Aw yay, I took that photo on the new homepage! It was during an editing party at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco (<a href="https://localwiki.org/sf/Prelinger_Library" rel="nofollow">https://localwiki.org/sf/Prelinger_Library</a>).<p>I've been a Wikipedia editor for many years, and last year I started splitting my editing work between Wikipedia and LocalWiki. There is so much I love in the places I've lived that can't fit into Wikipedia's notability/verifiability rules but is still important to me and other people who live in these places, and it's nice to have a collaborative thing to work on that is very relaxed.<p>So I wrote some articles about curious bits of my neighborhood in SF (<a href="https://localwiki.org/sf/Old_Mission_Police_Station" rel="nofollow">https://localwiki.org/sf/Old_Mission_Police_Station</a> for example) and then realized I should start a LocalWiki for a place I spent tons of time photographing and researching when I lived there, Isla Vista (next to UC Santa Barbara): <a href="https://localwiki.org/islavista/" rel="nofollow">https://localwiki.org/islavista/</a><p>Isla Vista is very interesting but doesn't have a lot of documentation of its history available online, and a lot of residents don't know much about it. It's been fun to use LocalWiki to start organizing and sharing what I've learned about it, and to get other people working with me to build a collective document that goes beyond my own perspective & interests. Also on Metafilter a couple days ago: <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/146431/An-Unincorporated-Historic-Neighborhood-Gets-it-Place-on-the-Internet" rel="nofollow">http://www.metafilter.com/146431/An-Unincorporated-Historic-...</a>
I'd really love for this to succeed. Periodically I'll remark to a friend: "The one thing the internet seems to be missing is a reliable place to catch up on a bit of local scuttlebutt or legend that has caught my attention." For example:<p>- Any idea why that restaurant that opened up three months ago and seemed to be doing fine closed up all of the sudden last week?<p>- Anybody know why I heard 50 sirens at 2am last night?<p>- How long has <i>this</i> been here?<p>Of course, AOL made a big play in this domain and failed miserably with Patch. I've heard of other successful sites that have have petered out for one reason or another. And then there's the cautionary tale of sites like Topix, as recounted in this New York Times article:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves...</a><p>I really hope you can discover the right balance of the scurrilous and the curious, navigate the editing wars and cultural issues that have plagued Wikipedia, and build that topical and timely local news thing I've been waiting for.
LocalWiki has awesome potential but they're facing two large problems.<p>If you browse you're going to see that in the majority of the towns someone signed up, started and then abandoned the effort. They need to implement rules similar to Wikipedia and sweep the ghost towns away.<p>The other weakness is mobile, that's really where LocalWiki could really shine.
Great platform. Used this religiously while in college at Davis. Luckily, there was an active community of people updating the pages, which allowed the Wiki to essentially replace Yelp for looking up business info.
I love this idea. I have had a hard time going to cities I'm unfamiliar with and not knowing a little bit about the important and not-so-important landmarks.<p>The problem I have with yelp in this regard is that it's all business focused. Hopefully localwiki will provide a more neutral and just updates based information.
How do you plan to differentiate from <a href="http://wikitravel.org" rel="nofollow">http://wikitravel.org</a>? Is <a href="http://localwiki.org" rel="nofollow">http://localwiki.org</a> supposed to be more localised / higher resolution? Targeted at locals instead of tourists?
I live in Ann Arbor, have my whole life, and am very glad for the wiki we have on LocalWiki. It's been extremely helpful to me a few times now. :)
Nice use of OpenStreetMap on the map page. I wonder if the system utilises the collection of places, buildings, pubs, shops etc that is also mapped.<p>Edits - looking at it in a bit more detail, it appears that it does allow people to create new pages based on features from the map, my guess is that these "seeds" would be from some spatial database (OSM?)
the local wiki editor tool bar & text area I've always thought was done very well. It's kind of a stand out, yet hidden feature that not a lot of wikis do as well. Simple but still HTML driven. I'd like to use the back end and re-template it for a personal site, just because I'd like to tinker with it a little more. Somebody elses' idea about calculating that a wiki is stagnant and having some actions / recommendations, even some auto email to existing editors is a great idea to keep things fluid and current.
Very nice idea. Just created the page for Milwaukee: <a href="https://localwiki.org/milwaukee/" rel="nofollow">https://localwiki.org/milwaukee/</a>