[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] [PRESS RELEASE] Wikimedia Foundation announces the official launch of the Wikivoyage online travel guide

[Matthew Roth]

(This press release can also be found online here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/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:
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
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
Tel. +1 415-839-6885 x6635
mroth at wikimedia.org


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