Press releases/Wikimedia Foundation launches Wikivoyage

Wikimedia Foundation launches Wikivoyage, a free, worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit

Wikivoyage becomes the 12th official Wikimedia project and debuts on Wikipedia's 12th birthday

SAN FRANCISCO -- 15 January, 2013 -- The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the launch of its 12th official project: Wikivoyage (www.wikivoyage.org), a free, worldwide, online travel guide. Like Wikipedia and its sister projects, Wikivoyage is free to edit, free of ads, and built collaboratively by volunteers from around the globe.

Wikivoyage is currently available in nine languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. There are already approximately 50,000 articles, which are edited and improved by a core group of approximately 200 volunteer editors.

"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."

Wikivoyage has been an active wiki-based travel guide since 2006 in German and Italian, supported by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association. The contributors on that site and the non-profit requested to migrate their content and offered to donate their brand to the new project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The proposal was approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in October 2012. The site was moved over to the Wikimedia Foundation servers in November of 2012, where it was in Beta until today.

"The purpose of the Wikivoyage Association is to promote education and knowledge of all countries and regions in the world, as well as understanding among nations," said Stefan Fussan, Chairman of the board of the Wikivoyage Association. "We're very excited about the launch of Wikivoyage as a Wikimedia project, and about the future role of the Association in supporting the Wikivoyage community through its programs."

Wikivoyage is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which allows anyone the right to read, copy, print, save, download, modify, distribute, sell, and update its content in any way, provided the terms of the free license are respected. This includes giving proper attribution to the creators of the content and ensuring that any reuse or derivative works are also freely-licensed.

"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."

The Wikivoyage launch coincides with the 12th anniversary of the founding of Wikipedia on January 15th, 2001.


 * Official Wikivoyage logo (Note: updated for legal reasons -- new logo at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikivoyage-Logo-v3-en.svg)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikivoyage-logo-en-TTO-attempt.svg


 * Visit the Wikivoyage portal site here

http://www.wikivoyage.org/


 * About the Wikimedia Foundation

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http://wikimediafoundation.org

http://blog.wikimedia.org

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 483 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, November 2012). Available in 285 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 24 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.


 * Press contact
 * Matthew Roth
 * Global Communications Manager
 * Wikimedia Foundation
 * +1 415-839-6885 x6635
 * mroth@undefinedwikimedia.org