TL;DR: Works well on mobile, has web maps, exports to PDF/EPUB/printed books, provides data dumps, is more active (pretty much the entire Wikitravel community jumped ship) and doesn't suck.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage#Additional_languages...
The main difference is that wikipedia pages will now link to wikivoyage instead of wikitravel.
Google will still have wikitravel at the top of the search rankings for some time so it is only a matter of time to see who wins.
<cynical> Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. </cynical>
If you read; http://gyrovague.com/2013/01/14/free-travel-guide-wikivoyage...
You will read how it is going to take on Tripadvisor et al. I really don't expect it to.
I just hope it doesn't turn into the stupid edit warring problems that exists with wikipedia.
Wikimedia is funded entirely by donations and the vast majority of them go to pay for Wikipedia. While adding eg. hotel bookings to Wikivoyage would be a near-guaranteed money spinner and, if done right, a genuine enhancement to the site, it would be an uphill battle to get the occasionally rabidly anti-capitalist wider Wikimedia community to accept this taint of Mammon. ...
This also explains why, as a travel industry insider myself, I don’t think Wikivoyage poses an existential threat to TripAdvisor, Google or, for that matter, Lonely Planet: it’s simply not playing the same game. Quite the contrary, it promises to be a great resource of information for everybody. In the same way that Google pulls in data for Wikipedia for its search results and Lonely Planet’s website uses images sourced from Wikimedia Commons, other travel guides will be able to complement their own content with additional data from Wikivoyage.
Disclaimer: I work for Lonely Planet, but these are my opinions, not the company's.
Congratulations to Wikimedia, the WikiVoyage team, and jpatokal (and thanks for making the Singapore article so comprehensive and accurate). I hope the migration is smooth and the SEO quickly works itself out in WV's favour. I for one will be linking to it whenever I have the opportunity.
But you do need a long-term perspective and a genuine rapport with the community, which is why 'traditional' companies taking over open source projects and adopting corporate command-and-conquer strategies to run them tend to crash and burn. Oracle and the trail of devastation they've wreaked with OpenOffice and MySQL is probably the canonical example, and Internet Brands is their open content equivalent.
And oh, thanks for the thanks ;)
I look forward to location-enabled WV guides/maps on mobile, if that ever becomes available - that would be amazingly useful. I'm often tempted to look towards tourist-oriented functionality in my own web/app project, but would like it if the market winner turned out to be an open resource rather than a crowdsourced-yet-profit-driven one.
'welcome :)
Same could be said of StackOverflow and Github (Stack and Git weren't acquired, but are both VC-funded). Many wikis are profit-driven too. Open collaboration takes time and resources. Wikipedia shows it can be achieved as a non-profit, but I don't think it's surprising that it can be achieved by a commercial organisation too, as long as its open about it and respectful of contributions.
WARNING: Compton suffers from a very high crime rate due to the gang violence, which is well-documented. It is recommended to stay no more than as long as necessary. Danger increases during the night time.
Helpful!
But yes, there's a fair bit of useless "advice" on the site. It's human nature to try to be helpful, even when much of the advice offered is common sense. Hence this policy:
http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:No_advice_from_Capt...
That's usually a fairly decent indication that there are better and more interesting places to visit.
Long story: http://gyrovague.com/2012/07/12/wikitravel-editors-abandon-i...
But one of the real benefits of the change has been that there is now integration with the other Wikimedia sites: the same login that one uses to edit Wikipedia works to edit Wikivoyage, and a fair few Wikipedia admins and regulars have jumped in to help Wikivoyage out.
In addition, Wikivoyage now has direct inclusion of images from Wikimedia Commons, so if you are writing a travel guide, you can just hop over to Commons and find an image, rather than having to upload your own like you did on Wikitravel. And there is an international community of people who curate that image collection.
Now that the contributors have mostly moved over, Wikitravel are now just descending into spammy oblivion, while Wikivoyage adds new and fresh content, fixes mistakes and so on.
All the while Wikitravel employees seem to be going around spamming blog posts and posting about how this is all an "anti-capitalist" conspiracy against them. Well, sorry, it's pure capitalism: if your service sucks, people will go to another provider. That your service sucks so much that you are being beaten by a non-profit... well, just the free market at work.
It's Wikivoyage, not WikiVoyage.
