WIKIPEDIA IMPACT ON TOURISM
In 2018, Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer and Olga Slivko published the paper Wikipedia matters, containing the results of their research focused on Wikipedia impact.
The goal was to evaluate the economic impact of user-generated information regarding touristic destinations.
In particular, their experiment verified whether enhancing the quality of Wikipedia articles on some touristic destinations may influence turists’ choices.
The results demonstrate that the existence of good Wikipedia articles, in different languages, high the visits till 9%.
CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT, TOURISM AND WIKIPEDIA
Wikipedia can be and important tool for cultural promotion and tourism web marketing.
Wiki environments, are based on ethic, formal and quality rules and, at the same time, they can be edited by any user.
In particular, Wikipedia ecosystem is full of many projects in addition to the encyclopedia, not always so well known but with important destination management effects.
WIKIPEDIA PROJECTS RELATED TO TOURISM
WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Wikimedia Commons is the centralized multimedia digital archive of Wikipedia ecosystem, with almost 50 millions files (mostly images).
All the files present in this archive could be used inside all other Wikipedia projects, but also anywhere else.
It was launched in September 2004.
commons.wikimedia.org
WIKI VOYAGE 1/2
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors.
Wikivoyage is a multilingual project, launched in 2012 and now available in 20 languages, with each language-specific project developed independently.
Wikivoyage content is broadly categorized as: destinations, itineraries, phrasebooks, and travel topics.
The italian version is at 4th place for number of guides (590.764 guides) and at 4th place for number of editors (22.605 active users)
it.wikivoyage.org
WIKI VOYAGE 2/2
In the long term period, Wikivoyage aims to become a world tourism guide thanks to the contributions of users located all over the world.
Wikivoyage aims to facilitate the exchange of information between tourists who have already visited or are about to visit a place.
WIKI LOVES MONUMENTS
Wiki loves monuments is an international photo contest held annually in September.
The mission is the collection of images of the world’s cultural heritage so that they can be uploaded to Wikipedia.
The 2011 edition entered the Guinness Book of Records as “World’s Biggest Photo Contest”
ikilovesmonuments.wikimedia.it
OPEN STREET MAP
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project launched in 2004, aimed at creating free content maps of the world and based on free editable maps made by users.
The project aims at a worldwide collection of geographical data, with the main purpose of creating maps and cartographies.
Some tourism applications based on OSM are:
- OMA: description of hiking and cycling trails, various amenities near the trail. Listing of trails by regions. Listing of amenities and POI by regions.
- Futouring.it: portal for cultural tourism in the Latium Region (Italy), containing background information and multimedia files for thousands of places, monuments and archaeological sites.
- KOMOOT Routing: calculate routes for mountain bikes, touring bikes and hiking taking your fitness level and elevation into account
- Wanderpferde: directory of accomodations for trail riders and horses in southern Germany.
FROM TERRITORY TO PROJECTS
Wikipedia voices written by inhabitants
History, culture, environment and traditions told by people who live and know the territory.
Creation of a local photographs archive on Wikimedia Commons
The territory presented through images, a perpetual memory and available to all.
Creation of tourist guides for Wikivoyage
Hikers, cyclists and experts, write their own tourist guide of a place.
Increasingly detailed and capillary mapping on OSM
The updating speed make these maps the most reliable and dynamic in the web.
FROM PROJECTS TO TERRITORY
All material is freely reusable, in respect of CC-BY-SA licence.
Considering the Wikipedia high ranking on search engines, Wikipedia voices can be a showcase for the territory-
Images on Wikimedia Common can be used to illustrate the material of operators (paper and web).
Wikivoyage guides tell the story of the territory with a different perspective from that of Wikipedia, giving space to tourist attractions.
OSM’s map allows to save money for Google’s license, and allows wide degrees of customization.
REFERENCES
- Agirre, E., Barrena, A., De Lacalle, O. L., Soroa, A., Fernando, S., & Stevenson, M. (2012, May). Matching Cultural Heritage items to Wikipedia. In LREC (pp. 1729-1735).
- Franch M. (2010), Marketing delle destinazioni turistiche. Metodi, approcci e strumenti McGraw-Hill.
- Hecht, B., Starosielski, N., & Dara-Abrams, D. (2007, December). Generating educational tourism narratives from Wikipedia. In Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (AAAI-INT’07) (pp. 37-44).
- Kotler P. et al. (2018), Marketing del turismo Pearson.