Wikitravel, Once a Profit Dream, Now Bedevils Its Owner (original) (raw)
Media|Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Its Owner
Advertisement
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Link by Link
Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Its Owner
- Sept. 9, 2012
LIVE by the wiki, perhaps die by the wiki.
When the California company Internet Brands bought the Web site Wikitravel in 2005 for $1.7 million from the two developers who had created it, the company got the site and the name, as well as a community of thousands of volunteers who generated the travel guidance that brought the audience.
Soon, with the introduction of advertising to the site, a nice business began to take shape, maybe even an ideal business: volunteers lovingly created the content; readers visited the site and clicked on the advertising. There was work to be done by the owner, certainly, like making sure the software functioned properly, but mainly this was a media site that ran itself.
There were some catches, however, that made for an unusual business proposition, starting with the fact that Internet Brands had not bought the exclusive right to the material on the site. The articles are governed by a Creative Commons license, which means they can be copied and republished by anyone as long as a mention is included of where the material came from.
Another catch: workers who do not expect a paycheck may find it easier to leave.
Soon after the purchase of Wikitravel, in 2006, contributors to the Italian and German sites simply left, not wanting to be part of a commercial site. They “forked” the site, meaning that they copied all of the content to a new site they named Wikivoyage.
Wikitravel is again facing a fork, this time by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia among other projects. On Thursday, the board of Wikimedia, the biggest wiki publisher, approved the creation of a travel guide after an extended online comment period that found support for the idea.
The project will seed itself with the tens of thousands of articles on Wikitravel, and already as many as 38 of the 48 the most experienced and trusted volunteers at Wikitravel have said they will move to the Wikimedia project, according to Dr. James Heilman, a Wikipedia contributor who said he had acted as a liaison between Wikitravel writers and the foundation.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement