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The Travel Guide is a proposal to create a world travel guide, which anyone can edit, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and free of charge to the public. It will differ from other travel guide wikis in that it will not host advertising and will be run by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization, for the Wikimedia movement. Wikitravel (WT) is the current front-runner of travel wikis, but suffers from monetization in the form of advertising and other proposed commercial content that may alienate potential contributors, the failure to provide database dumps, and a lack of technical support/feature development. Wikivoyage (WV) split off from Wikitravel in 2006, starting their own non-commercial association, due to the commercial concerns and have continued to develop the German and Italian language content since.

A majority (at least 38[unclear][1] of out 48)[1] of English WikiTravel administrators are interested in joining a Wikimedia wiki website, with support from all admins and contributors who have responded. Discussion took place on google groups, and each admin was individually notified of the proposal.

Internet Brands (IB), the company that hosts wikitravel.org, however, strongly opposes the proposal and a survey done by IB found that 86% of readers "like Wikitravel the way it is"[2]

Wikivoyage wants to merge with a Wikimedia Foundation run site, bringing their name, URL, and all admins, including the board of the association that runs the site. As well there are roughly 1500 users at WV, almost 12,000 articles in German, 2400 in Italian and 29,000 files. This proposal has the potential to reunite these two communities of editors.

WT and WV both have their policies and guidelines. It is proposed that both of these will form the basis of the project and that they will continue to be developed based on community consensus as usual.

NYCwiki, a wiki about the neighborhoods of New York City, is on hiatus for transition to such a site, bringing their detailed content. This content is directed towards locals traveling within NYC, which is also useful for people traveling from other places. We would be open to all city wikis.

Proposers

  • A large group of editors at Wikitravel and some from Wikipedia. The Wikitravel community is very interested in joining the Wikimedia movement and are spearheading this proposal.
  • The board of directors of Wikivoyage have agreed to a merger.

Educational in nature

Most would accept that travel is educational in nature. Resources that help with travel would thus be educational resources and within the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission to "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally"[3].

Site names

  • Wikivoyage will be the name used by the German and Italian editions.
  • The English version is still undecided regarding the final name they wish to use and discussions are ongoing. In the meantime the plan is to use travel.wikimedia.org.

A few domain names have been discussed, but the discussion should remain behind closed doors until the domain names in question have been purchased.

Initial domain names are www.wikivoyage.org and travel.wikimedia.org

Purchased: rugendo.org, voyagewiki.com, voyagewiki.org, wikicompass.org, wikidestination.org, wikguide.org, wikiguidebook.org, wikiholiday.org, wikilocale.org, wikipath.org, wikivisit.org, wikivista.org

Previous proposals for a Wikimedia project

Similar sites (non-Wikimedia)

  • Wikitravel (WT) is in 20 languages and the English version contains more than 25,000 destinations. The content is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Site readership statistics are not released by Internet Brands, but it is consistently ranked highly among travel sites. It is the largest and most popular freely-licensed, user-contributed travel guide collection. Alexa.com ranks it as the 2637th most popular site on the web with a global reach of 0.0602%. The interwiki links between Wikipedia and Wikitravel highlight the close historic cooperation between the editors of both sites, where users adding travelogue style content to Wikipedia have often been directed to add the content to Wikitravel.
  • www.wikivoyage.org. A group of primarily German editors and administrators of WT forked in 2006 after the WT site was sold into commercial hands. They founded a non-commercial association and an active community, the content is non-commercial and fully licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Currently Wikivoyage has about 12,000 guides in German and is the largest travel guide wiki in the German language area. Offspring are an Italian language version with 2,500 guides, a Commons-like file-repository with about 28,000 files and a location database (comparable to the principles of WikiData).
  • www.world66.com has 20,000 destinations, almost 80,000 travel guides, licensed under CC-BY-SA 1.0 Generic.
  • Wikia Travel has 2,386 pages, relatively few edits (32,280), 3 administrators. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported).
  • (Chinese) 背包攻略 has 900 content pages, 52,883 edits, 1,478 files, 6 sysops, CC-by-sa 2.5 Taiwan, as of 2012-07-20T20:45:06+00:00.

Discussion

Benefits

For the Wikimedia movement

  1. Increase the scope of content offered by the Wikimedia movement
  2. Increase the number of Wikimedians
  3. Increase the volume of content for fundraising
  4. Provide a separate repository for important travel and tourism information, some of which currently is contained within Wikipedia articles.

For travel content

  1. Reputation of the Wikimedia movement might increase the editor base.
  2. Remove the conflicts between the commercial decisions of the current WT hosting provider and the community.
  3. Would increase the reliability of the site, as WT is currently running old MediaWiki versions, on poorly performing infrastructure.
  4. Allow for database dumps to be released to re-users of Wikitravel content, to encourage creative spin-offs in the form of phone apps, mash ups, etc.

For both

  1. Would make it easier for Wikipedia and the travel site to direct editors to the better site for the content in question, leading to better focus within articles.
  2. Combining the image repositories at Wikimedia Commons would result in greater and easier image availability for both Wikipedia and the travel site, and an increase in both contributors and images.

Costs

The costs of starting up and running this new site have been deemed to be low by w:en:Erik Möller of the WMF. Some grants to cover part of the start up costs have also been obtained.

Current content policies

Wikitravel

The editors of Wikitravel have developed a number of policies over the last 9 years. They cover the same basic principles as Wikipedia's Five Pillars. It is proposed that Wikitravel's policies form the initial guidance for a new site, but they will be open to further development based on community consensus, as on all Wikimedia sites.

Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage is based on similar policies, but streamlined a little.

More policies exist concerning decision making (community decides), deletion, administration and more. The consensus of the community and the freedom of content are the main principles.



People interested

See also: Requests for comment/Travel Guide


Extended content
  1. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (Wikimedia Canada board member, admin of English Wikipedia and reader of Wikitravel)
  2. J1729 (talk) (Wikitravel administrator)
  3. Wrh2 (talk) (Wikitravel administrator/bureaucrat)
  4. Cacahuate (talk) (Wikitravel administrator/bureaucrat)
  5. Rein N. (talk) (Wikitravel administrator/bureaucrat)
  6. Ravikiran Rao (talk) (Wikitravel administrator Lapsed Wikipedian)
  7. DenisYurkin (talk) (Wikitravel administrator, en: and ru: Wikipedia and Wiktionary contributor)
  8. Texugo (Wikitravel administrator)
  9. Gentenaar (talk)
  10. Peter Talk (Wikitravel administrator/bureaucrat)
  11. Evan Prodromou (Wikitravel founder, Wikitravel Press founder, Wikitravel admin, MediaWiki developer)
  12. RegentsPark (Admin on english wikipedia. and a no longer contributing admin on wikitravel)
  13. Benoit Rochon (talk) (Wikimedia Canada board member and long term reader of Wikitravel)
  14. joelf (Wikitravel administrator)
  15. RolandUnger (talk) (Wikivoyage admin)
  16. Stefan Fussan (talk) (Chairman of the board of Wikivoyage association, Wikivoyage admininstrator/bureaucrat, Wikitravel:de administrator)
  17. Nearly Headless Nick (enwp admin, Wikimedia India board member, occasional wikitravel contributor)
  18. Stefan Ertmann - Wikitravel administrator
  19. Jpatokal (Wikitravel bureaucrat for en:, fi:, and administrator for ja:, zh:)
  20. Michele Ann Jenkins (Wikitravel co-founder, Wikitravel Press co-founder, Wikitravel admin)
  21. John Vandenberg (talk) (Wikimedia Australia board member, admin of English Wikipedia and English Wikisource)
  22. Shaun (Wikitravel administrator)
  23. Gorilla Jones (Wikitravel administrator)
  24. Jamesofur (talk)
  25. --Philippe (talk) 04:29, 11 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  26. Aschmidt (talk) 08:11, 11 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  27. notafish }<';> 08:31, 11 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  28. Comment: nice idea. a quote from the mailing list: 'travel is an avenue of education, possibly a more important one than an encyclopedia (since visual impressions are the strongest), and everything which promotes educational travel thus falls within the scope of the movement.' 140.247.240.60
  29. WereSpielChequers (talk) wikimedian, mainly active on Commons and EN wiki, has done a lot of travelling.
  30. Waldir (talk) 12:04, 13 April 2012 (UTC) Editor in several Wikimedia projects, admin on en.wp & commons, WikiTravel reader.[reply]
  31. Ymblanter, en.wp and Commons editor.
  32. David Le Brun (talk) 08:11, 16 April 2012 (UTC) (admin on french Wikitravel)[reply]
  33. Bgabel (Wikivoyage admin) -- Bgabel (talk) 21:05, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  34. Nicolas1981 (talk) (WP&WT editor, running a few WikiProjects on WP, maintainer of OxygenGuide)
  35. Inas66 (talk) 06:27, 17 April 2012 (UTC) (Wikitravel administrator/contributor)[reply]
  36. Manuel Schneider(bla) (+/-) absolutely! This is for the benefit of both projects. (Wikimedian, using WikiTravel regularly)
  37. Russavia (talk) 22:30, 21 April 2012 (UTC) Commons bureaucrat[reply]
  38. Denis Barthel (talk) (Wikitravel co-founder de:, Wikipedian, Wikimedian)
  39. Sven Manguard - Commons editor, willing to help with the integration of Wikitravel Shared with Wikimedia Commons
  40. Yann (talk), Commons admin, Wikitravel admin in French and English versions.
  41. The Helpful One - Wikimedian, I'm happy to help wherever help is needed, I'm an administrator of the English Wikipedia and an administrator and crat here on Meta-Wiki.
  42. Powers - Wikitravel and Commons administrator, Wikipedia editor
  43. Sky Harbor (talk) - Wikimedian (and an admin on a few projects), Wikimedia Philippines board member and contributor to Wikitravel
  44. Atsirlin – Wikitravel contributor (:en and :ru)
  45. Globe-trotter (talk) – (Wikitravel administrator)
  46. JamesA – Wikitravel and Wikipedia contributor
  47. User:Dirk Schmidt; editor on german wikipedia and author on german Wikivoyage
  48. Jensre (talk) 17:45, 11 June 2012 (UTC); member of board of Wikivoyage association[reply]
  49. Mulleflupp (talk) — WV admin and association member
  50. Der Reisende (talk) - WV Co-Founder, Admin and assoc member
  51. Guaka (talk) - Hitchwiki cofounder, former (pre IB) active contributor of Wikitravel
  52. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:32, 10 July 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia & Wikitravel contributor.[reply]
  53. Saint-Louis (talk) 13:40, 5 July 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia contributor[reply]
  54. -- ɑηsuмaη ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ — Wikimedian, English editor and an Administrator of Odia Wikipedia.
  55. Jewbask (talk) 16:07, 8 July 2012 (UTC) WMVE Board member, admin at lad.wp and contributor on es, en, pt, he, de and af wikipedias[reply]
  56. Elelicht (talk) 00:45, 9 July 2012 (UTC); member of Wikivoyage association[reply]
  57. –Juliancolton | Talk 23:42, 9 July 2012 (UTC) - long-term WT reader, admin at a whole bunch of projects over here. color:gray">Talk]] 23:42, 9 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  58. Ralgis WM-CR 21:18, 10 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  59. Ahalin (talk) 10:45, 11 July 2012 (UTC) - Wikipedia, Wikimapia, Wikimedia and Wikitravel contributor[reply]
  60. Ali Haidar Khan (Tonmoy) (talk) 17:37, 11 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  61. Elgaard (talk) 20:24, 11 July 2012 (UTC) - Wikitravel English administrator[reply]
  62. This will be a useful addition to the WMF umbrella. EngineerFromVega (talk) 07:11, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  63. Digr (Wikitravel bureaucrat for ru:). --Digr (talk) 17:52, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  64. --Diamondland (talk) 06:25, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  65. --David1010 (talk) 10:01, 19 July 2012 (UTC) Georgian Wikipedia Administrator, Commons and Wikitravel contributor[reply]
  66. FrankyLeRoutier (talk) 16:13, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  67. AHeneen (talk) - Wikitravel user of 4 years & over 3500 edits
  68. Nicolas M. Perrault (talk) Great idea!

Sundar (talk) 07:26, 5 October 2012 (UTC) Want to join![reply]

  1. Zazamental (talk) 18:35, 11 November 2012 (UTC) ([reply]

Notes

  1. ↑ Talk:Requests_for_comment/Travel_Guide#Summary lists some users who supported the proposal, mentioning emails, so that it's not clear where the supports where placed. As for the Meta-Wiki accounts voting, it's not clear whether someone verified their identity, as required on Meta-Wiki e.g. for stewards elections voters which must be clearly linked to a local wiki account.
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