Wikivoyage/Welcome, Wikipedians

Welcome to Wikivoyage! This article was written specially for people who are familiar with the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. The style and usage of this site were inspired by Wikipedia. The same software, MediaWiki, is running at our servers. You will feel at home here if you are used Wikipedia. Nevertheless you should also have a view to the Welcome page which was made for newcomers.

Although Wikivoyage aims for a cooperation with Wikipedia, there are some differences between Wikivoyage and Wikipedia you should know. Please read this article therefore carefully. Wikivoyage is a Wikimedia project as of January 15, 2013, the day of the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia's launch.

License

Like Wikipedia, we use the cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

Aims

If you read our goals and non-goals something will strike you:

• Wikivoyage is not an encyclopedia. We do not need huge and detailed articles on various subjects. Wikivoyage articles are intended as information sources for travelers. Topics that are neither directly nor indirectly related to travel should be avoided.
• Contrary to Wikipedia Wikivoyage is designed to appear in a printable form. We want that travelers have the possibility on their way to print, copy or pass to friends particular items, say, a map or a list of hotels. Please keep in mind if you contribute to Wikivoyage: Also a printed version should be possible!

Fair use

The term “fair use” is part of the Anglo-Saxon legal rule. It means that under certain circumstances it is allowed to distribute small portions of copyrighted works. We don't want to exercise this since this may lead to legal complications.

Differences in style

There are some stylistical differences which should be considered:

• It’s a common thing on [[Wikipedia]] to [[link]] practically every [[noun]] or [[date]] or [[other term]]. Because Wikivoyage is [[aimed]] at providing a [[travel guide]] with practical information rather than a collection of general knowledge there will be a lot of terms which are not suited for a Wikivoyage article. Please check before linking: Does the therm represent the name of a destination, an itinerary, or a travel topic? If not it shouldn't be linked.

What is an article?

If you read What is an article?, you'll see that individual Wikivoyage articles tend to be comprehensive than Wikipedia articles. One of our goals is to have printable guides that someone can take with them to use at a destination. On the one hand, we try to write articles about a city, region or country all in one place. On the other hand, we try to prevent doublings all over the place. We have to balance both aims.

Article templates

Wikivoyage articles adhere more closely to specific article templates as in the the case of Wikipedia. The vast majority of Wikivoyage articles are describing cities, countries and regions. Other ways of seeing travel. We think that it makes it easier for readers to use the guides more quickly if our articles have the most uniform structure.

If anyone wants to find restaurants, he looks in the Eat and Drink section of the article, whether it’s about New York or Bombay. The hotels and hostels go in Accommodation, the museums and monuments go under Sights.

In the manual of style we have a set of article templates whaich show the preferred format for each kind of article. These are only guidelines, of course. Everyone can add different or additional information to an article as he wants. That’s the Wiki way. But others come through later and try to shape the articles to look more and more like the original templates.

Geographical hierarchy and categories

Articles are linked through their geographical hierarchy(s). For this, there are tools illustrating this hierarchy.

Categories should not be used for the geographic subdivision. Non-geographical aspects can be categorized. Meaningful category keywords should be discussed on the corresponding portal pages.

Links to Wikipedia

We use InterWiki links to link to Wikipedia. You can learn how to make these links work on our links to Wikipedia page. It is possible to link to a Wikipedia page different in language, too.

Please note that there are interlanguage links like [[de:Berlin]] to link between language versions of Wikivoyage.

Codes of behavior

Perhaps because of our relatively small size, Wikivoyage does not yet have the same problems with vandalism, edit wars, and other unwanted edits that occur at Wikipedia. For this reason, we tend to use soft security measures instead of technical tools to deal with unwanted edits.

Upto now, we have hardly any protected page. And we want to keep it that way.

Important terms

Some terms you may know from Wikipedia have analogs in Wikivoyage but sometimes under a different name.

• There a similiar templates showing coordinates like in the Wikipedia. At Wikivoyage they are named Template:Geo. Template:Coord was made for the usage of coordinates in a text line.

Meanwhile, there are already Wikipedians who found there way here. Maybe they can list some important terms at this page soon.