Wikivoyage talk:Business of Wikitravel

Moved from travellers' pub by (WT-en) Evan

Relationship to Wikimedia

Who is paying for the website? Just wondering why you guys didn't approach the Wikimedia Foundation first. Wikivoyage would make a wonderful addition to the Wikimedia family. Oh well, good luck. :) --(WT-en) Maveric149 16:07, 5 Aug 2003 (PDT)

Mav: cool that you're here. Me and (WT-en) Maj are paying for it out of our own pocket right now. We're probably open to moving it to a Wikimedia thing -- we just didn't know it'd be welcome (dumb of us, I guess). We've had some other thoughts about how to finance it, but it's not a big deal for us yet -- maybe it will be if this growth continues! -- (WT-en) Evan 22:08, 5 Aug 2003 (PDT)

I think the idea of this website it great and will quickly generate a lot of traffic and interest (although I won't have time to contribute due to my role in helping set-up the Foundation and Wikibooks - not to mention my daily edits to Wikipedia). We are having our first Wikimedia press release soon and are already going to mention the addition of Wikibooks and Wikiquote ; I see no reason why we couldn't also include Wikivoyage (if you decide to enter the Wikimedia family - I'll advocate for it). Some people may be a bit apprehensive because of your license but you have convinced me that the GNU FDL is totally inappropriate for your goals. Oh and http://wikivoyage.org , http://wikivoyage.com don't work and http://www.wikivoyage.com says "Now Is The Time..." --(WT-en) Maveric149 01:35, 6 Aug 2003 (PDT)

You would be well advised to register these names before User:(WT-en) Maveric149 does. He has a history of registering names without consensus and holding them "until"... whatever he determines is appropriate, has been done. Whatever route you take, you will probably not want Maveric149 to decide it for you.

Although I highly encourage going the Wikimedia route, you may also want to consider ibiblio. They host all kinds of interesting non-profit projects free of charge, while you maintain editorial control. You get all the services you need: web hosting, e-mail, MySQL, a whole slew of open source tools, and shell access. I notice that Fred Bauder has moved his fork of Wikipedia there, so I think something as cool as Wikivoyage would be welcomed. Hey, now that I think of it, maybe ibiblio could do the hosting and it could still be an official Wikimedia project. -- (WT-en) Stephen Gilbert 20:22, 16 Aug 2003 (PDT)

ibiblio is a far better option - for one thing, it would not come with all the baggage of "Wikimedia" including people who are, simply put, untrustworthy:

Control over the server is also important. So if they do decide to eventually enter the Wikimedia family, it would probably mean that they will be hosted from Wikimedia's servers. Of course, we can and should use Ibiblio as a mirror or even webserver for anon's (updated via RDF feeds, perhaps). --(WT-en) Maveric149

These servers are overloaded, fail often,

As of this writing, December 25, all the Wikipedias are down yet again. You should be making a long term plan to move away from mediawiki and work on a wikitext standard that other software could use. The developers of metaweb are far more credible people as developers, including Danny Hillis etc., and no doubt they are using mediawiki only to figure out what's wrong with it, how to clone it, and replace it, once they have their requirements straight. "Requirements" itself seems to be an alien word to the mediawiki crowd.

and their adminstrators apply hard security measures often, lying about their reasons for doing so. Their IP block list is full of false statements, assertions made only by one person without much validation, etc..

This group is becoming known as the Wikipedia Liars Club, especially for its "vile" (to quote The Cunctator) echo chamber habits.

You don't want these people in charge of who gets to read or edit Wikivoyage. Among other problems, you would eventually alienate some official person doing some official function or trying to correct some falsehood about some facility or destination or event, and that would potentially lead to legal hot water, since these people actually do sue.

That issue is outlined at Consumerium: "libel pit", and it will eventually destroy Wikipedia if the technical incompetence doesn't.