Website of the Week — Wikitravel

  03 April 2009

Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.

Guide books are great for travelers … until you find that the museum you'd planned to visit is now closed on Tuesday or the morning bus no longer runs. Our Website of the Week is a travel guide that is kept current by the thousands of contributors who use the site.

"Wikitravel.org is a project to create a free and complete, up-to-date reliable world travel guide. It's built in collaboration by the community," says Brent Conver, who oversees travel sites including Wikitravel at parent company Internet Brands.

If you've ever used the popular user-written encyclopedia Wikipedia, you'll feel right at home at Wikitravel.org.

"So it's going to look very similar. They will be able to go in, type in a country or city that they're looking for in a search box.

"The articles are very in-depth, and they're all kind of in blog format, so you kind of read down and you don't have to click through a bunch of different pages to get there. It's all in one, very consistent location. So it's actually very easy for the traveler on the road to go through."

Like other wikis, Wikitravel is written by its users - 30,000 of them, Conver says, who have written more than 20,000 articles in English and almost 20 other languages. The contributors are mostly visitors to the places they're writing about, but you also get the local perspective of people who live there.

Because of the large number of contributors, Brent Conver says Wikitravel can be more up-to-date than conventional travel guides. Also, he says the 'anyone-can-edit' format improves accuracy.

"We have a really vibrant community that spends a lot of time editing other people's edits, making sure that they are as accurate as they can be. And quality turns out to be really important to the community. So really, we're very focused on making sure that we're having the most accurate, up-to-date information available on the Web.

Like any wiki website, Wikitravel isn't going to be 100 percent accurate all the time - but then, neither are conventional travel guides. Check it out at Wikitravel.org, or get the link to this and more than 200 other Websites of the Week from our site, VOAnews.com.

• Listen 
• Email 
• Print 
• Comments