Users of Wikitravel , the collaboratively edited vacation spot database, will migrate to a brand new travel neighborhood that will be hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation , abandoning the platform run by private company Internet Brands , a supply tells Tnooz.
That’s when one other distinction between Wikitravel and Wikipedia hit home. If you are like me, you utilize Wikipedia to search for errant stuff you hear about randomly, just like the band the Hold Steady or the final mission of the Battleship Yamato But you don’t truly rely or rely upon Wikipedia, any more than you relyon Michelle Malkin’s views on Iraq If Malkin or Wikipedia are unsuitable, no huge deal. If Wikitravel’s fallacious, you are sleeping on the streets.
In the opinion of the Wikimedia Foundation, all that is an apparent try and intimidate” people concerned within the fork, and to their infinite credit they are not taking it lying down: they have on this same day filed a go well with in opposition to Internet Brands in San Francisco , in search of a judicial declaration that Internet Brands has no lawful right to impede, disrupt or block the creation of a brand new travel oriented, Wikimedia Foundation-owned web site in response to the request of Wikimedia community volunteers”. As the eleven-page go well with clearly lays out, Internet Brands’ place is just not merely baseless but preposterous, and I’m very a lot trying ahead to them getting slapped down.
Lack of funding. That cash is unlikely to come up, although, since Wikimedia is funded totally by donations and the overwhelming majority of them go to pay for Wikipedia. While adding eg. lodge bookings to Wikivoyage could be a near-assured cash spinner and, if finished right, a real enhancement to the site, it would be an uphill battle to get the sometimes rabidly anti-capitalist wider Wikimedia group to accept this taint of Mammon.
The other extreme is that Internet Brands tries to forestall or sabotage the fork through authorized action, as they did within the vBulletin vs XenForo case that’s apparently nonetheless rumbling by way of the courts. I assume that is much more unlikely although: all they own is the Wikitravel trademark and domain, so as long as the brand new (and presently undecided) title is sufficiently dissimilar, they will not have a authorized leg to stand on. Unlike the XenForo case, there are not any workers jumping ship, the software program is open source, and the content material itself is Creative Commons licensed and can be copied at will.