evan

A lot of people have asked me about the Tim Wu piece in Slate about Wikitravel. I've commented already about the article in Wikitravel's Logbook: 8 April 2007.

The upshot: Wu got a lot of things really wrong about Wikitravel (like saying we didn't have any hotel listings for Bangkok). But if our readers get things wrong, that means Wikitravellers need to do some more work to help them get things right. User errors are developer errors writ large; we can do better.

But I think Tim Wu missed the main reason Wikitravel guides will always be better than proprietary guides: they are Free Cultural Works. Where I come from, that means a lot.

I wrote to Tim about his article, and he responded really kindly. The thing I liked most is that when he got home, he updated Wikitravel with the information he picked up on his trip to Thailand. That is pretty cool.

I'm not taking others' responses to the article too seriously. Wikitravel got a Webby Award nomination for Best Travel Site the same week. As Tom Wolfe said, "The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass." And Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." (Thanks to Hugh!)

tags: wikitravel travel tim wu slate

We're getting prepared this morning to head out to Puerto Rico for the first annual World-wide Wikitravel Get-together. Our flight leaves at 2:20PM, so we've got kind of a leisurely morning to get ready. As usual, we're pretty tense: what are we forgetting?

And I usually get hung up on unnecessary stuff to deal with. I should probably print out the Spanish phrasebook from Wikitravel, because my Spanish is pretty rusty. And I should download all the WT pages about Puerto Rico destinations to my laptop, just to know where we should fill in. And we can't find the charger for our camera's battery. And I want to bring a certain pair of cargo pants, but there's a button missing. Do I have time to sew on another?

Of course, all these anxieties melt once we get out of the house and into a taxi to the airport. Once you can't do things, you stop worrying about what you should do. I think.

The more I learn about Puerto Rico, the more fascinated I am. San Juan (Puerto Rico)'s Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The giant telescope at Arecibo is world-renowned as the SETI site. The islands of Vieques and Culebra are isolated and fun, and Fajardo and Rincon has world-class surfing.

My friend Biella Coleman gave me a great list of travel tips for San Juan and Culebra, which have been a big help in our planning.

OK, enough blogging: gotta get to work sewing on that button. (I've been stalling long enough for Maj to have found the camera charger under a baseball hat. Yay!)

tags: get-together07 wikitravel travel Puerto+Rico biellacoleman

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