Wikitravel thoughts

I knew that Wikipedia had many different sub-Wikis in all manners of subjects, but I never thought that there might be a travel Wiki. Probably because I'm not the travelling type, but I digress. I'm actually quite surprised that Wikitravel hasn't been featured in one of those Travelocity commercials with the Roaming Gnome or William Shatner and Priceline.com.

Wikitravel seems like a very useful addition to the site [Wikipedia] for people who are interested in travelling (duh) or who want to learn in-depth about different countries, cities, states, and so on, especially from a common person or tourist's point of view. The concept of people being able to post additions to a specific Wiki article from any country (or state, city, so on) and be able to share information about that country with other people who are intrested seems a very handy one. All of the information gets very specific, as well, so for tourists who want to know how they would be able to get around a city, what major cities are in a country, where certain churches or airports are, what food is like, etc. Wikitravel is like a godsend for planning trips, creating itineraries, and the like.

The main drawbacks with the site are the expectations as listed in the Policies and Goals/Non-Goals sections. "All text should be fair" is certainly an expected characteristic of useful information, but being a publicly-edited source, there are definitely bound to be opinionated, derogatory and badmouthing posts. There will always be some naysayer or delinquent that takes delight in bashing someone or something or someplace, and hopefully the measures taken by the filtering and editing team will be more than enough to catch and delete any objectionable posts. Also, some of the non-goals listed are going to be difficult to enforce. There isn't even any guarantee that many Wikitravel users will read the goals and/or policies sections, nevermind abide by them. Surely many users will post content that will be in opposition with policies like "do note create a travel anthology" or "do not make an advertising brouchure" simply because users are likely to be casual contributors, and won't always write content in accordance with such rules. And if many people post contributions like that on any kind of regular basis, then filtering information is sure to be an unruly job for the team designated to do it.

That being said, Travelwiki seems like it would be an exceptional site to use in the Travel Writing class offered at URI, simply because of the fact that the purposes and objectives of the two are very likely to coincide. Should I take Travel Writing as a class toward my major in the future, I'll be sure to make use of Travelwiki. I just might add it to my list of Wikis to look at while passing the time, too.