Wikivoyage is a travel wiki that’s even more like a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than Wikipedia is.
Screenshot: Animaniacs
When you’re researching for travel, Wikivoyage is a great place to start. You’ll get a better sense of a place’s vibe from Wikivoyage’s conversational pages than from Wikipedia’s dry encyclopedic text. Wikivoyage contributors are allowed to insert opinions; they just have to be “fair”.
So where Wikipedia’s page on Park Slope says:
Gentrification accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s as working-class families were generally replaced by upper-middle-class people being priced out of Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights.
Wikivoyage’s page gets to say:
The granola-eating transplant crowd might make you queasy at times and nostalgic for crackheads.
Wikivoyage pages include lists of landmarks, restaurants, bars, hotels, things to do, and sections such as “Understand”, which describes a location’s history and je ne sais quoi, and “Stay Safe”, which tells you where to watch out for pickpockets or scams or other dangers. City pages, such as the page for Brooklyn, break down neighbourhoods and districts. There are also directions from major airports, trains and highways.
Just FYI, there’s a very similar site called Wikitravel. In 2013, a lot of Wikitravel users revolted against the site, which ran ads but had increasingly poor technical support, and took their content to Wikivoyage, which is non-profit and ad-free. Here’s Wikivoyage’s side of the story. (Wikitravel never mentions Wikivoyage.) Since then, Wikivoyage has grown larger and gotten more edits. And if anything’s missing, you can add it.
So don’t panic.
Wikivoyage [Home page]
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