Opinion: 6 reasons why Wikivoyage is already better than Wikitravel
Skift Take
Beyond the top six list, the biggest thing Wikivoyage has going for it is the enthusiasm of the long-term contributors who had to fight hard to wrest content from Wikitravel in order to run the site they wanted.
Tomorrow, January 15th, marks the official launch date of Wikivoyage, the new free travel guide from the Wikimedia Foundation. Born from a split with Wikitravel, here are six reasons it’s already better than its ancestor.
Wikivoyage has a great mobile version. This uses the same systems as the massively popular mobile version of Wikipedia, and is thus fast, compatible with virtually every device, and close to bug-free.
Wikivoyage supports scrollable, zoomable web maps, courtesy of OpenStreetMaps. These are so new there aren’t many around yet, but here’s an example from the Italian page for Funchal; expect to see plenty more soon.
Wikivoyage lets you collect articles into books, which can be turned into a PDF or EPUB for offline reading, or shipped to you as a printed book. (And thus Wikivoyage Press came to life at the flick of a switch. D’oh!)
No more screen scraping: full data dumps of Wikivoyage are already available. Thanks to the Creative Commons license, you can freely use this data for travel mashups and more.
Thanks to its active community, Wikivoyage already gets more content updates, and has spam firmly under control thanks to the Foundation’s years of experience in combating it.
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