The Wikimedia Foundation has launched Wikivoyage, which brings a Wikipedia-like element to travel. It’s a free travel guide, which is freely editable, and was built by volunteers.
Naturally, it has a very Wikipedia-like look and feel:
While it is a new project for Wikipedia, Wikivoyage has actually been around for about seven years. As the foundation explains, it has been active in German and Italian, supported by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association, but the contributors wanted to migrate the content, and offer the brand to the Wikimedia project. The site moved to Wikimedia’s servers in November. It has been in beta since then, but it’s out now.
“There’s a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That’s about to change,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikivoyage is a great, useful service for travelers, and I’m expecting that with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation and the global Wikimedia editing community, it’s going to get even bigger and better.”
“As contributors to Wikivoyage, we work hard to create high-quality content, written by travelers, for travelers, in their own language,” said Peter Fitzgerald, an administrator on Wikivoyage. “We’re very excited to be part of the Wikimedia community, and we invite travelers to join us in creating an independent, non-commercial, online travel guide for the world. We are confident that it will become the number one travel resource on the web.”
Wikivoyage is currently available in nine languages, including: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. It already contains about 50,000 articles, edited by about 200 volunteer editors.