

LocalWiki: the open effort to share the world's local knowledge - philipn
http://localwiki.org/

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daed
I went to UC Davis when this (Davis wiki) was launched. It was invaluable at
the time. But I wonder how well it will fare elsewhere these days. You need a
decent-sized community to get good content, but most decent-sized communities
are already well covered by heavily used services like craigslist and yelp.

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philipn
We've thought about this a lot. There were some unique factors at play in
Davis. One big one that we've really tried to fix with localwiki is that you
had to be a pretty technical person to contribute to the project. Davis is,
second to Cambridge, the most educated city in the US.

So making the most -absurdly- usable software possible was a huge priority. If
you look around, there's really no easy to use open-source wiki software, so
we had to do a -lot- of gruntwork. We wanted to, at the very least, remove the
technically-savvy barrier.

And the standard for online collaboration hsa also risen quite a bit, but
open-source wiki software hasn't kept up. Back when DavisWiki started, the
very -idea- of web based collaboration was foreign. Nowdays, my mom uses
Google Docs!

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sandwiches
Awesome to see how this project has grown since the days of DavisWiki.org.

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Tichy
Why does it want me to download something?

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philipn
We're gonna refocus the main site later on when there's more communities using
the software. For now we're trying to focus attention on the software side of
the project.

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cmclaughlin
Nice work!

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sbhere
rocwiki.org

