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Wikivoyage talk:Cooperating with Wikia Travel

Hello from wikia
''The following – up to this date-and-time – is moved here from User talk:(WT-en) TVerBeek where this discussion broke out. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 15:50, 4 August 2006 (EDT)''

I ran across some of your postings, and wanted to invite you to join us at WORLD where we're trying to build a more open and flexible travel guide that is not controlled by a big company that is mainly focused on owning copyrights, and doesn't believe in GFDL truely free content. I'd love to chat with you if you're interested Gil

 * (I replied on his user_talk page at wikia.com, but here's a copy for reference.) Wow.  That was a load of badly informed nonsense you just dumped on my user_talk page on Wikivoyage.  For one thing, Wikivoyage is – and always has been – licensed under CC-BY-SA, not GFDL.  Internet Brands doesn't own the copyright to it; the contributors do.  CC-BY-SA is a perfectly valid and widely popular open-content license; the main difference is that the attribution/documentation requirements aren't as difficult to comply with.  As for whether IB believes in open content, that remains to be seen... but what evidence do you have that they don't?  (And since the license is legally binding even if they don't fully believe in it... what difference does it really make?)  Given the fact that you don't even know the basic facts about Wikivoyage (such as it always being CC-BY-SA, and why), I'm inclined to dismiss this accusation as just an uninformed assumption on your part.  (Hell, your notion that a company could take GFDL content and convert it to CC-BY-SA suggests that you haven't even read the GFDL; that's explicitly prohibited.)  By the way, trying to steal contributors from Wikivoyage seems pretty sleazy; someone who's trying to claim the moral high ground ought to avoid that kind of thing.  P.S. Wikivoyage's guidelines say not to add external links to other guides (they detract from the development of Wikivoyage itself); please don't add any more. - TVerBeek

 * Let me start by appologizing, if my recent frustration with IB was directed at you, I like what the community has built here. My understanding is that it took GFDL content to start it, and then switched to CC.  I can certainly be wrong, but this is what I was told by some wikipedians.  I agree with you that anyone with half a brain knows that you can't take GFDL and convert it to CC.  But in the last WEEK, I have become concerned that internet brands is not "a free content company" and does not respect licenses and I plan to talk to Evan about this this evening at wikimania.
 * Seperately, I appreciate your point about links, I will certainly honor that as it is new to me that a wiki site wouldn't want to have external links, and wikivoyage does link to world66, from the nav bar... and the about wikivoyage page links to internetbrands, so apparently it's OK to link to Internet brands sites, but not other people, which I find curious.  I also saw this page http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Milan which had links to a number of other sites, so apparently the policy may need more promotion, as my cursory look around wikivoyage showed me lots of links to other sites...  That said, if it's the policy I will honor it, it was not clear to me till you pointed it out.
 * Do you think it's OK to link to my user page on wikia in talking with you, as I don't check wikivoyage...   GIL

 * If you have concerns, why haven't you raised them here where the community can participate?  See Project:Internet Brands where others have done so. Why are you clarifying things with Evan after you have already started a new project instead of before?  And lastly, TVerBeek pointed you to our Project:External links policy.  If you'd read that you would understand that the Milan article includes only valid links to stuff like hotel websites (when providing contact info for the hotel); transit websites (when describing the transit); Wikipedia DMOZ, and W66 from the nav bar, and so forth.   It's not an unrestricted link farm -- we defer to DMOZ for that difficult task (at least until there's a serious Wiki doing the job).

 * The strange GFDL->CCbySA switch you are referring to occured at World66 before Internet Brands was involved there. Wikivoyage has always been CCbySA, and we have always been rigourous in protecting the rights of Wikipedia GFDL authors whose works occationally get copied here in error -- we delete them as soon as we spot them.

 * Internet Brands knew what they were getting into here with respect to free-content licensing.  They have actual lawyers who, before they acquired the website, understood exactly what that entails.  IB is just a hosting company and they know it -- they intend to make money off this by imitating Wikia and adding some ads around the article.  You, or anyone else, will remain free to reuse our guides -- even to seed a fork.

 * Ultimately I think you should start a new site if you feel it is required. But it makes sense to try to work things out first, and split the effort at a new site only if you must.  And even then, if there are other splits (see User:(WT-en) Hansm) you should consider joining with them first in preference to going it alone. Starting a new project from scratch instead of forking Wikivoyage makes about as much sense as starting a new Wiki Encyclopedia project from scratch. -- (WT-en) Colin 15:08, 4 August 2006 (EDT)

 * Hi, Gil. Let me quickly point out that Wikivoyage is not a copy of Wikipedia massaged and re-licensed under the CC-by-sa 1.0. I've heard this ugly rumor before, and as it's easily confirmable as false, I find it to be beneath the level of the Wikipedians I know and like. I'd be happy to straighten out your sources on the subject if you'd like me to.

 * I think this mistaken idea may come from a couple of places. First, we do use dual-licensed images and other works when the copyright holder has assented to make the works available under a license that is compatible with ours. Second, we did lay out the skeleton of the Wikivoyage geographical hierarchy with imported versions of the CIA World Factbook, a public domain work put out by the US federal government. It's possible that people see Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles using the same source (the Factbook), and think that one was copied from the other when both were copied, both legally and ethically, from a third.

 * This all said, it's an ugly assumption to make. We are all allies in making Open Content works and it's a bad idea to jump to conclusions about others. Wikivoyagers are extremely vigilant about GFDL'd work on Wikivoyage, and we make sure that people who mistakenly copy content from Wikipedia know that the licenses aren't compatible. We've done a really good job at that.

 * Let me know if you have any more questions about Wikivoyage -- I'd be happy to answer them. Also, feel free to come talk to me at Wikimania. --(WT-en) Evan 15:11, 4 August 2006 (EDT)

Open letter to Wikia
I sent an email to Gil Penchina, the former eBay executive who's now CEO of Wikia, as well as Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales, about world.wikia.com. It's available here:

 * http://evan.prodromou.name/Open_letter_to_Wikia

I hope we see some response. --(WT-en) Evan 17:56, 9 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Hi Evan - I still haven't gotten your email, but someone forwarded your blog to me. We are very interested in finding ways to work together with you.  As you can see on our discussion, we had several travel, city, and tourism related projects that had bubbled up and we're trying to find a way to better organize them.  We are also more open on things like external links, etc.  I think the easiest thing we can cooperate on, would be if both Wikivoyage and Wikia World were to agree to use both GFDL and CC.  Then our data could be completely compatible and we could share freely.  We didn't intend to create an incompatible guide, it happened because Wikia users started writing a wide variety of content.  As Jimbo frequently says, it's better to try a lot of things, than to plan for perfection and move slowly.
 * We've already got 17,000+ articles and unfortunately we cannot just unilaterally and retroactively relicense, or even re-double-license them, as GFDL. However, at this stage World Wikia could still adopt a dual license, although I'm not entirely sure what you would get out of keeping GFDL?  (The reasons Wikivoyage doesn't use GFDL can be found here.) (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:54, 10 August 2006 (EDT)
 * I would like to start, by offering to cross-linking on all our Worldcity pages with wikivoyage and to share categorization (continent/country/city) so at least we're organized as sister projects.  I'm not sure what we should be doing with World66, but we're happy to talk about that as well.   gil
 * On a seperate note, I am disturbed that Wikicars.org continues to display dozens of pages of content 100% copied from Wikipedia, without providing attribution. These are the car manufacturer pages on the right hand side of the home page.  I had mentioned this to you at the conference, and I assumed that a big company like Internet Brands would try to respect the GFDL copywrite requirement of attribution if they wanted to be a positive force in our community.  Obviously this doesn't benefit anyone, if big companies don't respect our licenses... and you assured me that IB is a good actor, yet it's been a week and no attribution yet... so I thought I would just bug you again since I don't know anyone else at Internet Brands.gil
 * I was told at Wikimania that wikis hosted by Wikia are unable to have any license but GFDL so neither Wikivoyage or World Wiki can change the licenses unless WorldWiki is willing to fork from Wikia and set up a new server, but that requires more money and time than is currently required by being hosted by Wikia. I recommend keeping our relationships at the linking level only to avoid violations of the legalese.  On WikiCar or whatever it is called it would be best to contact the admins over there, because you're more likely to get an answer although I do understand why you'd tell Evan. -- (WT-en) Sapphire 02:06, 10 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Hi sapphire - it's largely true that Wikia is GFDL, but if it would make Evan and the Wikivoyage team happy, I'm saying we would spend the money on lawyers to try to make World dual-licensed if Wikivoyage did as well. I'm just trying to manage what our users have already build - a very rich, but different travel guide, like Roman Churchesgil

 * Gil, a couple of notes. First, you may not know that policy, editorial, and most technical decisions for Wikivoyage are made by consensus by community members, guided by our goals and non-goals. Our external links guideline, for example, wasn't created by a project manager in a 8-hour product meeting; it's the result of years of experience, discussion, and clarification. Although admins are typically over-represented in these discussions (or, rather, people who participate in these discussion tend to end up as admins), we've always found that a bottom-up approach to site development has been best. Around here the traveller comes first.

 * Second, I'm not really involved with Wikicars; nor are most Wikivoyagers. You may want to leave a message on http://wikicars.org/en/Talk:Main_Page (don't forget to sign your post with four tildes ( ~ )).

 * We've already got a Project:Dual licensing page; you might want to set something up on Wikia for that.

 * We've got "other sites" links with friendly, Open Content Web sites that provide complementary viewpoints on subjects covered by travel guides in Wikivoyage. If the community here decides that Wikia meets those criteria, it'd be pretty easy to do.

 * Lastly, I'm glad to see that you've changed world.wikia.com from a "travel guide" to a "travel directory". That makes a lot more sense. --(WT-en) Evan 10:10, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

Moved from page
From the section on dual licensing.

 * This is a great idea - Both Wikivoyage and World wikia should encourage their users to make content available under both licenses. Can you suggest ways for this to happen?   gil

Archive/delete
This page does not appear to have ever been completed - it says essentially "we may or may not develop a relationship with Wikia travel". Barring objection I think that it should be flagged it as historical and move it out of Category:Wikivoyage policies. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:07, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Wikivoyage talk:Cooperation

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

Wikivoyage/Wikipedia cooperation
Are Wikivoyagers interested in cooperation in certain areas with Wikipedia? While the licenses of the two projects are incompatible, there are some ways the two projects can work together, eliminating duplicate effort while allowing each project to focus on its own goals. Two ways I can think of:

 * 1) Appropriate interlinking: Wikivoyage is not an encyclopedia, so detailed encyclopedia-type articles about travel destinations are offtopic. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a travel guide, so encyclopedia articles about places shouldn't include pub suggestions and hotel price comparisons. However, Wikipedia could provide a wealth of background information for travellers, while Wikivoyage would be very helpful to Wikipedia readers looking for specific travel information. Also, given Wikipedia's popularity, it could result in a steady influx of new Wikivoyagers.
 * 2) Image sharing: Many images in an encyclopedia would be appropriate for a travel guide, and vice versa. Licensing problems could be avoided by the contributor of the image making it available under a dual license, GNU Free Documentation License/Atrribution-ShareAlike. Putting images in the public domain is another option, and one that several Wikipedians have chosen.

Opinions? -- (WT-en) Stephen Gilbert

 * Stephen, this is an excellent point to bring up. It's right that our license is incompatible with the GFDL -- those who haven't should read Why Wikivoyage isn't GFDL -- and that it's going to be a hassle to coordinate effort. I think that the sole consolation is that the overlap is kind of thin.

 * That said, our current policy is to allow people to copy their own articles and images from Wikpedia to Wikivoyage. They're implicitly dual-licensing their work that way. The big problem is that dual licensing isn't commutative -- if you dual-license an image, I have to pick one license and stick with it. People downstream from me can only use that license. So, images can't cross back and forth between Wikivoyage and Wikipedia over and over, just once.

 * Lastly, we're a young site, and we're still trying to figure out our internal standards and practices. I think it might be a little early to see how they work with external ones. Just my opinion, though. -- (WT-en) Evan 14:12, 12 Aug 2003 (PDT)

 * I agree with Stephen on Interlinking. Interlinking for appropriate subject matter would provide the traveller with the option to pursue specific subjects in more depth. For instance the country material from the CIA Worldbook has been massaged on wikipedia to provide detailed information on economic and political information.  It seems superfluous to duplicate that work here.  For example New Zealand is developing on wikivoyage but is well developed   here.  Why duplicate the effort when the pages can be complementary.  (WT-en) Tiles 14:17, 12 Aug 2003 (PDT)

 * I think we always had that in mind. A few caveats: Wikipedia has a lot of great background info, in much the same way the CIA Worldbook does, but, this is not the same thing as a travel guide. The CIA info is partly a placeholder and partly a starting point, but not at all a guide in and of itself. All Wikivoyagers should be very aware of what a wonderful resource Wikipedia provides (and I can see quite a lot of people finding out about one via the other), but it needs to be treated like any outside link. Wikivoyage has a distinctly different goal than Wikipedia, enough that there should be little or no 'dupilcate' content between the two-- though there may be many cases where information is adapted for one or the other.(WT-en) Majnoona

''>> Lastly, we're a young site, and we're still trying to figure out our internal standards and practices. I think it might be a little early to see how they work with external ones. <<''

Absolutely. Projects like this should evolve gradually and naturally. I also agree with Maj that, at least at this point, Wikipedia should be treated as any other external resource. However, it's worth considering a semi-official relationship in the future, if only to reject the idea. It would be wonderful if each Wikipedia article about a place had a prominant link to "[place name] Travel Guide".

As for the CIA Factbook, if I had been here a week earlier, I would have advised against importing it, given the experience we had with doing so for Wikipedia. We thought it would be good early on because it would give us an article for every country, and we could work the data into proper articles. However, the process took years, and it still isn't finished yet. Also, once the articles were edited, we had no way of automatically updating the data when a new edition of the Factbook came out. Finally, given our Project:Goals and non-goals, most of the CIA data just doesn't fit. A travel guide doesn't need to provide detailed statistics showing the number of seats each party holds in government, or a list of all the treaties and international organizations to which the country is party. Providing a link to the Factbook entry would allow someone to find this information easily, without creating an out-of-date fork. However, some of the info would be good as a placeholder: the introductory paragraph, the flag and Quick Facts box, and the map, perhaps.

This isn't meant as an insult against you guys who did the importing; I was one of the first people to do so over at Wikipedia. :) -- (WT-en) Stephen Gilbert

 * So, it took me a while, but I finally starting grokking what you meant by "interlinking". That's the feature of the MediaWiki software that's mostly used for interlanguage links right now on Wikipedia, right? So that if there's an article about Napoleon on the English Wikipedia, and one on the, uh, Swahili Wikipedia, there can be links between those two articles. That's a pretty cool feature, and, in fact, I think having links between equivalent pages on Wikivoyage and Wikipedia might be nice. I'll put it on my TODO list to enable it for Wikivoyage, and write up a page on how to use it.

 * I have a teensy problem with linking to Wikipedia articles, however, which is that I want Wikivoyage articles to be complete in and of themselves. I'd hate to see a Wikivoyage article that said, "Everything you need to know about France is here, except that there's a good bagel place in Lyon." I think that links to Wikipedia articles are good resources; I'd be saddened if Wikivoyagers leaned on them too much, and made weaker Wikivoyage articles because of it. I think we have the job of extracting information that's important for travellers from a lot of different resources, and not making everyone do the same research. It's falling down on our job to just link to resources about France without doing some winnowing, selecting, and editing. Does that make any sense? -- (WT-en) Evan 19:48, 13 Aug 2003 (PDT)

 * Yes, that makes perfect sense. Wikipedia has had similiar problems, with some people providing an external link and saying "For information on topic X, see this web page". If the information is relevent and encyclopedic, put it in the encyclopedia! Likewise, Wikivoyage articles should provide all relevent information for travellers, including such things as the history and politics of countries. I don't think anyone wants Wikivoyage to be degraded to Wikipedia's "travel suplement". If some people do what you fear and lean too heavily on Wikipedia links, we'll just do what we do with all substandard pages on a wiki: edit, replace and expand the content. -- (WT-en) Stephen Gilbert 20:22, 16 Aug 2003 (PDT)

Would it be better to have magic links that are displayed in the header (such as with interlanguage links), or inline links (such as links to Wiktionary on Wikipedia and links to Wikipedia on Wiktionary). --(WT-en) Maveric149 17:28, 15 Aug 2003 (PDT)

 * The magic interlanguage header links are already enables in the software, although the code needs a little modification to be useful here. If you look at the top of this page, you'll see I've added an interlang link to the "Paris" article at the French Wikipedia (just as an example; I'll remove it a bit later).

Paris

 * MediaWiki is still designed specifically for Wikipedia, so this installation assumes that this is the English Wikipedia and that http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris is the French version of this page. I suggest holding off on using these links this early in Wikivoyage's development. As Maj pointed out, it's a simple matter to link to Wikipedia articles like we would link to any other website. -- (WT-en) Stephen Gilbert 20:22, 16 Aug 2003 (PDT)

title: Wikivoyage talk:Cooperation