Clinamen

A colleague(John) sent me this story from Salon by Tim Wu about a website called Wikitravel.

Wu decided to visit Thailand with "only the internet" as his guide, but he ran into a problem when trying to use Wikitravel. It turns out that the site has a "be fair" rule that is similar to the Wikipedia "NPOV" rule. As Wu explains, this is not what you want in a travel guide. What you want are opinions: What's good? What's bad? Where should I stay? Where should I definitely NOT stay? He moved his internet research to Travelfish and had much better luck. This site is written by professionals but also allows user feedback.

The lesson? Wikis are not good for everything. While Travelfish seems to offer a good mix of professional writing, expert advice, and visitor input, Wikitravel (at least according to Wu) might be a case of Bad Idea Jeans.