"An API for your city" - LocalWiki API released | Hacker News Reader

"An API for your city" - LocalWiki API released

localwiki.org

32 pointsphilipn9 comments

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.

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.

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/

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

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.)

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

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

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

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com