Wikitravel – The Free Travel Guide (originally stylised WikiTravel) — is a travel guide in a wiki format, founded in 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michelle Anne Jenkins. Now owned by Internet Brands, Inc. (IB), it is an advertising-supported (GoogleAds and Adtrue) free, world-wide travel guide in twenty-one (21) different languages. The wiki sites 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 wiki sites previously supported the OpenID universal log-in until the March 2013 software upgrade. The individual language projects do not support CentralAuth, so editors must register for each wiki site individually, as well as Wikitravel Shared, the multilingual media repository for the project.
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 (or separate article pages), but distilling the most useful information about each travel destination on to one single article. 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] Following this acquisition, Internet Brands progressively alienated their core Wikitravel editors, by placing increasing amounts of adverts on wiki pages, failing to provide technical support and software upgrades, and denying wiki database downloads of user-submitted content. As a result, a group of German Wikitravel editors forked their German- and Italian-language Wikitravel wikis to a new site which they called 'Wikivoyage'; with other Wikitravel language versions subsequently doing the same.
In early 2013, Wikivoyage became 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 desperation, on the main front page of the English Wikitravel, there was a prominent claim: "(Wikitravel) ... is the premier travel wiki on the Internet", with a link to 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"!
- Wikitravel — an early discussion from 2003-2005 at Wikimedia Meta-Wiki
- Article on Wikitravel — from MeatballWiki
- Wikitravel — at the English Wikipedia
- Wikitravel (Q2017) — at Wikimedia Wikidata
Template:Wikistats 2.2-project
- Wikitravel Interactive Statistics — from Wikistatistics.net, via Archive.org from 2016
- Wikitravel downloads[fix me] — Wikiteam
- Wikitravel editors abandon Internet Brands, join up with Wikipedia — Gyrovague.com; 12 July 2012
- Challenges of merging communities: the case of WikiTravel and WikiVoyage — governance across borders; 13 July 2012
- Wikitravel owners Internet Brands threaten legal action against a tiny community wiki — at Couchwiki
- Wikivoyage and Wikitravel — at the English Wikivoyage
- See also
- JAMGuides – a mirror of Wikitravel which uses the JAMWiki engine; after the Wikivoyage merge with the WMF, JAMGuides redirects to Wikivoyage
- Wikivoyage – the fork done by German and Italian Wikitravellers in 2006, which aimed to be a non-commercial alternative with transparent and democratic internal structures, along with their plans in 2012 to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)
- OxygenGuide – an independent offline copy of the Wikivoyage travel guide, restyled for smartphones, based on work by all volunteers of Wikivoyage and Wikitravel
- All Wikitravel wiki sites in these languages (view / edit / talk) — WikiNode (en) • WikiNode (de)
10,000+:
English (en) •
Wikitravel Shared (image depository)
1,000+:
German / Deutsch (de) •
Spanish / Español (es) •
Finnish / suomi (fi) •
French / Français (fr) •
Italian / Italiano (it) •
Japanese / 日本語 (ja) •
Korean / 한국어 (ko) •
Dutch / Nederlands (nl) •
Polish / Polskie (pl) •
Portuguese / Português (pt) •
Russian / русский (ru) •
Swedish / svenska (sv)
Bubbling under:
Arabic / عربى (ar) •
Catalan / Català (ca) •
Esperanto (eo) •
Hebrew / עִברִית (he) •
Hindi / हिंदी (hi) •
Hungarian / Magyar (hu) •
Romanian / Română (ro) •
Chinese / 中文 (zh)
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