Wikipedia information boosts tourism

18 Sep 2020

Wikipedia has turned out to be a way to boost tourism in towns or cities, economists pointed out. Tourism worldwide was impacted by the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic.

Editing the Wikipedia page of a town or city has the potential to add an extra £100,000 a year in tourism revenue. This was shown by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany.

A number of Spanish cities were chosen for the experiment and had their Wikipedia pages updated, inputting more information about their history and local attractions. It was also shown that pictures helped the end result.

Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer and Olga Slivko, authors of report, said, “If we extend this to the entire tourism industry, the impact is large. Its impact could be in billions of euros.”

The results showed that around two paragraphs of text and a photo would improve tourism, boosting the number of nights spent in the city by about 9%. 

The authors questioned why other countries had not followed this technique to try improving the tourism. 

Researches said that adding information to the articles, especially scientific content to the online encyclopaedia “causes changes to hundreds of related scientific journal articles”.