Template:Wikivoyage

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Wikivoyage – the free worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit — is a collection of worldwide travel guide wiki sites in different languages, and now a major linguistic edition 'project' of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

The Wikivoyage 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 are not able 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 others during a trip like to exchange information about the places they want to discover, or the ones they have already visited. Wikivoyage wants to facilitate this knowledge exchange; their copyleft licence (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike, or CC-BY-SA) creates the right conditions for folks to make their knowledge available to a huge community of interested people.

original Wikivoyage logo, as used before its merger with the Wikimedia Foundation

and in blue

Wikivoyage was initially created primarily by some German writers of the earlier Wikitravel community (itself founded July 2003 in English as a private enterprise by Evan Prodromou and Michelle Anne Jenkins); after Wikitravel was was then subsequently acquired in 2005 for US$1.7 million by Internet Brands, Inc., a commercial 'for-profit' American consumer internet company. Following its purchase of Wikitravel, Internet Brands (IB) progressively changed the fundamental ethos of the original Wikitravel; with the inclusion of prominent in-page advertising, and lack of technical support and MediaWiki software upgrades, and ultimately the denial of database dumps.

In 2006, the German-language Wikitravel community forked their work from Wikitravel, to create a totally new wiki site called Wikivoyage. In 2007, the Italian-language Wikitravel community subsequently followed by forking to create the Italian Wikivoyage. The Wikivoyage Association (German: Wikivoyage e.V.), founded in Germany in 2006 as a non-profit organisation by Roland Unger,[1] was created with the aim of hosting all Wikivoyage wiki site language versions.

Wikivoyage and Wikitravel wiki sites continued to co-exist, though the original Wikitravel project lost the major core of its productive writers and editors to the newer Wikivoyage. This meant the quality of articles began to diversify between the two; Wikivoyage articles continued to (slowly) improve professionally and factually, whilst Wikitravel articles deteriorated in quality and accuracy, resulting in Wikitravel becoming increasingly out-dated.

the original WMF Wikivoyage logo, now superseded

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 wiki sites, 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 owners Internet Brands, Inc. 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 [adjective]) on Wikimedia servers, and its content pages displayed 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, around that time period, the project was still in a transition status, as most images had still to be moved from the former Wikivoyage Shared repositories to Wikimedia Commons, and many links had to be manually fixed by the community. Textual content for all Wikivoyage wiki sites is made available under an open content free license: the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY-SA 3.0).

The Wikivoyage Association (Wikivoyage e.V.) had applied to become affiliated with Wikimedia as an independent thematic organisation. It was approved on 3 May 2017.

• Wikivoyage-Association.org — home wiki of Wikivoyage e.V. (de / en-gb)
• www.Wikivoyage.org — Wikivoyage portal to all language versions
• Wikivoyage — Meta.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Meta-Wiki
• Wikivoyage (Q373) — www.Wikidata.org at Wikimedia Wikidata
• Wikivoyage Association (Q17229339) — www.Wikidata.org at Wikimedia Wikidata
• Wikistats v1 – site map – Wikivoyage Statistics, 31 December 2018 — published 2019-01-31 (public domain) by Erik Zachte, Stats.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Statistics
• Wikistats v1 – Wikivoyage report card: summaries for 19 languages, October 2018 — published 2019-02-01 (public domain) by Erik Zachte, Stats.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Statistics
• Wikistats v2 – All Wikivoyages – Wikimedia Statistics — monthly overviews of reading, contributing, and content; from Wikistats v2 (data available under CC0 1.0); Stats.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Statistics
• WikiStats v2.2 – List of Wikivoyages — sortable list table of Wikivoyage wiki sites from Wikistats v2.2 at WikiStats.WMCloud.org; independent MediaWiki statistics from mutante, hosted by Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS)
• Wikiscan Wikivoyage statistics — independent statistics site on Wikipedia and other wikis hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, at Wikiscan.org
• Wikivoyage Interactive Statistics — from Wikistatistics.net, via Archive.org; 2015-10-05
• List of Wikivoyages — from WikiStats by S23.org
• Wikivoyage database list — NOC.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia NOC; lists the 25 individual sites by language code
• wikivoyage-l — Wikivoyage mailing list for discussing technical and community matters by email, Lists.Wikimedia.org at Wikimedia Lists
• Wikivoyage Twitter feed — initially mainly in German, now almost exclusively in English
• Wikivoyage.org site info — from Alexa.com, April 2022, via Archive.org

See also

• JAMGuides — former earlier fork of Wikitravel which used the JAMWiki engine; after the Wikivoyage merge with the WMF, JAMGuides.com URLs redirected to Wikivoyage
• OxygenGuide — an independent offline copy of the Wikivoyage travel guide, restyled for smartphones, based on work by all volunteers of Wikivoyage and Wikitravel

References

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All Wikivoyage wiki sites in these languages ^{(view / edit / talk)}

As of July 2024, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki indicates that there are 25 Wikivoyage wikis of different languages; tabulated and sorted by creation date, and detailed statistics. It is important to note that individual language versions created before 2013 were forked from their equivalent-language Wikitravel (highlighted in bold); whereas those language versions created during or after 2013 were approved from the Wikimedia Incubator. The non-profit charitable Wikivoyage Association (f.2006) (German: Wikivoyage e.V.) wiki originally acted as a 'meta' wiki and central portal for the entire Wikivoyage project.

10,000+: English (en) (f.2012) • German / Deutsch (de) (f.2006) • Italian / Italiano (it) (f.2007) • Polish / Polski (pl) (f.2013)
1,000+: Chinese / 中文 (zh) (f.2014) • Dutch / Nederlands (nl) (f.2012) • Esperanto (eo) (f.2020) • Finnish / Suomi (fi) (f.2016) • French / Français (fr) (f.2012) • Greek / Ελληνικά (el) (f.2013) • Hebrew / עברית (he) (f.2013) • Japanese / 日本語 (ja) (f.2020) • Persian / فارسی (fa) (f.2014) • Portuguese / Português (pt) (f.2013) • Russian / Русский (ru) (f.2012) • Spanish / Español (es) (f.2013) • Swedish / Svenska (sv) (f.2012) • Ukrainian / Українська (uk) (f.2013) • Vietnamese / Tiếng Việt (vi) (f.2013)
100+: Bengali / বাংলা (bn) (f.2018) • Hindi / हिन्दी (hi) (f.2017) • Pashto / پښتو (ps) (f.2018) • Romanian / Română (ro) (f.2013) • Shan / လိၵ်ႈတႆး (shn) (f.2022) • Turkish / Türkçe (tr) (f.2021)
depreciated: Wikivoyage Shared (wts) (f.2012)
unofficial independent: Cantonese / 廣東話 (yue) (f.2013)

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To not include articles which use this template in the category: Wikivoyage and the standard skin categories, type (or copy and paste) {{Wikivoyage|cat=no}}

Related templates

• Template: Wvoyage — a template which creates an interwiki link to any article on any Wikivoyage wiki site
• Template: SeeWvoyage — a template which creates an indented 'see also' message to any article on any Wikivoyage wiki site
• Template: WikiApiary-Wikivoyage — an interwiki template linking to its respective article on WikiApiary
• Template: Wikistats v1 Summary-non-Wikipedia — a template for an 'at a glance' summary card for a Wikimedia Foundation wiki site from Wikistats v1
• Template: Wikistats v1-tables-non-Wikipedia — a template for highly detailed statistics tables for a Wikimedia Foundation wiki site from Wikistats v1
• Template: Wikistats v1-charts-non-Wikipedia — a template for graphical statistics charts on various metrics for a Wikimedia Foundation wiki site from Wikistats v1