Wikipedia:Meetup/West Coast/Leveraging Wiki

Leveraging the reach of Wikipedia:
a workshop for tourism operators

This is a series of free workshop run in September 2020 by Dr Mike Dickison as part of the West Coast Wikipedian at Large project. Most people visiting the West Coast are getting their information from Google and Wikipedia, so we need to make sure the information they're seeing is detailed, comprehensive, and accurate. But Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a marketing tool, and you can't use it to directly promote your business. There are other options, like the free travel guide Wikivoyage, and the free image library Wikimedia Commons. In this workshop you'll learn what you can do to raise the profile of the West Coast and your business without breaking any rules.

The event is hosted by Development West Coast.

When and where

• Fri 11 Sept, 11:00 am – midday, Development West Coast, 54 Tainui Street, Greymouth • Register
• Fri 18 Sept, 11:00 am – midday, EPIC Westport, 10a Lyndhurst Street, Westport • Register
• Fri 25 Sept, 11:00 am – midday, Westland District Library, Sewell St, Hokitika • Register
• Thu 14 Oct, 11:00 am – midday, Franz Josef Medical Centre, 97 Cron Street, Franz Josef • No registration required

To attend

• These workshops are free, thanks to the support of Development West Coast.
• There are limited spaces, so register here to be sure of a place.
• The workshops are primarily for tourism operators; if you just want to learn how Wikipedia works and how to edit it, come along to the all-day public workshops being run the following day in Greymouth, Westport, and Hokitika (listed here).

Media

• Use the link https://w.wiki/ZoY if you want a short, shareable link to this page

Background

Wikipedia is a window to the world, and every place’s public face. Wikipedia is the 5th-most-visited website in the world, and the only non-profit in the top 10. Wikipedia articles are in the first few search results of any topic, if not the first result. English Wikipedia has 6 million articles, and is one of 300 different language Wikipedias, some of which also have millions of articles. Combined with other Wikimedia Foundation projects, like the free image library WikiCommons and the open database Wikidata, Wikipedia is part of the information infrastructure of the world.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and the articles are written by volunteers; currently, about 250,000 dedicated editors (Wikipedians) around the the world. Despite the lack of an editorial board, the coverage is usually very accurate, sometimes amazingly so, and there are teams of volunteers and software “bots” that check the articles for accuracy and swiftly remove vandalism. Since it was launched in 2001, Wikipedia has been a great example of the power of collaboration and crowdsourcing.

But New Zealand has a Wikipedia problem. Our editor community is quite small, so in almost every area – towns, national parks, artists, endangered species – the coverage in Wikipedia is much poorer than an equivalent place, person, or thing in the UK or the USA. For example, let's look at two geological attractions: the seaside town of Lyme Regis in Dorset, popular with fossil hunters, which has similar tourist numbers to Fox Glacier. But the Fox Glacier article (400 words) is dwarfed by the Lyme Regis article (2600 words), and is dominated by coverage of fatal accidents. Someone planning their visit to New Zealand and Googling the famous Fox Glacier wouldn't learn from Wikipedia that there was plenty to see in the surrounding area, and would be less likely to stay an extra day.

We have data to back this up. Researchers added just two paragraphs of text and a photo to a random sample of very short articles about Spanish towns, and discovered this alone was enough to increase the number of tourist nights spent in those towns by 9% compared with the control group (Hinosaar et al. 2019). Visitors to the West Coast don’t find out about many of its attractions until they arrive, and would likely stay longer in a location if they’d known about them earlier; Wikipedia is one tool they’re using to make those decisions.

But beyond just increasing tourism nights, Wikipedia can shape public perception and counter stereotypes. It is viewed as a trusted, neutral source, often preferred to “official” government or tourism sites which are perceived as having an agenda. So anyone with an interest in how the West Coast is portrayed, and what attention is paid to its history, its economy, and its flora and fauna, should be interested in Wikipedia.

Links

• Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest rules
• Wikivoyage's Guide for Tourism Professionals and Business Owners.
• Hinnosaar, Marit; Hinnosaar, Toomas; Kummer, Michael; Slivko, Olga. (July 14, 2019) "Wikipedia Matters". SSRN. 10.2139/ssrn.3046400
• Nguyen, George. "How to get a Knowledge Panel for your brand, even without Wikipedia". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 3 September 2020.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Westland District Library, Grey District Library, Glacier Country Tourism NZ, and Development West Coast for supporting the West Coast Wikipedian at Large project.