Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
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Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#2I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else.
Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which used to be a community-run/crowdsourced lyrics repository, not full of pop-up ringtone ads, was similarly negative.
Since then, I contribute only to nonprofits that seem to have some long-term credibility with their data licensing and governance, such as Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, and OpenStreetMap. In principle I'd contribute to a for-profit if it were really convincing about its long-term good faith (and provided data export), but the bar is high.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#3Hmm, good to know. I work remotely and travel quite a bit, and wikitravel has always been the first place I check when I land in a new place. Updating bookmarks to http://en.wikivoyage.org
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#4I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else. Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which use…
How about StackOverflow? Even though it's ran by a for-profit entity, all user-provided content is licensed as Creative Commons and they offer regular database dumps for download.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#5I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if it's on the way to something else. Planning a travel itinerary is all about clustering attractions so that you see lots of cool stuff without wasting too much time in transit.
Given this, it amazes me how primitive the location features of travel guides are. When I buy a Lonely Planet guide, even as an eBook, at best I get a small, low-res map with numbers that cross-reference a list of labels that cross-reference the actual blurbs about these places! This is very slow and labor-intensive to scan. What I really want is a way to overlay the travel guide on top of my phone's Google Maps, so I can easily see my current location, any markers I've added like my hotel, and travel guides all in a single map. I want to be able to click a location marker to get the travel guide's blurb. Bonus points if I can easily combine different travel guides onto a single map (Lonely Planet, Wikitravel, etc.)
One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides. For example, the Puget Sound Business Journal maintains a list of attractions called "The Geek's Guide to Seattle" (http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2009/08/Th...). I would love to be able to search for these kinds of guides when I visit a new city and combine all of them into a single map. Sort of like Amazon Listmania lists, it would give you an opportunity to find like-minded people and what they think is cool.
This is a lot like what KML allows in Google Earth (and maybe Google Maps too?) but very few people use this format and the workflows for using KML in this way don't seem to be very streamlined (for example, it appears you can "import" a KML file into maps, but you can't subscribe to one by URL).
Established content providers for travel guides might not like this approach because it commoditizes them, but I think it would help the best content to ultimately win out.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#6I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else. Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which use…
How about StackOverflow? Even though it's ran by a for-profit entity, all user-provided content is licensed as Creative Commons and they offer regular database dumps for download.
Actually yes, that's a good example; not sure why I didn't think of it. They run the community well, and the license and data dumps are a sufficient insurance policy against any kind of change in that (which I'd only expect if they were bought out).
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#7I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…
We tried to do something along these lines with journly.com. We've since pivoted away and are working on something else, but I agree it's still a problem that needs to be solved.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#8I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…
Would there be a way to combine guides like that in OpenStreetMap? That might be a better option than Google Maps.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#9I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…
The ebooks really are frustrating aren't they - I blame this mostly on apples iBooks though which is best for novels really.
We're exploring digital travel guides over at coolplaces.co.uk and are busy building out content (uk only for now). So it's interesting to read your ideas on this as they are close to ours. It's early days yet for us, and we have a lot of ground to cover before we get to custom travel guides created by users, but it is on the roadmap, and these are exciting times to explore travel info. Would be interested in your comments on our site.
Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
#10This is great news. I've always appreciated Wikitravel, and only wished it caught on a bit more. With Wikimedia behind it I'm sure it will.
Incidentally, my favorite use of Wikitravel has nothing to do with travel -- using it for a more candid or colorful take on a place than the drier treatment you'll find on its Wikipedia page. A Wikitravel page often leads with facts and images that IMHO are more interesting than stats, rankings, etymology, and history (which is how most Wikipedia place articles start).