Wikitravel and travel information

Wikitravel,, a site containing information for travelers. I don’t think the wiki concept works in all cases, but this is a good example of where it could work. But what happens if it becomes too popular? Can’t you imagine lots of local restaurants and hotels fighting to delete negative information about their business?

Here’s their page on how to buy an airline ticket.

Helpful tip: mobipocket has a template for creating-your-own-tourism ebook.

Here’s a discussion I started about the concept of DRM and ebooks. My last comment provided the coup de resistance. Library systems are providing digital content through netlibrary (which means encrypted Adobe DRM). That means basically that no portable devices can read anything they check out of the library without it. Is this a good situation? (At the very minimum, netlibrary should offer digital content as mobipocket ebooks).

Posted

4/9/2007

General

Robert Nagle

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Wikitravel and travel information”

Evan Prodromou

4/10/2007

Hi, Robert. I think there is a very real risk of businesses trying to put inaccurate information into Wikitravel. However, I think that accuracy has force of numbers.

Each person who wants to put incorrect information into Wikitravel wants to do it in a different way. Restauranteur A wants to fake up the listing on his restaurant, and Hotelier B wants to erase the description of his shoddy accommodations.

But travellers want things to be right in the _same_ way. So force of numbers is with accuracy.

This isn’t just theoretical — it happens every day on Wikitravel. Some business owners we convert into productive contributors; others simply give up and move on.
rjnagle

4/14/2007

Perhaps a community rating system might be better suited to handling this gaming of the system. Where there are honest and irresolvable disagreements in viewpoint, I’m not sure if the wiki format is the best one.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Wikitravel and travel information

Comments

2 responses to “Wikitravel and travel information”

Leave a Reply