Wikitravel

Meet my newest web diversion: Wikitravel. WT is the Wikipedia of travel guides. It's got, or will have, articles about every city on Earth (worth visiting and/or worth writing about and/or someone's from or been to). Go ahead, go there and check your local city. I'll wait.

Pretty cool, eh? What, you found something wrong? Or better, something you'd like to add? Go ahead! All pages are editable. If you vandalize or make a mistake, someone else will helpfully revert the page to before. Articles are well-linked to others, and are fairly hierarchial where possible.

Besides cities, it has articles about other popular places – Death Valley, for example; I'm trying to write one about the Mojave Desert.

I've been concentrating on what I know best – San Diego area, a few in Los Angeles, some in Baja and of course Imperial Valley – which is actually a rather popular tourist destination.

I even wrote Driving in Mexico – mostly, unless someone's edited it. Is it perfect? Of course not – but someone will get around to fixing it. Feel free to hack at it yourself. If you do, it works better if you register a username, tho you're not required to.

One of the cool things about WT is that, although it's been running for a couple of years, it's still sort of getting started – so maybe you're not getting in on the ground floor, but maybe you're on the Mezzanine. Or the pool deck on top of the lobby, or something.

Waste of time? Sure. But it's entertaining. And I enjoy contributing to this sort of open information exchange. And I found information about all the places on my upcoming trip to China (more about that at some point).

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