Template:Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage — the free worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit — is now a collection of worldwide travel guide wikis of the  (WMF) in different languages.

This project has the long-term objective to become a complete and up-to-date worldwide travel guide, the contributions of which come from Wikivoyagers all over the globe. Wikivoyage wants to fulfil the need of travellers to obtain up-to-date information as fast as possible, something that long book-publishing cycles can't seem to meet.

Wikivoyage is – similar to the well-known Wikipedia – carried by the spirit of knowledge exchange, which is so evident for lots of travellers. Travellers meeting during a trip like to exchange information about the places they want to discover or the ones they have already visited. We want to facilitate this knowledge exchange; our Copyleft licence creates the right conditions for you to make your knowledge available to a huge community of interested people.

Wikivoyage was initially created primarilly by some German writers of the earlier Wikitravel community (itself founded July 2003 in English as a private enterprise by Evan Prodromou); after it was was acquiried by Internet Brands, Inc. – a commercial for-profit American consumer internet company. Internet Brands progressively changed the ethos of the original Wikitravel; with the inclusion of advertising, and lack of technical support and software upgrades, and ultimately the denial of database dumps. The German language Wikivoyage community forked from Wikitravel in 2006, and subsequently in 2007, the Italian Wikivoyage community had also forked from Wikitravel. The Wikivoyage Association (German: Wikivoyage e.V.), created in Germany in 2006 as a non-profit organisation, was set up to host all Wikivoyage wikis. Wikivoyage and Wikitravel wikis continued to co-exist, though the original Wikitravel project lost the core of its productive writers to the newer Wikivoyage; which meant the quality of articles began to diversify, Wikivoyage articles continued to improve professionally and factually, whilst Wikitravel articles deteriorated in quality.

Early 2012, members of the Wikivoyage Association suggested a merge with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), with discussions taking place across various platforms (Google Groups, Wikitravel, Wikivoyage and Wikimedia Meta-Wiki). The driving force was to go back to basics of collaborative wiki writing, on a non-profit educational basis, free of advertising; and to gain the extensive and long-established technical support, development and backup provided by the WMF. The goal would be to import all existing Wikivoyage language wikis, users, admins and page content onto WMF servers; and also import and merge in any useful content from Wikitravel too (which is allowed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license as used by Wikitravel, but which Wikitravel was trying to prevent, and also initiated legal action to prevent). Discussions progressed, and during October 2012, Wikivoyage migrated the content of Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, along with all contributors, to the Wikimedia Foundation. On 10 November 2012, the Wikivoyage project went live (as beta) on Wikimedia servers and its content pages display the Wikimedia Foundation logo. On 15 January 2013, the WMF announced that all existing language versions of Wikivoyage had been formally launched onto Wikimedia servers and incorporated into the WMF. However, project is still in a transition status, as most images still have to be moved from the former Wikivoyage shared repositories to Wikimedia Commons, and many links have to be fixed by the community. Text for all Wikivoyage wikis is made available under an open content free license: the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA 3.0).

The Wikivoyage Association is applying to become affiliated with Wikimedia as an independent thematic organisation.
 * Wikitravel editors abandon Internet Brands, join up with Wikipedia — Gyrovague.com
 * Challenges of Merging Communities: The Case of WikiTravel and WikiVoyage — governance across borders
 * Wikivoyage Statistics — stats.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Statistics
 * Wikivoyage Interactive Statistics — from Wikistatistics.net
 * Wikivoyage database list — at noc.Wikimedia.org
 * Wikivoyage.org site info — from Alexa.com
 * Wikivoyage on Twitter — mainly in German

As of March 2013, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki indicates that there are 11 Wikivoyage wikis of different languages.
 * All Wikivoyage wiki in these languages: (edit)

10,000+: German / Deutsch (de), English (en) 1,000+: Spanish / Español (es), French / Français (fr) Italian / Italiano (it), Dutch / Nederlands (nl), Polish / Polski (pl), Portuguese / Português (pt), Russian / Русский (ru), Swedish / Svenska (sv) 100+: Romanian / Română (ro) Chinese / 中文 (zh)