

Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel  - uladzislau
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/lessons-from-the-dramatic-slow-motion-death-of-wikitravel/

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haberman
I 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...](http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2009/08/The_Geeks_Guide_to_Seattle_53810857.html?page=all)).
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.

~~~
srunni
> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate
> special-interest travel guides.

I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the
aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything
manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland
and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and
Travelocity, but they're more like extensions of the package tour idea than a
rethinking of the concept.

In my vision, you'd give it the dates you want to travel, where you want to
go, your budget, and access to your social networking accounts (so it can
figure out your interests/hobbies). Then it uses the data you've given it
along with preexisting curated travel data (which could be based on
crowdsourced info, both from previous customers and from 3rd party sources) to
create an optimized & customized travel itinerary and take care of all the
purchases (plane tickets, hotel reservations, Uber reservations from the
airport to the hotel and between sightseeing locations (if needed), tickets
for different sightseeing locations, etc.) so that you just have to pay once,
to this service. You don't have to worry about when places are open/closed,
how long it takes to get between them, etc. - that would be automatically
calculated (should be pretty straightforward with Google Maps API access).

Then you'd want to have an associated smartphone app that will (in real-time)
display the itinerary, give directions between the different places, suggest
restaurants to eat at (maybe make reservations using OpenTable), etc. The
itinerary could even be dynamic. For example, if there's an outdoor activity
planned and it starts raining, it would automatically rearrange your itinerary
as necessary, etc. You could use GPS and/or NFC at museums and other places to
play back audio explanations of various exhibits (they already have this at
many museums, but you have to pay extra for the privilege and wear an iPod or
some other clunky device for the duration of the tour).

~~~
Avshalom
... you mean a travel agent?

~~~
srunni
No, travel agents fit into the "package tour" group that I mentioned above. In
my experience, travel agents have provided a one-size-fits-all experience -
stale and boring.

------
_delirium
I 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.

~~~
DrJokepu
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.

~~~
_delirium
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).

------
Revisor
Spot the differences:

2007 - Internet Brands purchases Jelsoft, creator of the succesful vBulletin
forum SW

2009 - IB starts selling vB 4.0 despite it being not finished and buggy.
Customers are angry

2010 - Internet Brands sues Kier Darby, a lead developer of XenForo, who had
previously served as a lead developer for Internet Brands' vBulletin, claiming
that Kier had not returned confidential information from Internet Brands
regarding the vBulletin software

2012 - After not having fulfilled the promises of vB4, IB introduces vB5. The
beta version meets with horror and disgust of the current customers. No
serious forum plans to upgrade.

2013 - The once mighty forum's future is as well as dead.

------
zachalexander
This 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).

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pault
Hmm, 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>

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jvdh
Wow, that's some bit of linkbaiting in that article, pointing to other
techcrunch articles and a lot of pointing towards skift.com, nytimes and some
other sites.

The entire article talks about three different websites, and it contains 0
links to any of them. <http://wikitravel.org> is the old one,
<http://wikivoyage.org> is the newer one, and the last one is not decided upon
yet, but the definitive source about that is:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide>

------
tnuc
Wikitravel suffered from having ads (commercial) while internet brands did
just enough to keep the site running. For some reason applying innovation or
new features to wikitravel just didn't happen.

Wikipedia suffers from a lot of issues in terms of the constant edit wars,
politics and rules. People who once edited on Wikitravel may run away from the
politics of wikipedia. Wikipedia articles will no longer link to Wikitravel
but to somewhere in wikipedia/media. Wikipedia will have slight edge on
wikitravel. Innovation on wikipedia is mainly limited to pictures and text so
any change isn't really. If innovation wasn't happening with Wikitravel it
certainly isn't going to happen with Wikipedia owning it.

The only real change with what has happened is that the content that once
existed on wikitravel and couldn't be commercialized, can now be integrated in
commercial applications/websites.

Very soon the content will be put up on commercial sites whilst they collect
further information for themselves. The top contenders at this stage are
Google and Tripadvisor. I honestly can't see Lonely Planet getting their shit
together, their parent company BBC don't have a clue.

I can only hope that new innovation occurs and winner of this are the users.

~~~
chris_wot
Your entire post is invalidated by the following facts:

1\. Wikipedia doesn't own squat. It is the WikiMedia Foundation that's
involved here, not the _English_ Wikipedia.

2\. The WMF haven't purchased or taken over WikiTravel. WikiVoyage have
voluntarily merged into a new travel project started by the WMF.

