Paris
I haven't written for a very long time, mostly because I was concentrating on a project which wound up taking a few months longer than I'd hoped: editing a print version of the Wikitravel Paris guide for Wikitravel Press.
In case you're not familiar with Wikitravel it's a travel guide built using the Wiki method, which is to say using a website that anybody can edit. Those of us who have been involved with Wikitravel over the last 5 years or so think that this sort of massive open collaboration is not just the best way to write a good up-to-date travel guide, but really the only way that is economically feasible.
As we've seen in the press recently the other guides, the ones you find in a bookstore, are often years out-of-date and in many cases don't even pay their contributors enough to visit the country they're writing about. Wikitravel contributors have at least mostly been to the places they write about, and are quick to complain when something is inaccurate, and remember in a wiki a complaint is tantamount to fixing the problem.
But there's more! Wikitravel Paris also represents the first major scale collaboration between Wikitravellers and the OpenStreetMap project which is a project to produce a detailed street-level map of the entire planet.
The book contains 20 super-detailed maps generated from OSM data. These maps supersede and exceed by some margin of quality the original Wikitravel Paris maps which I made in 2004, and I'm proud to say that I've contributed some data to them, and am deeply grateful to the OSM community to their gift to the world in providing the platform and the rest of the data in the map.
-mark
