Good news for freedom loving travelers. The Wikitravel community and its content has been freed. The website was bought by a company for more than million dollars a couple of years ago and this year the community revolted and moved everything to the Wikimedia Foundation - a 501(c)(3) non profit that is extremely unlikely to ever sell out.
My first contributions to Wikitravel date back to August 8th, 2003 (less than 2 months after my first attributed edit on Wikipedia). I found out about hospitality exchange through Wikitravel. (I actually only signed up with hospitality club in 2004, because couchsurfing had a silly commercial vibe to it...) I had been asking for database dumps for a while, in vain, and I finally give up. I was slightly upset when Evan and Michele Ann sold out to Internet Brands in 2006 but I knew that whatever IB would do, the content would still be available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution license.
Finally the addition of advertising was a big reason to stop contributing. This was also a big reason to choose to never have advertising on hitchwiki.
I actually met Evan at the Wikimania conferences, so before I started volunteering with the non profit couchsurfing (but without 501(c)(3) status). During the couchsurfing collective in Montreal he came over and Casey, Evan and I had a chat. I should have thought harder about what could happen to the non profit couchsurfing. But let's make sure Be Welcome will be for hospitality exchange what Wikivoyage is now for travel wikis.