Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel | Hacker News Reader

Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

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62 pointsuladzislau30 comments

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...). 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.

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.

Care to share why you pivoted away from that idea?

Would there be a way to combine guides like that in OpenStreetMap? That might be a better option than Google Maps.

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.

Something that has hit me more times than is ideal is opening times. A surprising number of travel guides do odd things like say 'open Tuesday to Sunday, closed 1st Sunday of the month.' At a quick skim its easy to miss the 2 key things, closed some Sundays, closed all Mondays. And unhelpfully the format of the information is often inconsistent within the same publication. Invariably the info is out of date anyway, and prices are considerably higher than the guides states. We usually used Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, but the lack of up to date opening times was a continual pain (out of date prices is annoying, but you can spend more and get in, but if the place is closed, you're stuck).

> 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).

... you mean a travel agent?

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.

http://plnnr.com/

This seems quite nice. It has a solid UI and is certainly heading in the right direction, but lots of work remains to be done. For example, flight booking needs to be integrated, and a smartphone app isn't available.

They say the service is completely free, which IMO is a big mistake - the right approach is to be responsible for all the payments and then charge the user just one time, which not only allows you to add a fee on top (your primary revenue source) - it removes one more pain point for the user.

Wouldn't that require having arrangements with all the carriers?

Also, I probably wouldn't give several thousand dollars to an intermediary, especially when some airlines have "special" policies that apply to tickets booked by proxy (e.g. the proxy needs to request changes, not the end user).

Travelers not willing to do some legwork should not be surprised if they find themselves confined to proven tourist trails. And in fact that's what many people want.

I have to ask:

Why is there so much emphasis on planning a trip? What happened to mapping out a few attractions and spending the rest of the time stumbling around letting your feet and eyes be your guide? All my favourite trips have resulted from pure serendipity and the rewarding experience of discovering something purel by accident.

I understand your frustration with how the travel guides under-utilize potential of new media.

I would like to ask you, though: do you find electronic renditions of Lonely Planet (for either e-ink reader or tablet computer) an adequate substitute for the paper version? I understand that they could be much better in theory, but are they at least not worse? I am going to go on a tour around Europe and I seriously consider buying an iPad or a e-ink reader in part for Lonely Planet, because they should be easier to carry around than even a single travel guide.

I've used Lonely Planet guides extensively in paperback and somewhat in Kindle form. The Kindle versions are worse in terms of usability. This is partly because the maps are usable in paper form, where it is easy to flip between the map and the legend, or indeed where they are sometimes on facing pages visible at once. The way they make the electronic versions, the maps often have a low-res overview and legible sections on separate pages. Want to move north on the map? Go forward two pages! That's just silly, a UI worse than MapQuest ten years ago.

What's good about LP on Kindle? If you happen to be travelling very light to several first-world destinations which are not covered in any single book, you can definitely save space and weight. Also if you buy the book more for the prose than the maps, it could be all right (with an iPad and a local SIM card this could work well enough, again assuming you don't travel where people are very poor).

I just got back from a trip to hawaii, and still bought the Kindle version of the LP guide (and another) while there, rather than a physical print book, because I could do it from my hotel room without putting on pants the day before picking the next day's activity. A secondary consideration was 3 less things to carry around.

The books really could have been vastly better -- there were some clickable urls (when viewed in the iPad 3 kindle app)

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.

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).

IMDB was originally crowsourced. Started on Usenet.

Can anyone assert ownership over and derive commercial benefit from a data source that traces its origins to volunteer contributors? What would be legally required to do that?

> 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.

What is it with lyric sites and ringtone ads? LyricWiki went the same way.

Running a lyrics site is a tricky thing. Yes, there is a ton of traffic because it's essentially built for SEO. But think about the demographics who view lyrics. Typically very young and without a credit card. Translation: advertising == lower CPMs than other demographics.

So lyric sites have to supplement traditional banners with, well, those ringtone ads.

In the case of SongMeanings, we're doing ringtone ads because our licensing agreements are very expensive. It's not cheap doing what we're doing. We're proud to be licensed, sure, but again, it's very expensive.

Heads up -- if you become a member at SongMeanings, you'll actually see fewer advertisements. It's our way of saying thanks to loyal users.

I'm certainly open ears to suggestions on how to pay for licensing while not doing ringtone adverts. Or any other suggestions on how to improve SM, too.

Mike SongMeanings

The sad thing is, even non-profits are not guaranteed to stay that way indefinitely.

See how CouchSurfing turned into B-Corporation after being denied their 501(c)(3) charity status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing#2011_incorporation

They were a non-profit, for the first 8 years.

Huh, I didn't even realize that was possible. Seems like quite a bait-and-switch to build up a community under the guise of a nonprofit, and then take it for-profit afterwards.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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