Coinciding with the 12th anniversary of the founding of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation is today debuting its 12th official project: Wikivoyage, a free (and ad-free) online travel guide that anyone can edit.
Skift has published an interview with Peter Fitzgerald, Wikivoyage administrator, and you should also read Tnooz’s coverage of the launch. Wikivoyage is currently available in nine languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
According to some, it’s already ‘kicking ass’, too.
Wikimedia boasts that there are already approximately 50,000 articles, which are edited and improved by a group of roughly 200 volunteer editors. Not that all of them were written last month. In fact, much of the content was migrated over from Wikitravel, which is operated by Internet Brands. That company is currently mixed up in litigation with Wikimedia over the whole thing.
For your background: Wikivoyage has been an active wiki-based travel guide since 2006 in German and Italian (when it broke off from Wikitravel), supported by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association.
According to the press release, the contributors on that site requested to migrate their content and offered to donate their brand to the new project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Said proposal was approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in October 2012, after which the site was launched in beta.
As I alluded to before, the story didn’t end there, but we suggest you read Skift’s coverage for more background.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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