Talk:Pribaikalsky National Park

Merge in Listvyanka and Olkhon?

Both these articles are sub-usable and form crucial parts of the park. I don't think it's crucial to have separate articles for each town – many of these tend to be quite small and don't have many points of interests. Olkhon is an exception, but that's an island, not a town and would somewhat be like having an article for the Yosemite Valley. Other thoughts? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Given that the intro of Olkhon is quite good, my thoughts:

• Keep the current banner for this article but use Olkhon's banner on Irkutsk Oblast as the Irkutsk Oblast article has a rather dreary, low-quality banner
• Mostly replace the article's current lede with Olkon's lede as that is clearly superior to the current lede
• Try and maintain a clear distinction if a listing is in Olkhon

Does that work out? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:25, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Not sure. Isn't Olkhon a destination in itself much better known than the encompassing national park? Vidimian (talk) 13:45, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm aware, but many famous sights are usually part of a greater national park or protected area. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 13:51, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Yeah but keeping up with your famous American national parks comparison, people go to Yellowstone and see Old Faithful while there. Is the same true for this area as well? E.g., do the travellers expressly head for Pribaikalsky and take in Olkhon as one of its attractions, or do they specifically head for Olkhon and maybe visit the other attractions of the park? (Are they even aware that the area they've been visiting is part of a national park?) Leaving these two destinations as is, and maintaining the park article for the rest of the area — where you'd expect to find more "national park-y" activities such as the listed hiking trail — could be an alternative. I've never been to this part of the world, so perhaps it would be good to hear ideas from someone that has. Vidimian (talk) 14:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

If anything, these all could be merged into Lake Baikal, since the lake seems to be the main destination after all, and all others are basically attractions / facilities of it. Vidimian (talk) 14:34, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

To give a non-American example, Uluru is probably the better known destination but it's covered under Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. I'll merge Listvyanka as it's an outline and a lot of the content overlaps with the park in general; I'll leave Olkhon alone for the time being, though. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:51, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, the name of Uluru is right there in the name of the park so it keeps its level of recognizability at any rate but anyway.

I support your no gaps and no overlaps in the coverage approach. I suppose you are creating these articles in preparation for an upcoming Russian national parks article. If so, completeness in that context is also good.

But I think instead of sticking hard and fast to an idea of some completeness how we think it ought to be, we need a little more flexibility in achieving our #1 goal: serving the travellers.

To me, this case is more akin to how we prefer not to base our geographical hierarchy on official borders when they don't make sense for travellers. From what I gather from this article and bits of the Google-translated official website, some officials (probably in far-away Moscow) decided to declare a strip of land along part (but for some reason not all) of the rim of Lake Baikal a national park. Cool. But that decision has little if any impact on the traveller's experience in the area: there is an entry permit requirement on paper but no one checks for it (yet?), there is no park gate whatsoever to speak of, and even the measures taken for natural preservation are relaxed (e.g. you can collect wild plants as you like within reason). On the other hand, with or without a national park someone declared by adding a few more lines on a map somewhere, Listvyanka (and Olkhon) are there as actual realities that you can literally touch, with their ferry ports, etc. What the officials call a national park may very likely be just natural areas in the outskirts of Listvyanka to the travellers to the area (like I said, I've never been there, so these lines are kind of speculation but likely to be true).

The national park, save for two dots constituting its major destination (i.e., Olkhon) and major service town (i.e., Listvyanka) parts, could be covered at Lake Baikal in a couple of paragraphs just as well. Then if need be, it could be listed in an index-type article as [[Lake Baikal#subsection as necessary|Pribaikalsky National Park]]. By the way, currently readers who happened to click Listvyanka are totally out in cold on why they end up in this article.

So I want to express (again) my opposition to merging the non-park articles into this one that is even more barebones without them (they being outlines was a main argument for the merge, right?), is named after an entity with a much lesser impact on travel practicalities, and is therefore much less relevant for the travellers to the area looking for transportation, accommodation, etc options (if I'm not mistaken, even the official website for the national park doesn't list accommodation within Listvyanka). At least until someone comes by and says, "yes, I've been to Pribaikalsky, and couldn't care less about what Listvyanka is". Vidimian (talk) 15:56, 4 September 2022 (UTC)