WikiTravel

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http://www.wikitravel.org/

: Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide.

It was started in July 2003 by EvanProdromou and MicheleAnnJenkins??. The project has about 200 registered users, with, of course, much fewer members actually contributing on a regular basis. They use the CreativeCommons by-sa license, a CopyLeft license, to create an OpenContent travel guide. (Really, it's a set of guides.) The site runs the MediaWiki software created for/by WikiPedia.

Some ways that Wikitravel is interesting:

Because travellers -- the intended audience for the travel guides -- aren't always in front of a computer (almost by definition), there's a big emphasis on creating content for reuse in other formats, especially print. The wiki is a collaboration tool for creating content, and not an end in itself.
There's some pretty rigid formatting rules in the WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Manual_of_style for creating guides. Each guide follows a template (WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Article_templates) with sections tailored to the type of subject for the article. For example, country guides have a section for currency and language, city guides have a section for hotels and restaurants. There's an attempt to achieve some uniformity to make the guides more useful for travellers.
There are phrasebooks (WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Phrasebook_Expedition) for a number of languages, and more on the way.
There's a very coarse granularity to pages. There's not a single page for every restaurant, bar, hotel, attraction, etc. in the world. Instead, pages usually stop subdividing at the city level or, for huge cities, at the district level. Again, it's a print issue: the goal is to make it easy for Web users to print out a whole guide, stick it in their backpack, and take it with them to their destination -- having 200 pages for one destination would make this kinda impossible. OpenGuides, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach of total documentation.
Because it had the model of WikiPedia before it, the site went very quickly to a manual-of-style-these-are-our-policies format. Free-form addition to Wikitravel is encouraged (WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Plunge_forward) but will usually be converted to the rigid site templates soon after addition.

Some interesting pages on Wikitravel:

WikiTravel:Wikitravel:About
WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Goals_and_non-goals -- What they're trying to do (and not to do)
WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn't_GFDL -- Why the FreeDocumentationLicense doesn't meet their goals

TourBus data:

name: WikiTravel tour bus stop URL: http://wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:TourBusStop host and e-mail: EvanProdromou <evan@wikitravel.org> language: English and Other Languages (Français, Română, Deutsch, Svenska 1.11.2004) mission: Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. wiki-software (clone) used: MediaWiki geographical location: Montreal, QC, Canada neighbourhood: WikiPedia (mother), WikiBooks (stepsister), WorldSixtySix (separated at birth) date of birth: July 24, 2003 pages/homepages: 1764 / 582 open or closed: open tour connections / current: none tour connections / wanted: GRAND-WIKI-COMMUNITY-TOUR, REFERENCE-WIKI-TOUR date of last update (this template): May 19, 2004

Evan, I very happy to see your wiki for I think it is a natural wiki application. Though I hope - but this has nothing to do with the tour bus - that you don't drown the community aspects in encyclopedic information. The easiest would be to join the WIKIPEDIA tour which is not directly organized though connected to the TourBus. If your relations are good, this shouldn't be a problem, you should talk to StephenGilbert, I think. You would also fit near OpenGuideToLondon, later forming the kernel of something like a "travel and tourism wiki tour". Such a tour could then be connected to the GWCT backbone by its strongest node. This is a bit in the future. What do you think? Do you want to join route #6? -- HelmutLeitner

: Yes, I think we could be part of some other tours as they arise; maybe a MediaWiki tour, or a ReferenceWiki?? tour. But #6 should probably be OK for now. As for encyclopedic-versus-community stuff, it might be good to see our WikiTravel:Wikitravel:Goals_and_non-goals. We're not a chat board or a travel essay repository; we're trying to build a reference work using a BlackBoardModel. Community, in my mind, is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. If you're talking about encyclopedic content, no, we don't intend to have that. WikiPedia does a fine job, and we don't need to refill that spot. --EvanProdromou

Evan, I'll add you to TOURISM-TRAVEL-COMMUNITY-TOUR if you're OK with that. -- EarleMartin

I see no problem with that. --EvanProdromou

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