History

History

Wikitravel was started in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins, inspired in part by Wikipedia. To allow individuals, tourism agencies, and so on to make free reprints of individual pages more easily than permitted by the GNU Free Documentation License (used by Wikipedia at that time) it used the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. Since both Wikipedia and Wikitravel are now licensed under the Attribution ShareAlike license, appropriate content can be shared between the two so long as licensing requirements are met.

Wikitravel does not have a neutral-point-of-view requirement, as it is written from the point of view of a traveler and, instead, encourages editors to "be fair".^[10]

On April 20, 2006, Wikitravel announced that it and World66 — another open-content travel guide — had been acquired by Internet Brands, a publicly traded corporation.^[11] The new owner hired Prodromou and Jenkins to continue managing Wikitravel as a consensus-based project. They explained that Internet Brands' long-term plan was for Wikitravel to continue to focus on collaborative, objective guides, while World66 would focus more on personal experiences and reviews. In response, many authors of the German language community chose to fork the German Wikitravel, which was released on December 10, 2006, as Wikivoyage. The German language Wikitravel remains active. On April 1, 2008, Internet Brands added Google advertising to Wikitravel, with an opt-out procedure for registered users.

On May 1, 2007, Wikitravel received the Webby Award for Best Travel Website. On June 16, 2008, Wikitravel was named one of the "50 Best Websites of 2008" by Time magazine.^[12]

On August 3, 2007, Prodromou, Jenkins, and long-time contributor Jani Patokallio started Wikitravel Press, a company that produces and sells print guidebooks based on material contributed to Wikitravel. The first Wikitravel Press guides, Chicago and Singapore, were officially launched on February 1, 2008.^[13] Content in these guidebooks is available under the same Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license that Wikitravel material is licensed under. The Wikitravel trademarks are licensed to Wikitravel Press, but there is otherwise no connection to Internet Brands.

On January 1, 2010, the content of Wikitravel was migrated to the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license