About us

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This article describes our project.

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What is Wikivoyage?

Two things: On the one hand, there is the project Wikivoyage, on the other hand, there is the registered association Wikivoyage e.V. Both will be presented below.

The project Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage, the free, up-to-date and reliable travel guide.

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.

The heart of Wikivoyage is a technology called WikiWiki which enables each internet user to create, update, change or illustrate any article' at any time. We share our fragmentary knowledge, edit it, extract the essential and built a well readable whole out of it. The more people that use the "Edit" link, the better Wikivoyage becomes.

We have assembled a few milestones, but a big part of the road lies still ahead. If you are new to Wikivoyage, don’t hesitate and help us.

“Stop,”, you might think, “I know this from somewhere. Sure, it has been copied as is from Wikitravel!” --- Right, and it’s done on purpose. The project Wikivoyage has separated from Wikitravel on December 10th 2006. We pursue the same goal and during the spin-off (“fork”), we have taken over almost the complete inventory of articles from the German version of Wikitravel.

Wikitravel and Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage and Wikitravel

Wikitravel is the free travel guide project that was founded in English in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou (Evan) and Michele Ann Jenkins (Maj). It is our origin or mother (if you like this better). Its German branch of Wikitravel has been started in September 2004 and it opened officially on October 7th 2004. Already in summer 2005, the German version of Wikitravel was the second-biggest after the English original.

Some authors noticed over time, that the management style and the organizational structure of Wikitravel didn’t match their ideas and ideals anymore, but they didn’t see any possibility to bring about changes. On 20/4/2006, Evan and Maj surprisingly announced that they had sold the rights of the internet domain wikitravel.org to the American e-commerce company Internet Brands. This was a trigger for a group consisting mainly of German-speaking Wikitravellers to search for new paths. After long discussions and planning, the decision has been taking shape to pursue the goals of Wikitravel within a new project.

So the idea of Wikivoyage was born. To ensure a non-commercial orientation the Wikivoyage association was founded.

We wanted 100% transparent organizational structures and guidelines. The main topics (which we consider to be most important) are:

  • The domain and the server are owned and run by a non-commercial association and therefore completely independent from any monetary interest.
  • All decisions on Wikivoyage will be made by consensus or -if not possible- by voting.
  • Our server and Wiki administrators are subject to directives, they are supervised by the association.
  • Everybody can become a full member of the association.
  • The contents of Wikivoyage will be provided online, as an regularly updated offline version (testing at the moment) and as database dumps (currently being tested). These features are freely available to everybody everywhere.

It has to be expected that both projects will diverge a bit concerning the main focus of their content as well. Already after a few days it became for instance clear that Wikivoyage will offer more room for travel topics and provide a language version independent Wiki for general discussion and presentation purpose (you are just reading it). The last is important to us because we want everybody to be informed the same way at the same time.

The preponderant majority of founding members of Wikivoyage did not only work for Wikitravel, they also fulfilled in considerable ways leadership and organization tasks and made big contributions to the content; in this way they contributed to the success of the German version of Wikitravel. Due to this close connection it is only logical to consider Wikitravel as the most important partner project. Wikivoyage is very interested in a constructive collaboration with Wikitravel. Many authors will regularly contribute to both projects.

Wikivoyage e.V.

We consider the form of an association as the best form for our project.

The Wikivoyage e.V. is a registered association by the German law. The recognition of common good has been applied for but it has not been granted yet. Membership of the association is accessible to everybody. The general meeting makes important decisions that concern the project as a whole. General meetings take place on the association’s wiki, where also votes are held. The association’s wiki can be read publicly, but only members of the association are allowed to write contributions to the talk pages and to vote.

Articles about the project Wikivoyage

Welcome

Goals and Principles

What we have achieved already

Services

Technical basics

Wikivoyage and the rest of the world

See also

The namespace index provides an overview on all meta articles.
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