A dog-eared copy of the MTV Italy travel book hardly left my side during a 2007 trip to the boot-shaped country. It provided the context and the basics I needed, but the downside was that it was six months out of date as soon as it was printed. So that fabulous trattoria was now formerly fabulous.

Six years later, and I am better off tapping a Google map on my smartphone or firing up TripAdivisor to find a nice hotel or meal while abroad. The information is instantly available and up to date (mostly), but here the downside is that it lacks the context and the broader backdrop that printed travel guides offer. What I want is something that offers both, instant information and a broader education on the place I am traveling.

That is exactly where the Wikipedia gang thinks it can help with a new travel-focused wiki, which aims to offer in-depth travel information that's updated as quickly as the internet.

On Jan. 15, the Wikimedia Foundation is taking its travel wiki, Wikivoyage, out of beta, reports travel site Skift. The wiki is meant to be read online, on a smartphone, or printed out to take with you on your travels. You can even create a book with pages from Wikivoyage to build your own physical travel guide.

Each Wikivoyage article includes key details you’d need to know when traveling somewhere. For a trip to Bali that means which airlines fly to the island, and a list of major cities. A Disney World article will tell you how much tickets will cost and a breakdown of the monorail's appeal. The articles are actually quite useful because it's one page of all the very basic information you need to navigate a new city, country, or theme park.

It's a great notion, but Wikivoyage is coming late to the already crowded travel industry, and the non-profit has some well-funded and very smart competition to outmaneuver — everyone from Yelp, to TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, Hipmunk and others. No one wanted to get into the encyclopedia business when Wikipedia launched, but the travel industry is among the largest and most lucrative of any category online.

And then there is Google. When Google purchased travel guide publisher Frommer’s in 2012, the search engine company gained tons of extensive travel guides and began adding relevant travel information to search results when you typed in Disneyland or the Palace of Versailles. Android phones with Google Now also get travel- and attraction-related information that shows up when you’re trekking around London or searching for the Eiffel Tower. That’s ideal for the smartphone generation, who as Google wants us to believe, is apt to hop on a plane to New York City without an agenda and needs guidance once they land.

But even in the smartphone-enabled world, there's probably still room for Wikivoyage. If you're in the U.S. using Google on your phone for travel plans is easy, but once you go abroad it's often not worth the hassle. Even if you can connect your smartphone to another carrier's network on another continent, you'll usually pay a premium on the data needed to load a website. It might be far easier (and cheaper) to whip out a Wikivoyage print-out, and go about your sightseeing (just don't lose that sheet of paper).

Whether we all end up doing that as much as we refer to Wikipedia will depend on how useful, which is to say, how comprehensive and accurate, Wikivoyage becomes. The beta only launched in September 2012, and there are plenty of holes around the world for a knowledgeable jet-setter or local to fill. But it is an open question of whether they will, especially without being paid for their efforts.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said this week on The Colbert Report that Wikivoyage operates in the same way as Wikipedia, with no advertising or other business model.

To stay in the mix among the throngs of already established travel sites and Google, Wikivoyage will need to rally a Wikipedia-sized mob to build a repository of travel knowledge as extensive and vast as the encyclopedia site. Ad-free or not, if Wikivoyage doesn't have the travel information you want, why bother? And if you think spammy entries are bad on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage will be a magnet for every restaurant and hotel looking for a plug.

It's going be a tough act for Wikivoyage to pull off, especially keeping the marketers at bay. But then again, that's what every reference book or encyclopedia maker in the world thought until they were mowed down by Wales and his Wikipedia army.