in one place.

Let me also explain that although there is quite a bit of content in this article, I find very little if anything worth merging into Flying. I do believe most of it is already covered by either relevant destination articles or Wikipedia. Feel free to propose merging selected content into other articles or Wikipedia, or better yet plunge forward and do it. Otherwise, the merger would constitute merely turning this article into a redirect to Flying, as I personally believe there is really nothing to "merge" that isn't already where it should be, so even having authored a significant part of this article I won't even blink before erasing it. PrinceGloria (talk) 01:32, 30 June 2013 (UTC)Reply