Guaka! - wikitravel

wikis

Guaka — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:18:31 +0000

wiki.yt is my new vehicle for all my MediaWiki related activity. See also more about my wiki activity there.

Wikitravel was freed and everyone moved on to Wikivoyage

Guaka — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:12:07 +0000

tag:

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.

guaka: #wikitravel #wikivoyage #profit #nonprofit http://ur1.ca/am6zs #wiki #traveling

Guaka — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:07:49 +0000

tag:

guaka: #wikitravel #wikivoyage #profit #nonprofit http://ur1.ca/am6zs #wiki #traveling

guaka: #Wikitravel considers linking from my user page there to http://ur1.ca/am6kh "harmful" and it is thus not allowed

Guaka — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:41:27 +0000

Wikivoyage

Guaka — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:55:11 +0000

tag:

I have been a contributor on Wikitravel for a long time now. I was not too worried when Wikitravel was bought by Internet Brands (which has already shown interest in buying CouchSurfing). But I have been annoyed by the lack of database dumps at Wikitravel for a long time now. So I was very happy to stumble upon an alternative: Wikivoyage. The project was set up by disgruntled admins of the German version of Wikitravel. I haven't gone into the gory details, but it could be more than the lack of database dumps. My wild guess is that there was a cultural misunderstanding between Wikitravel, that was founded with an SF Bay Area Burning Man culture, and the Europeans dealing with policies created by them. It's funny to see some more parallels here with CouchSurfing but ortunately Wikitravel was already a lot more open (using Creative Commons and mostly open means of communication) than CS so forking was quite easy. Now let's see if a little bit more pressure will induce Internet Brands to make the dumps available.