Wikivoyage (wikivoyage.org) is a multilingual, web-based project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide. It was originally a fork of Wikitravel that started in 2006, but was relaunched with support from Wikimedia in 2013. The name "Wikivoyage" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and voyage. It is built in collaboration by Wikivoyagers from around the globe who write without pay. Wikivoyage servers are run by the Wikimedia Foundation, so we're under the same umbrella as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other great wiki projects.
Wikivoyage is built with the spirit of sharing knowledge that makes travel so enjoyable. Whenever travellers meet each other on the road, they swap info about the places they came from and ask questions about places they're going. We want to make it easy to share that knowledge and let others share it; our copyleft license means that the facts you know can spread far and wide. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikivoyage articles and editors can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or, if they choose to, with their real identity.
To create Wikivoyage we use a tool (or a process, or a technology) called a wiki which lets any Internet reader create, update, edit, and illustrate any article on the website. We all share our pieces of knowledge, edit them, distill them, and assemble them into a pleasing and cohesive whole. The more people that use the Edit link, the better Wikivoyage becomes.
Wikivoyage is a live collaboration differing from paper-based traditional guide books in important ways. Unlike traditional guide books, Wikivoyage is continually edited and updated, where traditional travel guides revised monthly or annually, Wikivoyage's guides are edited and updated on regular basis and information changes rapidly and thus errors are usually corrected within seconds.
We've achieved some milestones, but we still have a long way to go. If you're new to Wikivoyage, feel free to plunge forward and help us!
Wikivoyagers
edit- "[Crew] wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." -- Apocryphal recruitment poster for 1914 Antarctic expedition of Endurance
Wikivoyagers are travel writers and members of a world-wide community of contributors to Wikivoyage. Wikivoyagers are not a special secret organization or a limited group. We are people just like you. Some of us are interested in travelling, some are interested in their local communities, and others are interesting in wiki-housekeeping and organisation. What all of us have in common is that we want to share what we know with travellers everywhere. You can become a Wikivoyager right now! We need your help to make this project a success. We have a long way to go -- and anything you can do to contribute gets us that much closer.
Why Wikivoyage
editAt some point you may ask yourself: "Why edit and use Wikivoyage when there are already well-developed travel guides such as Lonely Planet?". Here are some good reasons.
- The very great thing about Wikivoyage is that it is open content, released under Creative Commons license. Unlike traditional guide books, where everything is copyrighted. Knowing this encourages people to contribute: they know it's a public project that everyone can use.
- While traditional travel guides might be revised monthly or annually, Wikivoyage's guides are edited and updated on regular basis and information changes rapidly.
- Errors to Wikivoyage guides are usually corrected within seconds, rather than within months or years as it would be for a printed travel guide. If someone sees something wrong within an article or if a restaurant or hotel shuts down, they can amend the page themselves. Compare that to the long, arduous and tedious process that it requires to report and fix a problem in a printed travel guide.
- Unlike traditional guides, where one needs to be an experienced writer, Wikivoyage has no qualification requirements. Even if you're not the best at writing, you're most welcome here. In addition, there are no assignments, meaning that anyone can find an article on a part of the world that interests them and edit it immediately.
- Wikivoyage guides are very easy to edit. Anyone can click the "edit" button and get to work. Obtaining formal peer review for edits is not necessary at all, since review is a communal function here and everyone who reads an article and corrects it is a reviewer. Essentially, Wikivoyage is self-correcting: over time, articles improve from a multitude of contributions. There is an entire infrastructure for people seeking comments, or other opinions on editorial matters. We prefer (in most cases) that people just go in and make changes they deem necessary; the community is by and large quick to respond to dubious edits (if any) and either revert or question them. This is very efficient; our efforts seem more constructive than those in traditional guide books.
- Unlike Wikipedians, we're not bound to provide sources of anything we write. We're allowed to freely express a destination but in fair manner.
- And last but not least, Wikivoyage is part of a great organisation supporting free knowledge for everyone, the Wikimedia Foundation—a sister project of the world-renowned Wikipedia.
See also
edit- Goals and non-goals – what the Wikivoyage community is trying to do (and not trying to do)
- Help – the entry to our documentation
- Namespace index – an index of all the pages in the "Wikivoyage:" namespace
- Press coverage – what the news media have said about Wikivoyage
- Technical details – for the geeks in the audience, a description of the software behind Wikivoyage
- Terms of use – using the Wikivoyage service
- Migration to Wikimedia
- List of related projects
- Wikivoyage and Wikitravel