A modern website? Well-managed social media accounts? Aesthetic, glossy brochures? Forget them! It turns out that one of the most effective ways to attract tourists to a city is to expand its page on Wikipedia!
An experiment conducted by economists from Italy's Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin and Germany's ZEW in Mannheim proves that a few simple edits to a city's Wikipedia page can increase tourism revenue by as much as £100,000 in a year!
Simple solutions...
Simple solutions...
The study's design turns out to be exceptionally clear. The researchers randomly selected several small towns scattered across Spain for the study. Then they began editing their pages on the most popular online encyclopedia:
- several paragraphs were added about the town's history and local attractions;
- a few high-quality photos of the town were uploaded;
- the Spanish page was translated into other languages (most often French, German, Italian, and Dutch).
...produce spectacular results!
...produce spectacular results!
Wikipedia as a tourism promotion tool – study results
These uncomplicated operations brought an immediate, noticeable effect. Adding two new paragraphs and a single photo could increase the number of days spent in the towns during the tourist season by at least 9 percent. In the case of towns whose Wikipedia pages are exceptionally sparse, a few small changes could increase the number of tourists even threefold.
If we scale the study's results to global tourism, Wikipedia's significance turns out to be colossal, reaching even millions of euros. In this context, it is puzzling why city officials do not engage in promoting cities in this way, leaving it instead to anonymous online volunteers. Simply adding a few pieces of information yields excellent results and does not require much time." — Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer, Olga Slivko, authors of the study.
An answer to the researchers' puzzlement may be provided by the case of Dutch Wikipedia, where one of the moderators realized that the site had become the target of an experiment. As a result, they decided to block future updates from that team – editing for commercial purposes is prohibited on that site, and the experiment was deemed a crossing of the line.
Summary
The experiment by economists from Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin and ZEW in Mannheim showed that expanding a city's Wikipedia page with a few paragraphs, photos, and translations can increase tourism revenue by as much as £100,000 per year. For sparsely developed entries, the number of tourists can rise even threefold, and the length of stay can increase by at least 9 percent.
An interesting footnote is the reaction of Dutch Wikipedia moderators, who blocked the researchers' edits, considering commercial activity a violation of the site's rules. This shows that effective promotion on the encyclopedia requires caution – overly aggressive actions can backfire.
