[Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[James Heilman]

The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in joining a WMF run
"Wiki Travel Guide". A proposal for creating such a project has been
outlined here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide and would
develop from the content currently at wikitravel.org

*Wikitravel is currently in 20 languages and in English contains more than
25,000 articles. The content is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.  Site
readership statistics are not released by Internet Brands, but for travel
information the site is consistently highly ranked.  It is the largest and
most popular freely-licensed, user-contributed travel guide collection.
Alexa.com ranks it as the 2637 most popular site on the web with a global
reach of 0.0602%. The interwiki links between Wikipedia and Wikitravel
highlight the close historic cooperation between the editors of both sites,
where users adding travelogue style content to Wikipedia have often been
directed to add the content to Wikitravel.

Benefits for the WMF:
1) Increase the scope of content offered by the WMF
2) Increase the number of Wikimedians
3) Increase the volume of content for fundraising
4) Provide a separate repository for important travel and tourism
information, some of which currently is contained within Wikipedia articles.

Benefits for travel content:
1) Reputation of the WMF would increase the editor base.
2) Remove the conflicts between the commercial decisions of the current
hosting provider and the community.
3) Would increase the reliability of the site, which is currently running
old MediaWiki versions, on poorly performing infrastructure.

Benefits for both:
1) Would make it easier for the two sites to direct editors to the better
site for the content in question, leading to better focus within articles.
2) Combining the image repositories at Wikimedia Commons would result in
greater and easier image availability for both Wikipedia and the travel
site, and an increase in both contributors and images.*

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian