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WikiVoyage launchs as a new travel guide

Internet Marketing

Rucksack Brian started this discussion 11 years 11 months ago

The Wikimedia Foundation is set to take their travel site, WikiVoyage, out of beta testing tomorrow.

Wikipedia Takes On Travel Industry With WikiVoyage

On Jan. 15, the Wikimedia Foundation is taking its travel wiki, Wikivoyage, out of beta, reports travel site Skift. The wiki is meant to be read online, on a smartphone, or printed out to take with you on your travels. You can even create a book with pages from Wikivoyage to build your own physical travel guide.

More here: WikiVoyages Might Be Your New Destination Guidebook

The main page acts like a guidebook and features links to articles titled, "Destination of the month," "Off the beaten path," and "Featured travel topic." Each section is clickable. There is also a discover section, which links to its own page. Here you can read about "strange but true trivia about destinations around the world."

But wait. Isn’t this WikiTravel?

No. WikiTravel is a commercial site owned by Internet Brands, Inc. WikiVoyage is a non-commercial site owned by The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia). From the Skift article:

Wikipedia’s travel site’s official launch coming soon; what to expect and not expect

The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of Wikipedia, agreed to host and support the new global travel wiki, despite opposition, including a lawsuit against volunteers, from Internet Brands, which owns rival Wikitravel. We’ve covered all of this in gory detail in past.

That said, most of WikiTravel’s editors left the site to go work on the WikiVoyage project. It may be for this reason that so much of the content is identical on both sites.

WikiVoyage put together a list of goals and non-goals for the site.

What they want:

To provide reviews and itinerary suggestions for specific destinations.
To provide a resource for travelers regarding "lodging, transportation, food, nightlife, and other necessities."
To provide personalized travel guides that can be printed out and used on the road.

What they don’t want:

To create a “travel essay anthology” like a travel magazine.
To create an advertising brochure for travel service providers.
To become a travel chat board.
To produce a Yellow Pages style list of all businesses in a destination.
To run a travel agency.
To be merely a travel guide supplement (they want to completely replace your old travel guide).

Some of their non-goals might be tough. It’s hard enough to monitor an encyclopedia’s content as editors battle over whose version of history is more correct. It’s going to be even more difficult to keep travel service providers whose livelihoods hang on the line from spamming their city pages and deleting their competitors’ information. The project may be non-commercial for the WikiVoyage team, but it could certainly be commercially influential for hostels, hotels, restaurants, and anyone else mentioned in a travel guide.

Given Wikipedia’s heavy weight in Google searches, it’s likely that we’ll see WikiVoyage info in travel search results. Now would be a good time to check it out and make sure that your city info is correct and compelling and that your hostel is listed in the accommodation section. Try not to be too spammy, OK?

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Josh Hostels

11 years

I just checked the pages for San Francisco and Berkeley, and it looks like there is a lot of content.

Since most content on the Wikipedia websites is under Creative Commons license, hostels could even reuse that information to create printed travel information or maps. All you have to do is give credit under the terms of the license and also release your changes under the same license...

I wouldn't use the content on a website though, because Google doesn't like duplicated content.

There is also a great app for saving webpages for offline reading called Pocket. You can install Pocket's browser extension in Firefox or Chrome and then click the button when you want to save a webpage. The webpage then automatically appears on your smart phone for off-line reading. I think that Wikivoyage + Pocket would be a great combination for travelers.

Here's how Pocket formats Wikivoyage information for viewing offline on a phone:

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