[LINK] WikiVoyage.org

[Scott Howard]

There's a little more to it than that...

Wikivogages is actually a fork of Wikitravel.org, which although being a
Creative Commons site, is actually run by a commercial company Internet
Brands.

When the fork being discussed, Internet Brands went so far as taking legal
action against a number of the volunteers involved in the discussions.
 This action was eventually thrown out by a California court a few months
back, and now Wikivoyages (which existed for several years as a mainly
German-language travel wiki that also forked from Wikitravel many years
ago) has become a part of Wikipedia with most of the content from
Wikitravel being copied over as per the CC licencing of that site.

There's a good writeup from the NY Times on some of the history at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/business/media/once-a-profit-dream-wikitravel-now-bedevils-owner.html

  Scott


On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 5:38 AM, <stephen at melbpc.org.au> wrote:

> http://www.WikiVoyage.org
>
>
> Wikipedia, now open for travel
>
> By Oliver Moody, The Times, London, January 17th 2013.
>
>
> WIKIPEDIA has entered the crowded travel guide sector with the launch of
> their free online handbook for tourists around the world.
>
> Like their internet encyclopedia, www.Wikivoyage.org can be edited by any
> user and will be funded entirely by donations from the public.
>
> It already contains 50,000 articles, in nine languages.
>
> It allows its articles to be collected into "books" that can be printed
> as PDFs, or ordered in print as customised travel guidebooks, and also
> includes interactive maps which run on the open-source, "OpenStreetMap"
> software.
>
> The guide has long been a pet project for Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of
> the Wikimedia group, who told The Colbert Report, the US satirical TV
> program, last week that it would operate with the same not-for-profit
> ethos as its parent website, which celebrated its 12th birthday on
> Tuesday.
>
> Wikivoyage will face tough competition for travellers' attention from
> Lonely Planet, which is owned by the BBC, TripAdvisor.com, which is
> funded by advertising, and Google, which bought the Frommer's travel
> guidebook series last August for a sum thought to be about $18 million.
> It will also compete with Wikitravel, a commercial website designed in a
> very similar format and owned by Internet Brands.
>
> Andrew Warren-Payne, a research analyst with Econsultancy, said: "I can
> imagine Wikivoyage being a part of someone's vacation research, but just
> a part. It's hard to see why this would be significantly disruptive -
> TripAdvisor et al did that years ago."
>
> <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/wikipedia-now-open-for-
> travel/story-fnb64oi6-1226555380873>
> --
>
> Happy trails,
> Stephen Loosley
> Member, Victorian
> Institute of Teaching
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