Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. The content is created a piece at a time by Internet users around the globe, who all contribute to a single, definitive document for each destination. By creating a community of amateur travel writers, we hope to provide high-quality guides in an Open Source content development model.

Our objective is to create professional-quality, definitive travel guides for destinations around the globe. If there is a place on Earth worth going to, we want to have a destination guide for that location. We want to provide lodging, food, sight-seeing, historical and cultural information and activity guides for each such destination. We want the guides to be in-depth, yet at the same time portable and readable. As practical reference works, they need to be well-indexed, navigable, and easy to access. We address a number of audiences:

• Travelers on the road. We want travelers in transit to be able to stop at a Web cafe and find the information they need to continue on their travels.

• Travelers at home. Travelers should be able to use Wikitravel to make travel decisions—where to go, what to bring, what to see, how to schedule.

• Travelers away from the computer. We also want to make our guides easy to use in printed form. Although computers are useful to travelers, not everyone has access to a computer at all times and in all places. A printed Wikitravel guide should be at least as useful as, say, a commercial guidebook for the same area. A last objective is to keep our guides Open Content. We want travel agents, commercial guidebook developers, and people working on other travel-related Internet projects to have access to the Wikitravel information contributed by so many people.

The project draws its context from two principal cultures. First is the international, informal network of travelers, tourists, backpackers and adventureseekers. These people share knowledge with each other in any number of ways: by word of mouth, using chat boards and newsgroups, with blogs and personal websites. We want to distill this informal knowledge into reference works. The second context is that of Open Content and its basis in Open Source software. We depend on the independent, do-it-yourself attitude that has made the Internet so full of information. Open Source software users and so-called “hackers” expect their software to be updatable, customizable, and redistributable; we want to do for travel guides what Open Source does for software.