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Wikimedia Foundation Launches Wikivoyage
jones_supa writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has marked its 12th anniversary by launching a Creative-Commons-licensed travel guide called Wikivoyage. Like other Wikimedia projects, Wikivoyage contains material written collaboratively by volunteers. The site has launched under the aegis of Wikimedia with around 50,000 articles and approximately 200 volunteer editors. Wikivoyage started in 2006 as a travel guide in German and Italian, backed by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association. The transition to a Wikimedia project was initiated by contributors and the Association, and content is currently offered in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The purpose of the Wikivoyage is to promote education and knowledge of all countries and regions in the world, as well as understanding among nations. There's a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That's about to change."
Mostly harmless.
Wikivoyage is largely a fork of Wikitravel, which has been around for years, but is under the control of a private business.
Your tourist site with ancient historical monuments is non-notable and the article has been deleted.
See our top article:Twilight Land
My little Linux and tech blog
Did you actually look at the site? Almost all the content was copied and pasted straight from Wikitravel. Maybe over time it will become another option, but for now the differences are very minor.
When this story broke a couple days ago the big question was: WHY did they create this site? There's already another perfectly good travel wiki. What's the motivation for creating a second one that has the same content? Why is this news? And why do all the articles about Wikivoyage neglect to mention Wikitravel?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Answer.
"Wikitravel is not a Wikimedia project"
http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:List_of_related_projects#Wikipedia
http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Cooperating_with_Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Wikitravel have distinct goals, and forking large amounts of content from one project to the other creates wasteful duplication, and can actually stifle the development of creative, original content. In most cases, linking from one to the other would be a better choice.
As a rule, any significant copy-pasting of Wikipedia text to Wikitravel is not permitted, while borrowing the odd single turn of phrase when your writers' brain is stalling is allowed.
Now that they've been forked, Wikitravel might as well close up shop.
All the eyeballs that ended up on their website will be landing on wikipedia instead.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's their resources, so it's theirs to decide WTF they want to do with it. But here's a thought. What the Web sorely lacks isn't another Wiki dump of specialized topics that can be found in other Wikipages, something a web robot can do. The Wikimedia foundation is in a good position, more than any other non-commercial group, to start its own search engine to rival the corporate offerings of Google and Microsoft. Besides Google, Bing and specialist search sites for products, pr0n, and pirate wares, the other search "engines" are mostly Google/Bing scrapers. Wikimedia has the chance to change that, with its already extensive catalog of human verified links, aka citations required.
I'm not sure if your (good) questions are legitimate and about the site or rhetorical and about the quality of reportage. If it's the former, then:
WHY did they create this site?
They didn't. It was forked from Wikitravel several years ago.
What's the motivation for creating a second one that has the same content?
Free culture. This site is run on a non-profit basis. At the risk of sounding pedantic, it's worth it to have free alternatives. This is like saying, "We already have a newspaper, so why have alternative weeklies?"
And why do all the articles about Wikivoyage neglect to mention Wikitravel?
That's maybe your best question and providing context to these stories will help to clarify *why* this is news at all. The Wikimedia Foundation probably doesn't mention them in their press because of litigious threats and the fact that Wikivoyage has (and has had) its own identity, but news outlets should do their research and post background information making your questions redundant rather than simply parroting press releases.
As people before have noted Wikivoyage is a fork of the Wikitravel, and I thing this is a great thing for Internet freedom and collaborative work. For all the critcism Wikipedia has had, there is the goal to make knowledge free. Whilst Internet Brands abused the old wikitravel website, hopefully we can get a reformed great collaborative travel guide, and something to balance Tripadvisor
They have a mobile version of the web site. But I sincerely hope they make it possible to download offline packages for different areas. Pair it up with OpenStreetMap data , and you'd have a great app.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Internet Brands is something of a juggernaut. I don't know enough about them to say there's anything terribly wrong with them, but they do have some history of buying up medium size web properties, packing them with ads, and setting the cruise control.
A popular niche site that I developed (but did not own) was bought up by them. They're still, by all outward appearances, running my code from nearly a decade ago.
1. Somewhat cheaper.
2. Has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large friendly letters on the cover.
I think Wikimedia Foundation figured they could do a better job than Wikitravel? Which I suppose is in the spirit of forking. For one thing, I noticed searching for "Charleston, SC" gets me a result in the more intelligent Wikivoyage and just "There were no results matching the query." on Wikitravel. Probably for the better that Wikivoyage is taking over.
What matters most to me when traveling is avoiding the negative experiences. The internet is increasingly censorship-oriented, and quickly deletes posts that are critical of a place. I've been on other travel forums where the moderators will quickly delete my account if I say that e.g. most Mexican food in Austin, TX is bland and overspiced with raw jalapenos. I've had much better Mexican food elsewhere.
Another project Wikipedia can export its dysfunctional culture to... though to be fair, it seems German wikipedia is a lot less dysfunctional than the English.
It's time someone did to wikis what distributed revision control did to software projects. Easy to fork, easy to maintain specialized trees without duplicating effort.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
From the FAQ:
Is it true that Wikivoyage's content came from Wikitravel?
It's true, more or less: when the English language Wikivoyage was founded in 2012, we brought over the travel guides from Wikitravel. (This is both legal and moral thanks to the free licence both sites share!) In fact, Wikivoyage was founded by a very large contingent of editors and administrators from Wikitravel—the very people who originally wrote much of the content we imported.
If you're interested in the gory details of why we forked the project, we have a page that provides a recap. But we are our own project now, and we're moving forward with great new content. As time goes on, our content will resemble Wikitravel's less and less—hopefully, by being more up-to-date, better organized, and more integrated with the other wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation.
There are very good reasons for the fork (IMHO), more here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Migration/FAQ
I can't wait to visit the spot in North America where George Washington manipulated our nation's Great Stick and made a speech concerning public health.
Visiting history, one edit at a time!
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Jimmy Wales is not payed by Wikimedia Foundation.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
That's because it's a fork, because Internet Brands tried to sue the volunteers involved.
At present, Wikivoyage is running about 500 edits an hour, Wikitravel around 500 edits every 15 hours - most of those being spam and spam cleanup.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
There's quite a lot terribly wrong with them. Look up VBulletin versus Xenforo too.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think it's that WMF is in litigation with Internet Brands so is opting not to mention it.
Speaking as a volunteer myself, IB are arseholes, and fuck 'em.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Offline Wikivoyage app now available on Google Play Store.