Wikitravel

Does anyone have a clue as to whether Wikitravel is related to Wikimedia in any way, and if so whether it was permitted to use the Creative Commons licence? Or, if it is an entirely unrelated project, shall I remove the link to it that I came across on Wikibooks?

Actually, this raises an interesting point. No one says that Wikimedia has some right to use the prefix Wiki- in its project titles. I can easily see, at some future point, a number of Wiki- sites, which could be confusing as far as identifying ownership and licensing are concerned. -- Kwekubo 14:14, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikitravel was started by two Wikipedians who for some reason thought that a travel guide was not something Wikimedia would want to host. One of them, Evan, is one of MediaWiki's most active developers right now. The reason they went to CC license was due to the fact that the GNU FDL requires copies of itself to be distributed with any GNU FDL material [1]. As of right now they are self-funded but are very open to joining Wikimedia if/when that becomes too expensive for them. --Maveric149 17:58, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Problem is, how can they join wikimedia if they use a different license? Maybe we don't need to use the same license across the project, but it would be better if we did... Now, I think it would be nice to have wikitravel with "us", and it would also be good if we got the trademarking etc issue settled. -- Sverdrup (talk) 14:10, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hi, folks. So, here's a couple of answers to things, from my perspective:

• Our relationship with Wikimedia and Wikipedia is one of utmost respect. We want to do our best to be good citizens and fellow travellers with the Wikimedia community (communities?). We have a special sub-project dedicated to cooperating with Wikipedia.
• I think we share almost all the same goals and ideas that Wikimedia does. If there's any big difference, it's that we try to concentrate on paper output. People who are traveling don't always have ready access to a computer -- it can be nice to have printed guides.
• The choice of using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license comes out of this concentration on paper output (see the page Mav mentioned for details). The GFDL has some hefty requirements for redistribution, and we wanted to lighten those. So, we went with the CC by-sa, because it's about as close as you can get to the copyleft spirit of the GFDL.
• As far as I know, Wikimedia doesn't claim any rights to the "Wiki-" prefix. We picked the name "Wikitravel" because it sounds good. It'd be something of a hassle to change it at this point, but I think we'd rather change the name than lose our good relationship with Wikimedia. It'd cause us some pain, though, and probably set our project back a bit, without a lot of real advantage for Wikimedia. I don't think we'll do it preemptively.
• The link on Wikibooks, I believe, came about because someone there thought it'd be a good idea to do a travel guide, and someone else pointed to the existing Wikitravel, and then someone else decided it was related. If someone thinks it's not related, heck, take out the link.
• I've been talking with the Creative Commons folks, and they have a goal of revising some of their licenses this winter. One revision will be to make ShareAlike licenses compatible with the GFDL. That'll mean that Wikitravel content can be imported into Mediawiki projects. Unfortunately, GFDL'd content won't be able to enter Wikitravel, but that's another fish to fry.
• w/r/t joining Wikimedia, I think we've talked about it before, but frankly we're having a lot of fun doing this as an independent project. We've got a good server, and we're moving to a colo facility soon. I dunno if the Wikimedia admins want another service to support.

Thanks for all the discussion, and please feel free to post questions or comments on Wikitravel, too. --Evan 20:59, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Actually, I've been thinking about this sentence:

It'd cause us some pain, though, and probably set our project back a bit, without a lot of real advantage for Wikimedia.

I realized that this was not 100% true. [I am not a lawyer, by the way. The following is not legal advice]. One of the things about en:trademark, at least in the USA, is that you have to actively defend your trademark. If you sue someone for trademark infringement, and they can show that you haven't been enforcing that trademark, a judge can decide that you lose the trademark.

So, if Wikimedia wants to attempt to use and enforce a trademark on the "Wiki-" prefix, it'd probably be unwise to let anyone -- even friendly projects -- use it. That could make it harder for Wikimedia to keep other, less wholesome people from using "Wiki-something" in the future. --Evan 00:25, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No - Wikimedia does not have, nor wishes to have, any trademark on the term "wiki". Ward Cunningham is the first person who used the Hawaiian word wiki to described what we now know as wiki technology and philosophy (IIRC that was in the mid 1990s). He could have created and enforced a trademark on that use but made no move in that direction. So please do not feel that you are infringing on our 'trademark' by using the name 'Wikitravel'. I find your info about CC-SA / GFDL compatibility to be very interesting. Hopefully when that is implemented the GNU folks will reciprocate by creating a Lessor GFDL (which would be essentially the same of the CC-A/SA) that all GNU FDL content with no options exercised could migrate to. IMO we should not just dump the GNU folks. --Maveric149 04:26, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)~

Is there a way to (automatically) link to Wikitravel pages from Wikipedia? If not, that would be extremely useful. Something like [[wikitravel:en:Portland (Oregon)]] - Pingveno 23:56, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The {{wikitravel}} template works on at least the English Wikipedia (and has been migrated to a few others too). Note that article naming conventions are not 100% identical, so a redirect on the Wikitravel side may be necessary. en:User:Jpatokal 01:32, 26 May 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

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