The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that supports and operates Wikipedia, brought its crowd-sourced reference model to the travel industry last month with the introduction of the online guide Wikivoyage. The Web site is one of several specialized wikis backed by the organization, including Wikinews and Wiktionary.
Those spinoffs, though, were not making a foray into travel, a topic that is already replete with crowd-sourced advice that can be found everywhere from TripAdvisor to Foursquare. While such sites promote their volume, Wikivoyage seems to be trying to cut through the clutter. Its user-generated content is filtered and edited into coherent articles, so there’s no need to cull through hundreds of reviews — they’ve already done it for you.
Visitors used to other travel sites will notice something missing besides clutter: in keeping with the foundation’s charitable mission, Wikivoyage does not provide any way for users to book travel directly on its site. Its entries, though, include plenty of links to airlines, hotels, restaurants and sights.
Wikivoyage says it already has posted about 50,000 articles in nine languages on destinations ranging from Walt Disney World (above) to Dostoyevsky’s summer retreat in Russia. As with other wiki sites, anyone can add to or revise entries, which are monitored by a core group of about 200 volunteer editors.