[Wikimedia-l] Travel Project - Next Steps

[Erik Moeller]

Hello all,

As recently announced [1], WMF will move forward in creating a
Wikimedia travel project based on community request and support.

We’re currently in discussions with the Wikivoyage community, who’ve
expressed interest in joining Wikimedia’s project family as part of
this launch. We’re coordinating certain practical issues, such as
content migration, account reconciliation, and attribution, with them
directly. Please note that the new project will be subject to
Wikimedia’s terms of use, privacy policy, and licensing policy. Like
with any of our projects, the bulk of content-related policies and
practices will be designed and managed by the community.

Launch discussions are continuing here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Travel_Guide

An additional open question is the project name. Wikivoyage has
offered to contribute its name.  So, we could stick with Wikivoyage,
which is already established, and has a non-profit organization
supporting it. We have also obtained a number of alternative domain
names, as have individual community members. We’ll initially straw
poll the "Wikivoyage yes/no" question as this seems like the simplest
path forward if there’s wide agreement in favor; more on that in a
separate note by Philippe.

For the Wikivoyage content import and project launch, our current plan
is to do an in-person sprint in San Francisco in late October to
support the project launch (we may defer this based on everyone’s
availability). There’s also plenty of work ahead of time. If you’d
like to be part of the technical launch team, please sign up here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide/Technical_coordination

We’ll also continue to monitor comments on
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Travel_Guide and will engage
there as the process continues.

For the time being, I am coordinating the overall project launch,
supported by Philippe. Questions/comments welcome.

I look forward to getting this project off the ground. :-) As we’ve
said before, we don’t view ourselves in competition with other
providers of free knowledge, nor do we encourage anybody to leave any
other site. The beautiful thing about free culture is that anyone who
wishes to contribute to the corpus of freely available information
about travel (or indeed any subject) can do so anywhere, and both
information and people can flow freely between projects.

All best,
Erik

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-September/121897.html

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate