Add some Wiki to your travel guide

The Wikimedia Foundation have built a reputation over the last twelve years as being an excellent interactive reference for everything from Civil War battles to reality TV shows. The whole idea of Wiki being to allow everybody and everybody to input information into the system. Every year of their existence the Foundation have released a new project and Wikivoyage becomes the 12th official Wikimedia project. It's a free, worldwide, online travel guide and, like Wikipedia and its sister projects, Wikivoyage is free to edit, free of ads and is built collaboratively by volunteers from around the globe. Regular FeedMyApp readers will be well aware of our love of all things travel and we have a number of favorite travel apps that sit nicely alongside obvious ones like Tripadviser, Triposo and TripIt. Some of our favorites of recent times are the excellent RoadTrippers and Go Pro Traveling. There's a huge global demand for travel information but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation was quoted as saying that "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 has been in Beta. 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. "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." Wikivoyage is currently available in nine languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish and there are already approximately 50,000 articles up and running. These are edited and improved by a core group of approximately 200 volunteer editors. Despite the naysayers, Wikipedia and all of its derivatives, have become the benchmark for quick research on the net whether we like it or not. While we are aware of the possible incorrect entries at times we are generally well prepared to put up with the odd blemish for the solid information and links that the sites' provide. If it goes to plan, Wikivoyage will become the biggest travel resource in the world and will give you info on pretty well any place in the world. Whether you want to take highway 60B to Louisville (and we all know how confusing the roads are in Kentucky) or want some information on salmon fishing in the Yemen (for obvious reasons, ) Wikivoyage will be your first port of call.

via Jonathan's starred items in Google Reader http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/feedmyapp/~3/Uk2HS3eA-jI/