On February 15, Wikimedia Foundation announced the settlement of litigation between itself and Internet Brands.
The news means smooth sailing ahead for new wiki-based travel site Wikivoyage — which officially launched in January.
It also means a loss for Internet Brands, which had attempted to build a commercial business on the back of user-generated, Creative Commons-licensed travel content with an ad-supported website, Wikitravel.
Internet Brands did not find support in court for its legal argument that Wikivoyage, the fork to which Wikimedia volunteers ported user-generated content, was an “Infringing Website,”  violating the company’s intellectual property rights.
It also failed to gain traction with its claims of trademark infringement.
The SERPs battle commences
Now it’s a battle for primacy in search engine rankings. As of today, Wikivoyage has more than 27,000 English-language entries, versus 84,000 on Wikitravel.
Yet Wikivoyage now claims it has about 200 volunteer editors. (See a typical day’s edits, here.) Time is on its side.
Analysis
Wikitravel articles were never as informative as Wikipedia articles or guidebook excerpts. Its successor, Wikivoyage, hasn’t yet revealed any major innovation that will tackle the underlying reasons why.
TripAdvisor’s hotel reviews work, to the extent that they do, because their focus is narrow: Is this specific hotel good or bad?
In contrast, Wikivoyage’s articles are wide-ranging and open-ended. So when a particular destination or travel-related topic lacks a passionate editor, Wikivoyage will have a gap in its content or will become the victim of PR-marketing.
Why hasn’t there been a successful Wikpedia of travel?
Wikipedia works, in part, because its entries are created out of a finely tuned set of rules and norms regarding things like citations. But as Jani Patokallio, the publishing platform architect at Lonely Planet has blogged:
Wikitravel has to rely on the subjective opinions of anonymous travellers, and when they are in conflict, it is not possible to say who is “right” and who is “wrong”: the only possible route is to strip out anything disputable and leave behind bland trivia.
This is not helped by the steady stream of Wikipedians coming in under the misconception that, as in Wikipedia, dull, unopinionated writing is a good thing.
If writing a neutral review is hard enough, then curating a neutral list of top attractions, best places to eat etc is even harder, especially for country or region-level articles.
These tend to be constantly subject to edit wars, with residents and business owners pitching for their own places and surreptitiously trying to remove others.
Patokallio is ultimately hopefully that a solution will be found, perhaps if a for-profit company is able to build a mutually beneficial, nurturing, and symbiotic relationship with the community of volunteer writers.
He’s also published insightful comments on a related project he directly worked on:Â Wikitravel Press: Seven lessons from a startup that failed.
But as the outlets for user-generated content in travel proliferates — reddit forums, Gogobot, Quora, etc. — Wikivoyage seems like a long-shot endeavor. But no less valuable as a labor of love.
NB: Image of Wikivoyage staff celebrating the site’s official launch, courtesy of James Alexander/ Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
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About Sean O'Neill
Does the web really need another online travel guide? What makes Wikivoyage or WikiTravel any different from Frommers, Fodors, Lonely Planet, Wcities, Yahoo Travel, USA Today Travel, AOL Travel, TripAdvisor, etc…? If the only difference is they have Wiki in their name I think the world will go on quite easily without them.
Thanks for your comment.
One thing Wikivoyage has in its favor is heavy marketing and branding from one of the most used websites in the world: Wikipedia.
Another advantage it has is that it is especially useful in non-English speaking markets, where there is still often a dearth of detailed user-generated travel coverage. While Wikivoyage may struggle in established English-language dominated countries, it may boom elsewhere in the world.
That’s a wild speculation, though.
Best,
Sean
WhoWikiCares,
“What makes Wikivoyage or WikiTravel any different from Frommers, Fodors, Lonely Planet, Wcities, Yahoo Travel, USA Today Travel, AOL Travel, TripAdvisor, etc…?”
There’s a world of difference between between them. I would go to wikitravel/voyage before the others aside from say the ThornTree if I was stuck for some accommodation or border advice/recommendations.
Dave,
Thanks for your comment.
I agree: There’s definitely an audience that wants travel content that’s from actual travelers and not marketers, presented in a way that isn’t surrounded by irritating pop-up ads.
Best,
Sean
I agree that Wikivoyage’s ultimate usefulness remains to be seen.
When announced, I went to the page for my city, which is not large but is popular with tourists. I made a couple of factual edits (updated the name of an attraction, added a local commercial airport, corrected a B&B listing), but did not add any listings.
Going back today and looking at the listings I can see that more have been added, and I can see the beginnings of advertising (a hotel listing it’s features like wifi) and opinions about restaurants (go there when X is there). Some of the places listed represent what makes us “unique”, but others are generic. To be expected when there is no overall theme and someone to enforce the theme.
I’m not sure whether Wikivoyage will become an acknowledged travel resource, but I do think that regular Wikipedia listings continue to be the best references for individual places, and that someone will be able to incorporate them into an overall reference that gains wide adoption.
Hi Ron,
Thanks for that comment.
It’s especially relevant to break out that Wikipedia’s main entries can still be valuable travel resources on destinations.
I am trying to hold out hope. If you had asked me in 1995 if Encyclopedia Brittanica would be put out of business because tens of thousands of people would voluntarily spend hours creating a deeper, interlinked, ultimately more useful version, I would have said you’re insane.
So maybe they’ll figure out the incentives. Google continues to adore user-generated content that is full of deep links, and as it becomes more difficult for travel companies to win the PageRank game, partnering with this content might have a benefit in SERPs that isn’t directly related to advertising and sales. That’s just one idea.
Best,
Sean
It will be interesting to see how well Wikimedia manages to integrate Wikivoyage with other good, free open-source data such as the Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Wikivoyage tends to be a good introduction to a city (as a list of the main attractions and a brief explanation of the history, geography and culture in an area) which could serve as a jumping-off point into a more detailed, encyclopaedic focus on an individual landmark or historic site which has its own encyclopaedia article on Wikipedia.
There are city-level articles in the encyclopedia, but they’re not written in the same manner. Many are packed with endless statistics, trivia or even RamBot spam (Rambot was a rather annoying automated script which used to run on WP, bulk-importing US 2000 census trivia for every town and hamlet in that country as placeholder articles before finally being put out of Wikipedians’ misery around 2006. Sadly, many of his edits remain today despite the numbers being too outdated now to be of use as anything but filler.) In some cases, Wikipedia will have a great article about a city; in others, Wikivoyage will shine.
So now the question is how to present the best of all of these projects as one cohesive product. There have been third-party attempts to consolidate data from multiple free sources (the WikiSherpa mobile app switched to Wikivoyage, supplemented with Wikipedia data and maps) but that’s just scratching the surface of what might be possible if all the pieces could be fit smoothly together.
If wikivoyage would could start up a counter to the neutral bland stats and facts and really launch itself I’d recommend they launch a forum so travelers can have their “opinion”.
With the current status of ThornTree WikiVoyage or Wikitravel for that matter could really elevate themselves. How quite they could battle the spam and trolls would be another question.
I’d be surprised if Wikimedia were to go into the forum hosting business… they’re a 501c3 non-profit foundation devoted to adult education, not a soapbox for random hôteliers to boast the quality of their respective wares. To fit with the mission of Wikimedia (which primiarily is to build Wikipedia and related projects), there is a need for actual reliable fact instead of just allowing every spammer and troll to “have their opinion”.
Some actual educational value has to be present or the project would not fit the foundation’s primary mission.
I’d be sceptical about the claim that “Wikivoyage has more than 27,000 English-language entries, versus 84,000 on Wikitravel,” especially since it’s usually made in the same breath as a claim that both wikis contain basically the same text.
It looks like WT is distorting the numbers by including things which are simply not articles (such as talk, user or image description pages, most likely). Remove that bit of misleading puffery and you’d likely find 26000 of the same articles which are in Wikivoyage are basically the entire main body of WT (but perhaps half a year out of date, if no one is maintaining them). There is also a huge quantity of “outline” articles, little more than stubs with “X is a city in Y” and blank see/do eat/drink buy/sleep sections. MediaWiki by default counts anything in mainspace with at least one valid internal wikilink as an article, so these “outline” skeletons are badly distorting article count statistics on both sites.
Thanks for raising that issue!