Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage and Wikipedia

Wikivoyage is part of the Wikimedia movement. The most-used Wikimedia project is Wikipedia; other projects include Wikibooks, Wikidata (the database for statistics used on Wikivoyage, such as some of the coordinates, etc.), and Wikimedia Commons (the repository for Wikivoyage's pictures and audio files).

Differences
While Wikivoyage and Wikipedia are cooperating, there are differences in scope, style, and ambition.

As a travel guide, one of Wikivoyage's goals is to provide overviews of destinations that can be covered per our "What is an article?" policy. Wikivoyage articles should have enough information for a tourist to understand why a place is notable (along with a bit of historical or geographic context), but a Wikivoyage article's emphasis is on finding things to see or do, along with a list of enough basic infrastructure (food, transport, lodging) to make the journey. As a general rule, the "Understand" section of a Wikivoyage article should not have the majority of an article's content.

On the other hand, Wikipedia tends to provide more extensive detail or broader coverage in many areas: one historic building, one museum or one famous work of art in a notable museum may have an entire encyclopaedia article, while in the travel guide an individual museum or venue might just have a listing. Wikivoyage may indicate which birds can be observed in a national park; an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia will go one step further by including a full-length article about each of the individual species.

Topics which are not related to travel are likely to be covered in Wikipedia (which does not specialise in any one field of endeavour) but are not covered in this travel guide. Likewise, you are unlikely to find information about a city's best restaurants, their phone numbers, and pricing information for those restaurants on Wikipedia; however, this information is included in Wikivoyage articles.

There's also a difference in the way a subject is covered: an encyclopaedia is a secondary source which tends to be neutral in tone and avoid imparting first-hand knowledge. A travel guide welcomes first-hand observations if they are fair (which isn't quite the same as neutrality) and put the voyager first. If Wikipedia is a grand Encyclopaedia Galactica which summarises and consolidates a universe of knowledge, Wikivoyage is more akin to a friendly Hitchhiker's Guide which packages the information the voyager needs in their travels in a handy guide which can be taken along for the ride as carry-on baggage.

Banners
One difference between Wikivoyage and Wikipedia that may surprise Wikipedians is that we do not use a table of contents on most of our pages like Wikipedia does. Instead, banners are used at the top of Wikivoyage pages. Wikivoyage banners are at the top of a page instead of being at one of the sides (usually on Wikipedia, the left side) and have a picture in the background. However, they are functionally much the same as Wikipedia's version of the table of contents: both include links to various sections of the article in question.