Thanks World Wikia for wasting my time

I will be visiting Salamanca in Spain for a few days this September.

“Great and what has that got to do with me?”, I hear you ask. Well, nothing really, unless you have some information about Salamanca that you’d like to share with me, in which case, please leave me a comment below.

Anyway, I have been meaning to do some online research on Salamanca, as I like to do before a visit a new place, but until this morning had not done much about it. So when I received a feed about World Wikia this morning, I thought, well there is my excuse to spend the morning surfing the net. (Before you get all up in arms about employees spending their work time surfing the net, I should let you know I work for myself, so the only one I’m cheating is ME!)

World Wikia

The feed titled “World Wikia takes off” (which I have happily forgotten the source for, so apologies to whoever you are) said that

“Wikia, Inc., has reported that the users of its recently launched World Wikia project have contributed over 1,000 original articles in less than one month of operation.”

So I headed over to World Wikia to get enlightened about Salamanca.

What a disappointment!

First of all, I fail to see what new value World Wikia is trying to add. It sells itself as “a free travel directory that you can edit”. So far so good, not that this hasn’t been done before, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t try to do it better.

It then goes on to say that

“We intend to provide more depth in content and opinions to people who want something other than a NPOV (Neutral Point of View).”

A risky statement, as it would struggle to get more opinionated than the forums on say Tripadvisor or Frommers in my humble opinon.

Worst of all though, it completely fails to deliver. I did a search on Salamanca and found nothing. Now Salamanca is probably not the most popular destination in the world, so I wasn’t all that surprised not to find anything.

I then chose the more popular destination Barcelona, and indeed the search result came up with a page. But when I went to the page all I found was a photo of the Sagrada Familia, which admittedly is very famous, but surely who ever wrote this page could have found something to say about Barcelona.

After a while I gave up searching for destinations and turned to the promoted Travel Guides section. I clicked the “check out the top 50″ link and nearly fell off my chair laughing when I was taken to a page saying

“You’ve followed a link to a page that doesn’t exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below.”

Now determined to actually find some content on this site I turned to the so-called Citi Wikis. After facing the dreaded do-you-want-to-create-this-page editor a couple of times I eventually managed to find some content on the Beijing City Wiki. Unfortunately, I didn’t really find the information there that useful or even interesting.

The final drop in my Chinese green-leaf tea cup was that I to my great frustration couldn’t even find a way to get back to World Wiki short of hitting the browser back button a couple of times.

How is this for an Non-NPOV opinion?

I’m afraid my review of the World Wikia is that it is a total waste of time!

The only way I can see World Wikia make any sense currently is, if the owner wanted to force visitors to click the ads on the site, by not providing any other content.

If I must say something positive about the site, it would be that it has a cool logo.

Now obviously, I don’t want you to take my word for it, so I guess you now have two options:

1. Go visit World Wikia at http://world.wikia.com/ (I refuse to provide you with a clickable link), see for yourself and leave in disgust.
2. Go visit World Wikia, see for yourself, feel sorry for them and fill in the blanks for them.

If you go for option 2, do be careful you don’t get caught in the middle of a typical wiki war about which restaurant is better. Me, I’ll stick to my very opinionated articles here.