Microformating wikitravel

While describing some of the mechanisms necessary to put in motion the Global Culture project (read think culturati), I mentioned that a workshop on blogging would be important and some of the topics to be covered would include microformats.

A few days before that, Jordan had made a comment on the post "a tourist guide for the global citizen" stating that Wikitravel was already some sort of a global tourist guide. While this is in fact true, and the content within is more reliable than many specialized tourist guides, I thought a lot could be improved if there was a certain convention on how certain aspects of the descriptions of places are formatted.

I spent some time looking through existing microformats but couldn't find one that would fit what I'm trying to accomplish. A microformat that would allow a certain observer to document a particular cultural behavior (or if we generalize, a social event). hReview is close, but there are a number of fields missing. Reading through the process to develop a new microformat it seems the first step is to collect enough evidence of real sites or blogs that are creating the information that needs structuring. Wikitravel seems to be full of examples, but deciding how far the microformat should go is though.

Take the description about Toronto. Things that would be relevant from a culture migration point of view are:

• Chinatown: buy food. China. Dundas & Spadina. Weekends
• Theatre District: go to theathre. Broadway. King & John.
• Greektown: eat restaurant. Greece. Danforth
• Corso Italia: drink coffee. Italy. College St.

These are just some examples and the type of information that would be most useful is not final yet, but I'm sure this is the sort of thing that Technorati has in mind for the new microformat search.