Description German,

Polish,
Italian,
Persian,
French,
Russian,
Chinese,
Dutch,
Portuguese,
Spanish,
Hebrew,
Vietnamese,
Finnish,
Swedish,
Greek,
Ukrainian,
Romanian,
Bangla,
Esperanto,
Pashto,
Destinations Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations
and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia
and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).
Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".
Itineraries The project began when editors at the German and then Italian versions
of Wikitravel decided in September 2006 to move their editing activities and then
current content to a new site, in accordance with the site copyright license, a
procedure known as "forking". The resulting site went live as "Wikivoyage" on
December 10, 2006 and was owned and operated by a German association set up for
that purpose, Wikivoyage e.V. (which continues to be its representative
association). Content was published under the copyleft license Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike.
Phrasebooks In 2012, after a long history of problems with their existing host,
the English-language version community of Wikitravel also decided as a community to
fork their project. In a two-way move, the English Wikitravel community re-merged
with Wikivoyage under the Wikivoyage brand, and also all Wikivoyage language
versions moved their operations to be hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-
profit organization hosting several of the world's largest wiki-based communities
such as Wikipedia. Following agreements by the various communities involved and the
Wikimedia Foundation, the site was moved to the WMF servers in December 2012 and
the whole of Wikivoyage was officially re-launched as a Wikimedia project on
January 15, 2013, the day of the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia's launch.
Travel topics Using a wiki model, Wikivoyage is built through collaboration of
Wikivoyagers from around the globe. Articles can cover different levels of
geographic specificity, from continents to districts of a city. These are logically
connected in a hierarchy, by specifying that the location covered in one article
"is within" the larger location described by another. The project also includes
articles on travel-related topics, phrasebooks for travelers, and suggested
itineraries.
Organization and operation Wikivoyage is a multilingual project available in 23
languages, with each language-specific project developed independently. While now a
Wikimedia project, it was begun independently. Wikivoyage content is broadly
categorized as: destinations, itineraries, phrasebooks, and travel topics.
Mode of operation Geographical units within the geographical hierarchy may be
described in articles, based on the criterion, "can you sleep there?"
Copyright The hierarchy includes:
Information structure Attractions such as hotels, restaurants, bars, stores,
nightclubs, tour operators, museums, statues or other works of art, city parks,
town squares or streets, festivals or events, transport systems or stations, bodies
of water, and uninhabited islands are listed in the article for the place within
which they are located.
Languages An itinerary describes a group of destinations according to a temporal
division rather than a spatial one and will list destinations and attractions to
visit during a given amount of time, with recommended durations of stay and routes
to follow. Itineraries may cross geographical regions, but usually have a well-
defined path.
Statistics A phrasebook includes:
Distribution Travel topics are articles that deal with a specific topic of
interest to travelers that is too large or detailed to go in a specific travel
guide destination page; travel tips that are so general that they apply to nearly
all destinations and do not need to be in each specific travel guide; major events
that occur in different places; and specialist travel information, such as regional
guides to scuba-diving sites.
History Wikivoyage uses the free MediaWiki software (developed for Wikipedia) to
allow internet-based editing without requiring registration. Quality assurance
occurs in the same way as on Wikipedia: through reciprocal control by editors. The
use of the same software was intended to facilitate familiarization with
Wikivoyage.
Launch Wikivoyage licenses its content to the public under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license, but not the GNU Free Documentation License. This is
intended to facilitate the production of printed guides from a legal point of view.
Media files are intended to be published either in the public domain or licensed
under multiple licenses (GNU, Creative Commons).
Additional languages and migration The information is built up in a more
structured way than usual for encyclopaedias. Articles belonging to a topic are
grouped by the categories known from the Mediawiki software as well as through the
so-called bread crumb trails which show the geographical connection between the
articles.
Growth trends in number of articles and active users In the German-language
version, different name spaces are used to separate different topics. The main name
space contains travel destinations within their geographical hierarchy. Two other
important name spaces are reserved for travel topics and travel news, with the
intent to allow a tight interconnection between travel destinations and topics.
Historical Alexa rank vs. that of Wikitravel The content design is decided by
consensus of the community of authors.
See also At the time of transfer to WMF, Wikivoyage was available in German,
Italian, English, French, Dutch, Russian, and Swedish language versions. The
Russian-language project is named Викигид (which translates roughly as "wiki
guide"). In January 2013, Portuguese and Spanish versions were created, followed in
March by Polish and Romanian, in April by Hebrew and Ukrainian, in May by Greek,
and the Vietnamese in August. The Chinese version started in January 2014 and
Persian in October. The Finnish version launched in November 2016, Hindi in
September 2017 and Bengali and Pashto in June 2018. A Japanese version began in
August 2020.
References As of December 2020, there are Wikivoyage sites for 23 languages of
which 23 are active and 0 are closed. The active sites have 120,246 articles. There
are 2,508,458 registered users of which 1,210 were recently active.
External links