LocalWiki: the open effort to share the world's local knowledge

localwiki.org

11 points·philipn··7 comments

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.

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!

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

Why does it want me to download something?

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.

Nice work!

rocwiki.org

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