Wikitravel — a wiki travel guide, founded in 2003 by Evan Prodromou (and others), now currently owned by Internet Brands, Inc., is an ad-supported (GoogleAds) free, world-wide travel guide in many languages. They have several thousand destination guides, and other articles written and edited by 'Wikitravellers' from around the globe (some of whom just sit at home describing what's good about their surroundings). Wikitravel wikis support the OpenID universal log-in.
One of the more interesting project goals is to create destination guides which are useful as printouts, i.e., not always linking to sub-pages, but distilling the most useful information about each travel destination. For a good example see the "destination of the month" on the English Wikitravel main page.
In April 2006, Wikitravel and World66, both open content wiki travel guides, were acquired by Internet Brands, Inc., an American commercial 'for profit' company that operates a number of consumer information websites. [1] [2] [dead link] broken link as of 2010-07-09? Following this acquisition, Internet Brands have progressively alienated their core Wikitravel editors, by placing increasing amounts of adverts on wiki pages, by failing to provide technical support and software upgrades, and by denying database downloads of user-submitted content. As a result, a group of German Wikitravel editors forked their German-language Wikitravel to a new site which they called Wikivoyage; with other language versions subsequently doing the same.
As of early 2013, Wikivoyage has become an integral new project of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) – and whilst the two sites (Wikitravel and Wikivoyage) still co-exist, Wikitravel has declined in its quality of editing. As a seemingly act of desparation, on the main front page of the English Wikitravel, there is a prominent claim – "(Wikitravel) ... is the premier travel wiki on the Internet" – with a link to an off-site publication, namely Time.com. However, the content contained within that Time link is extremely stale and out-dated; it was published in 2007 under the title: "50 Best Websites 2008"! [3]
- Wikitravel Interactive Statistics, from Wikistatistics
- Wikitravel downloads — Wikiteam
- Wikitravel editors abandon Internet Brands, join up with Wikipedia — Gyrovague.com
- Challenges of Merging Communities: The Case of WikiTravel and WikiVoyage — governance across borders
- See also
- JAMGuides – a mirror of Wikitravel which uses the JAMWiki engine [4]
- Wikivoyage – a fork done by some German Wikitravellers in 2006, which aims to be a non-commercial alternative with transparent and democratic internal structures, along with their plans in 2012 to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation
- OpenSeaMap
- All Wikitravels in these languages (edit) — Wikitravel WikiNode
1,000+:
Deutsch (de),
English (en),
Español (es),
Finnish (fi),
Français (fr),
Italian (it),
Japanese (ja),
Dutch (nl),
Portuguese (pt),
Russian (ru),
Swedish (sv),
Wikitravel Shared (image depository)
Bubbling under:
Arabic (ar),
Catalan (ca),
Esperanto (eo),
Hebrew (he),
Hindi (hi),
Hungarian (hu),
Korean (ko),
Polish (pl),
Romanian (ro),
Chinese (zh)
- The red-links here need their Wikitravel URLs, the {{add}} template tag and the {{Wikitravel}} template tag added.