Talk:Motorcycle touring

Why a separate page?

I kind of understand how there are technically different types of motorcycles for touring and sport touring, which explains (perhaps) why we have Touring motorcycle and Sport touring motorcycle to cover the mechanical differences in the bikes. But why do we have Long distance motorcycle riding along with Motorcycle touring? It looks an awful lot like they cover the same things. If Long Way Round is supposed to be a good example of both, then shouldn't they be merged?

I'm not actually proposing a merge right now but I'm unclear what the distinct point of this page is. What makes motorcycle touring different than long distance motorcycling? How does this article relate to Category:Long distance motorcycle riding and all the articles in that category? Is Long distance motorcycle riding still the main article for the category? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 04:26, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Motorcycle touring may not really be Long distance motorcycle riding, that seems to be competition according to the Wikipedia page, Motorcycle touring is more of a easy going tourism sport, known also as Mototurismo, not really a race but just touring —Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 05:24, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

...conquering the world on a motorcycle maybe —Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 05:42, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand. Do you have sources that define what you're trying to say here? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 14:25, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Lets say its the counterpart of Bicycle touring, i think that taking a trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in 30 some days or 6 months is definitely Motorcycle touring, and the term Long distance motorcycle riding may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Long distance motorcycle riding has a name and its called “Motorcycle touring“”, I suggest changing the name— Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 19:05, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Petition for Name Change/Merge

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was No consensus

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Long distance motorcycle riding → Motorcycle touring

Google hits for:

• Long distance motorcycle riding: About 1,670,000 results (0.12 seconds)
• Motorcycle touring: About 14,300,000 results (0.10 seconds)

— Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 19:05, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

• Comment Please see prior discussion of this at Talk:Long distance motorcycle riding#Proposed move and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 April 25#Category:Long-distance riding. Note that if we decide to merge Long distance motorcycle riding into Motorcycle touring then Motorcycle touring would become the main article for Category:Long distance motorcycle riding, so we'd probably want to move the category to conform. I think it would be better to answer this by off looking at the way motorcycling experts categorize this topic rather than a Google test, for reasons explained at Wikipedia:Search engine test. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:02, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

No response on Motorcycle touring/Long distance motorcycle riding, they must be all fed up because they alredy went trough this a short while ago. I'm not a motorcyclist, do cycling, but been around and met fellow motorcyclists throughout the world, the long distance kind, and all i can tell you is that long distance motorcycle riding is really touring, and it could be either a type of endurance event, a competition riding 1,000 miles in a day for example, usually but not necessarily in developed countries, or a more leisurely long distance tour anywhere in the world, and both use practically the same bikes; “Motorcycles for touring”, and both of this capabilities aforementioned should go under “Motorcycle touring” — I'll be offline for the next several weeks, i will not be able to refute (discuss) the dilema. Cheers — Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 14:10, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

There is no response there because comments belong here, as per the note I added. But we should wait at least a week for comments. There's no hurry.

This isn't really a discussion of your or my opinions about what motorcycle touring is or isn't. Since Wikipedia doesn't publish original research, it isn't relevant whether you ride motorcycles or not. All that matters is information we get from reliable sources. I tend to agree with some of what you've said, but I'm still waiting to see reliable sources to back it up. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 15:40, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose - motorcycle touring is too close to touring motorcycle - and we already have an article for that. If anything this article should be a redirect to motorcycle touring and simply merge what little content there is here into that one. Motorcycle touring and long distance motorcycle riding are different things. One can do a tour of the UK for example and only ride between few hundred to 2,000 miles - hardly long distance. --Biker Biker (talk) 19:09, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

• Just like Bicycle touring and Touring bicycle, Motorcycle touring and Touring motorcycle are both correct definitions! Long distance motorcycle riding is Motorcycle touring, Long distance motorcycle riding should be a section of Motorcycle touring. In Amazon.com you get 4,369 Results for Motorcycle touring and 20 hits for Long distance motorcycle riding, — Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 20:11, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

• Motorcycle touring and touring motorcycle are two different things, one is the usage of a motor cycle for touring the other is a motorcycle designed specifically for touring, (or the sub group of this, sport touring motorcycles), it would if one was to claim they are the same thing be acceptable to compare the usage of a motor home, (winnibago), with a Ferrari for travelling to travel a distance. Motorcycle touring is a method of travelling a distance as a tourist with the idea being taking in the scenery and country side, this is used by motorcyclists either touring their own countries or visiting others. Long distance motorcycle riding would be best as being considered alone the same lines as a sport, the objective is to travel either a preset distance over a specific time period ie 1000 miles in 24 hours or to cover as much distance as possible in a given time frame, the prize generally is bragging rights or membership to organisations such as the iron butt club, a better usage of time would be to tidy up the subcultures and get the specific sections into some semblance of order, recognition that for some motorcycling is not method of transport but and alternate lifestyle. -- JMemonic (talk) 00:18, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

• Further reflection, motorcycle touring needs tidying up it seems a little wishy washy to me, also the reference to Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman in long distance riding would be wrong from my perspective, they would belong in motorcycle touring JMemonic (talk) 13:28, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

• Support - However, I'd like to hear more about tedder's comment "the problem with "motorcycle touring" is that it refers to something different than "long-distance riding". The former is satin jackets and a trailer behind the goldwing, the latter is Iron Butt style" here. My reaction is that it's a content fork, where we introduce an artificial distinction between long distance/touring riders based, arbitrarily, on how far they go in a day and whether they camp at night or stay in hotels. I think this distinction should be described within the article rather than in two separate articles.

  Regarding Biker Biker's objection that Touring motorcycle should cover this subject, I agree as far as the current scheme. We have Sport bike but we don't have Sport biking or Sport motorcycle riding. However, maybe we should. I can see a sport biking article that covers topics like track days, canyon carving, sportbike street cruising and custom bike nights, as well as illegal street racing and stunting. Much of this activity happens on standards, cafe racers, supermotos, naked bikes and streetfighters, and even cruisers or dirt bikes. That is, you can do sport biking without necessarily having a sport bike. Expanding this further, we could have articles on motorcycle commuting, and the type of cruising and rally meetups associated with Cruiser (motorcycle)s, and an adventure touring article that exists independently of articles on adventure touring bikes, dual sports, sport tourers and similar hybrids. Adventure touring is another example of a type of riding which is practiced with multiple types of motorcycles.

  But unless we have consensus then we will be leaving Motorcycle touring where it is, and Long distance motorcycle riding as the main article for Category:Long distance motorcycle riding. Which is fine for now because we don't yet have enough content to have all the separate articles I described above. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:57, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

It seems to me that there are two distinct topics here: competitive challenges to cover a certain distance or territory in a fixed amount of time, vs. tourism that's done on motorcycles. The two topics tend to blend together at the edges where they meet (like when somebody says "I'm gonna ride my motorbike from A to B to C, and do it in X days") but there's a pretty obvious difference between participating in an Iron Butt rally and a riding a motorcycle to explore Montana. The difference isn't the kind of bike that's ridden, or what type of sleeping accommodations .... its the difference between an organized race and a personal vacation. -67.39.251.254 (talk) 20:00, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Not exactly. The IBR is organized and competitive, but the kind of long distance riding described, for example, in Melissa Pierson's The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing, is not highly organized, though clearly it is competitive and hierarchical. Part of the problem is that the bikes, accessories, books and magazines about both kinds of riding tend to be constructed in a way to convince the casual touring, or even urban commuting, rider that they are true long distance riders. If not in fact, at least in spirit. They buy a lot more stuff that way. But it could well be that the distinction is not well documented enough for Wikipedia's standards, in which case it would be a WP:Content fork. You could treat organized events separately, on the grounds that it's well sourced and verifiable, and ignore the other, more subtle distinction. I'm still on the fence. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 22:00, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Movies and external links

This content belongs either on Motorcycle or Motorcycling.

What on Earth does The Wild One have to do with touring? It's mostly a movie about prancing around drunk with a mop on your head, and being surly. The motorcycle as a fashion accessory is an intersting topic, as far as it goes, but it doesn't belong in an article about motorcycle touring.

With Easy Rider, it's at least a road movie where they ride around the country, but it is utterly, uttlerly unrealistic. The point of Easy Rider is not to tell us anything about motorcycles, it's a story about American culture. They're riding choppers with two gallon tanks -- the silliest bike possible for touring. And that's without the space taken up in gas tank by the money stash. In the book Legendary Motorcycles by Basem Wasef, it says Peter Fonda could barely stand to ride the Captain America chopper for the few minutes it took to shoot a scene -- it was excruciatingly uncomfortable. If you could cite a source saying this film somehow influenced actual touring in some way, maybe, but without that, delete it. The Ewan McGregor mention is fine, although, again, it needs to be pointed out this is not a realistic depiction of touring; it's Hollywood pretending to be a documentary. They traveled with a truck and a crew to serve their every need, after all.

The link to http://www.mtce.org/ should be deleted because it violates WP:ELNO. Links to clubs, forums and other social media don't belong unless the article is actually about the club. See also WP:RS and WP:SPS. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 15:53, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

...The article is still a Stub, Literature, cinema and television could be a section that can be put last, got the info from the Italian Wikipedia Motorcycling → (Mototurismo section), if it doesn't belong here, discard, edit as best posible — Moebiusuibeom-en (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I deleted the entire section, which was badly written with poor examples of either non-notable authors, films such as The Wild One - which isn't about touring at all, and factual inaccuracies such as the starement about mcgregor. If we are going to put stuff in then let's at least have better examples and some references. --Biker Biker (talk) 19:06, 17 May 2011 (UTC)