Jawaad Mahmood in Tokyo

So I was working on travel.wiki.com, and managed to get a proper layout done. I am quite happy with it – but I know that there are going to be people out there who are going to hee and haw and ask, “Why must it be done?”. I’m going to try to answer that here.

Wikitravel.org is an excellent resource. I won’t talk down to them, nor anyone else who wants to contribute to free information available online. Still, I have grave concerns about its setup, layout, and overall goal. What is it trying to be?

The design for the site, especially the front page, is unacceptably bad. There is a whole bunch of stuff hanging there which makes no sense. Why must there be a ‘Destination of the Month’, an ‘Off the Beaten Path’ and ‘Discover’ article all on the same page? Two, why is it cluttered so badly? Finally, why must I contribute my time and effort when I could do the same thing for wiki.com and make money; both for myself and my contributors?

A particularly gross example is their article on Montreal. I wasn’t sure if I was reading Wikitravel or if I was reading Wikipedia. If I am headed to Montreal for a few days, I wouldn’t care about the history – I just about things that I can see and do while there. Why shouldn’t that information pop up the instant I open the page? Mind you, I am not saying that the history of Montreal should be ignored all-together – rather, that it is not the prime concern. Second, there is far too much text, with far too little in the way of pictures. Travel is an all-encompassing experience. Putting too much text in one place is ridicuous; just look at their article on New York City, they had to put a warning that it had too much text (at 120 kb of text, nonetheless). A proper splitting of the data is imperative, and I think the software being used at wiki.com does it better (just my opinion – I have noted drawbacks in other fields).

Neither site will be good without a community, and a community won’t just appear out of nowhere. However, I have the initial seeds for a good community. One of the constant criticisms of Wikipedia is that knowledge of something is not appreciated. This is not the case at wiki.com. I can set the site to a state where only people I talk to can be added. Sure, you will have people who will want to contribute without having to register / etc.., and for them I will setup a message board of sorts. We can “meet” there, talk, and then register the user for the site. I’m not saying that is what I will do, but the fact the potential exists to close off the contributing community, and only permit trustworthy people to post is a good thing.

I guess the main question is “What do you want to do?”. I want to create a website anyone can visit, for free, find great information about places or activities that they want to do, and give them all the information they need to be able to go & participate. Tourism is the ultimate way to blow off steam – I want to help in the process. If I was to try to sum it up, I want to make planning a trip fun. Looking through wikitravel is not boring, but it isn’t fun to sort through the same stuff I find on wikipedia – so let’s see what I can do about it!