

"An API for your city" - LocalWiki API released - philipn
http://localwiki.org/blog/2012/aug/31/localwiki-api-released/

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YokoZar
LocalWiki really is a fascinating project. I went to University in Davis right
when the whole wiki project there was starting. This wasn't just a technical
effort, it was also a social one -- regular wiki barbeques were held, and
considerable unified effort was made to get enough content up before
"launching" for additional publicity.

It is no coincidence that the modest city of Davis, California has quite
literally the best town wiki in the world. If you happen to live in Davis, the
wiki is more useful than Yelp, Craig's List, and Wikipedia combined. Local
Wiki is the effort to extend that elsewhere.

I currently live in Woodland, a city right next to Davis. Woodland has a wiki
too, and you can even share accounts between there and Davis. But Woodland
gets maybe one edit a week on average, while Davis gets over 50 a day. I often
find myself visiting places in Davis just because it's easier to learn about
them than an equivalent local place.

It can't possibly be a technical issue -- it's the exact same software. To
make a good wiki happen, I need to do what Davis did: organize a real
community in real life, and work together to build something.

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dashr
Great work LocalWiki. This is a good way to build hyperlocal mobile/sms apps.
I find myself usually scraping data off wikis, massaging it a bit, then
building my own api endpoint to feed the mobile app.

I hope this one linked here is actually being built, can see a lot of folks
re-using it. <https://trianglewiki.org/Wanderful_App>

Next step is to build a mobile app that feeds data back in (POST/PUT). Like
YokoZar points out, it's a Sales task, not necessarily a difficult technical
one.

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carlyle
You are in luck! I'm one of the developers working on the Wanderful app and it
is very much being built. You can check us out at <http://wanderful.co/>

~~~
dashr
Cool, just installed it. Can you say anything about the platform it was built
on, Cordova?

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carlyle
The current version of the app was built with Titanium, but I'm not sure that
I can recommend it for nontrivial apps. The API still has plenty of gaps and
the platform isn't as 'cross-platform' as we had hoped (there are plenty of
controls and properties that are platform-specific.)

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profquail
Link to actual API docs: <http://localwiki.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api.html>

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joshu
I should set up paloal.to with LocalWiki. Too bad I moved out of Palo Alto.

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pwpwp
APIs are teh suck. The net and web don't have APIs either.

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danso
Glad to see the project continue growing and kudos for your continued work on
it...but title is a little grandiose. It's an API for your city's
LocalWiki...if it has one (NYC apparently doesn't).

