Yesterday, Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit parent of Wikipedia, announced that it had filed a lawsuit to seek declaratory relief in response to legal threats of individual users from Internet Brands, the company that has run the collaboratively edited destination database Wikitravel since 2006.
The move reveals that Wikimedia Foundation is, in fact, creating a travel-focused website, officially acknowledging what Tnooz reported earlier this summer.
The migration of the contributors from one user-generated wiki to a fresh, not yet named wiki-platform, has upset Internet Brands, according to a statement from Wikimedia Foundation:
On August 29, Internet Brands sued two volunteer administrators, one based in Los Angeles and one in Canada, asserting a variety of claims.
UPDATE: 7 September, 8amBST: Internet Brands has published its lawsuit.
The intent of the action is clear – intimidate other community volunteers from exercising their rights to freely discuss the establishment of a new community focused on the creation of a new, not-for-profit travel guide under the Creative Commons licenses.
The legal wrangling move might bury Wikitravel in paralysis for at least a year, according to some analysts.
During that time, it might still get traffic thanks to its years of search engine optimization.
But if the platforms have an ugly divorce, duplicate content problems will plague the sites, affecting how Google and other engines handle the duplicate content in their search results.
Wikitravel’s value proposition is in permitting deep-coverage of locations that often aren’t profitable for publishers to cover thoroughly in guidebooks.
Says Wikimedia Foundation in its statement:
We do not feel it is appropriate for Internet Brands, a large corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, to seek to intimidate two individuals.
This new, proposed project would allow all travel content to be freely used and disseminated by anyone for any purpose as long as the content is given proper attribution and is offered with the same free-to-use license.
Internet Brands appears to be attempting to thwart the creation of a new, non-commercial travel wiki in a misguided effort to protect its for-profit Wikitravel site.
Jani Patokallio, publishing platform rchitect at Lonely Planet and former managing editor at Wikitravel Press (which made guides out of Wikitravel content), has written on his blog about the matter, in-depth.
He says the end goal for Wikimedia Foundation is that the content from Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, a parallel project that has agreed to move to the new Wikimedia Foundation effort, will be brought under one umbrella and be supported by a host that has the funding and ethos to allow the user-generated efforts to thrive.
NB: Image of Thor vs. Superman toy figures is reproduced, aptly enough, under a Creative Commons license.
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About Sean O'Neill
Just a sad day for free independent travelers. I used wikitravel a lot over the years.
It was, to me, a great resource. Yes, a little dated. But if you are a solid independent traveler that’s not an issue.
The idea was to simply share your travel knowledge so it can help others.
Today it’s gone to the lawyers who will be the only ones to profit from this.
Thanks for your comment, Dave.
This reminds me of how the brothels were the real profit-makers during the Gold Rush in the American Wild West.
Best,
Sean
Sean? Did I miss the Tycoon empires spawned from brothel owners on the late 1800s?
While certainly the economic influence of miners did spawn a cottage industry of brothels in the old west,
It can hardly be said that they were the chief beneficiaries of the gold rush.
I think of the state of California, the railroads and corresponding monopolies thereafter
as being nominally beneficiaries of the gold rush.
I have a feeling the railroads and the state of California would have done fine without the Gold Rush and that their growth was not fueled mainly by the Gold Rush.
I didn’t mean to pretend to be an economic historian, but I was trying to be funny.
“The legal wrangling move might bury Wikitravel in paralysis for at least a year, according to some analysts.”
Which analysts? I’m putting together a blog post on this myself, and haven’t spotted such analysis as yet.
Some people my editor and I spoke with, off the record.
Depressingly plausible, given IB’s fondness for scorched-earth litigation. Here’s said blog post. Still hoping for a copy of IB’s suit, not just WMF’s countersuit.
FWIW, Wikimedia states in its own lawsuit that they will not be intimidated by IB’s tactics and intend to launch ASAP regardless. See also:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Travel_Guide#Board_statement
Jani,
That’s an extremely important point, which wasn’t mentioned in the original Tnooz article. We’re grateful that you’ve brought it to light.
Best,
Sean
I’ve also updated the article to include the Internet Brands lawsuit documents.
Thanks for the link to your blog post. Definitely in keeping with the spirit of user-generated collaboration and knowledge gathering.
Well, that’s the story here: it’s not just company A sues company B, it’s company A tries to sue CC-by-sa into not working, which is a rather more momentous deal.
Here’s the suit as filed against Ryan Holliday. Haven’t read it yet.
Don’t forget Levi Strauss
Good point. Also, in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, an anecdotal case is made that saloons and department stores were also key beneficiaries of gold rushers.
I agree with Jani’s conclusion on his blog that wikitravel is only headed one way now, and that’s down. Considering a large part of their search engine juice comes from Wikipedia, it’s a rather dumb move to go upsetting the wikimedia foundation and these volunteers any more than necessary, but this is your typical corporate knee jerk reaction. I’m surprised more aren’t placing at least some of the blame on the founders of wikitravel for selling the site in the first place. Realistically this was only ever just a matter of time the moment they took the money… It was always only a matter of time!
Thanks, Sam.
Especially given how Travellerspoint has a wiki travel guide of its own, you’re an authoritative voice to hear on the topic.
Thought the most interesting thing to come out of all this was that the purchase price of $1.7m was made public in the IB legal doc.
Also, thought this discussion, dating back to the German fork, has turned out to be rather well considered.
http://wikitravel.org/en/User:Hansm/Commercialisation_FAQ
Onwards, think most interesting point will be how Google treats the two sites with regard to page placement.
Thanks, Stuart!