Wikitravel

Wikitravel (wikitravel.org) is a cooperative travel guide with over 10000 articles. There is a beta version of integration of Wikitravel into CouchSurfing at the CouchSurfing Guide.

Why

• It is cool to have travel guide information inside CouchSurfing.
• Wikitravel is available under a free license (Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution).
• Extensive infomation on the places the couchsurfer is going to visit right at their fingertips

How

• Places visited and places where people live (on profiles) could link to Wikitravel
• We don't want to fork Wikitravel. If there will be an “edit” link, it will direct people directly to Wikitravel. We can use this wiki for more specific CouchSurfing information.
• Some programming needed, CouchSurfing and MediaWiki integration, but it will also be useful to integrate information from this wiki into CS.

• We can encourage CouchSurfers on Wikitravel to become Wikitravel Docents

Advantages

• Wikitravel will become better, and CS will have a good travel guide.

Disadvantages

It was sold to Internet Brands, an operator of media and e-commerce sites, in April 2006. Internet Brands also announced to put advertisments on the page.

These facts and the disappointment about the management style of the project resulted in most administrators and other dissatisfied users of the german speaking version leaving the project to start Wikivoyage.org as a non-commercial alternative with transparent and democratic internal structures.

Comments

Add your comments here.

• Currently Wikitravel's founder is in Montreal, Guaka 16:21, 12 August 2006 (EST)

• It would be cool to automate a WikiTravel account creation from CS, such that WikiTravel editors that are also CSers would be easily recognizable, something like "[CS] csusername".
  • Just talked to Evan from Wikitravel, they just started using OpenID. I will look at possibilities of using it for CS as well. It's not directly about this, but it's related.
    I'm not going to change my usernames into something containing CS, and I guess it will be enough to just put some cool CS template on your Wikitravel profile page. I started something like that. Will look at it later today, but would be cool if someone else picked it up :) See http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel_talk:Project#CouchSurfing_box Guaka 14:13, 14 August 2006 (EST)

See also

• Wikitravel - Cooperating with CouchSurfing
• wikivoyage.org – a fork of Wikitravel