Forget glossy travel brochures and flashy websites .One of the most cost-effective ways tourism entrepreneurs can promote their businesses is by simply updating their city's Wikipedia page.
An experiment by economists at the Carlo Alberto College in Turin, Italy, showed how a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page can lead to up to $100,000 in additional tourism revenue per year for a small town, highlighting the power of the free online encyclopedia.
The researchers randomly selected cities across Spain to make targeted improvements to their Wikipedia pages, adding a few paragraphs of information about their history and local attractions, as well as photos of the area.
No special technical expertise was required for all of the above. Most of the content added was simply translated from the Spanish Wikipedia into French, German, Italian or Dutch.
The results were truly remarkable, as adding just two paragraphs of text and a photo to a city's article increased overnight stays by 9% during the tourist season, and in some cases, the increase was even greater. For cities with no information on their Wikipedia pages at all, a small edit could increase visits by a third.
“If we extend this experiment to the entire tourism industry, the impact would be large,” write the authors, Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar and Michael Kumme. “Its impact could translate into billions of euros.”
The result raises questions about why more cities around the world don't do this basic editing themselves, the authors say. Wikipedia is largely written and edited by volunteers, but simply increasing the amount of information available on specific topics could yield huge rewards for the time spent.
However, Wikipedia's structure provided one answer to the question: almost all additions to the Dutch version of the site were removed within 24 hours, forcing researchers to limit their examination of the results to the other three languages.
An experienced editor at the Dutch site had spotted the ongoing experiment and proceeded to ban all future updates from the team. Commercial editing is not allowed on the site and the research was deemed to have crossed the line.
This experiment is not the first to highlight the online encyclopedia’s excessive influence. Another experiment, the researchers reported, showed that adding new scientific content to the encyclopedia “causes changes in hundreds of related scientific journal articles.” Even academics check Wikipedia and often cite as sources the same articles cited on the site.
The power of Wikipedia can be used for both good and evil. In August, it was revealed that an American teenager who had started editing the site as a hobby when he was 12 had become one of the main editors of the Scottish edition of the site, despite not being able to speak the language.
He had written entire articles replacing English words with their direct Scots translation, even if the resulting sentence made no sense. “This person has probably caused more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history,” noted the user who initially pointed out the problem.
