Show HN: LocalWiki, the open platform for local knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LocalWiki, the open platform for local knowledge

localwiki.org

83 pointsphilipn29 comments

Aw yay, I took that photo on the new homepage! It was during an editing party at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco (https://localwiki.org/sf/Prelinger_Library).

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.

So I wrote some articles about curious bits of my neighborhood in SF (https://localwiki.org/sf/Old_Mission_Police_Station 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): https://localwiki.org/islavista/

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: http://www.metafilter.com/146431/An-Unincorporated-Historic-...

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:

- 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?

- Anybody know why I heard 50 sirens at 2am last night?

- How long has this been here?

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:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves...

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.

I've recently spent some time in a small beach community, where they set up a Facebook page for the village. It's extremely active, from lost cats, local store offerings, small-crime reports and what that new restaurant opening in 2 weeks is. It's been amazing to watch people come out of the woodwork when history questions are asked.

Since so many people are already on Facebook, it might make sense for LocalWiki to leverage this with an app, rather than hope for natural migration.

As someone who blissfully retired from Facebook years ago (for all the usual cranky reasons regularly cited on HN), I really hope Facebook doesn't come to fill this niche.

But I can see how it would be a natural Schelling point[1] for doing so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29

Not that I don't also want this LocalWiki thing to succeed, but you should definitely check out your local subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search

Yess, and a local Facebook group and/or subreddit can work really nicely in coordination with a LocalWiki. To share local knowledge you totally need that conversation part, where the oldtimers and newcomers sit around and chat (or comment) about what's interesting today and what happened a while ago, in a casual and amusing and timely way. But then you also need the reference part, where bits and pieces slowly get collected and organized and cross-linked to tell a more comprehensive story, and to make sure individual memories don't get lost if people move out of town (or get busy, or die) and aren't around to tell their stories anymore.

Good suggestion. I actually am subscribed to my local subreddit. It's occasionally interesting but generally pretty slow.

> - Anybody know why I heard 50 sirens at 2am last night?

This doesn't seem like the sort of thing that belongs on a wiki, being incredibly transient by nature.

Another user mentioned subreddits - that is a good place to search.

I agree that wiki is probably not the best platform for this. I thought years ago Twitter, with the appropriate search capabilities, could serve this niche. In my experience, it hasn't.

It would be interesting to have a service that could gather together (effectively gather together, with the perfect magical user interface on the other side) a bunch of disparate municipal public data: crime blotter stuff, business filings, real estate transactions, city council actions, what have you. Anybody else curious about this stuff?

EveryBlock tried to be that gathering-together service, but it got shut down: http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/everyblock/ + http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/ "We showed you nearby public records (crimes, building permits, restaurant inspections), pointed you to automatically indexed articles (newspapers, blogs, forums) and provided a sort of "geo-forum" that let you talk with people who lived near you."

It's sort of maybe being revived: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/02...

Here's an example of that kind of transient information sharing working quite well over a long period of time:

https://oaklandwiki.org/Why_are_there_helicopters_right_now%...

Nextdoor <https://nextdoor.com/> is exactly this!

Nextdoor sounds like it might be cool, but I don't know. It makes you put in a lot of information about yourself, including real name, real address, real email address, before asking for a credit card #, phone #, or to send you a post card and wait 3-5 days to verify your identify and before this is completed, you can't browse the site.

There are some great hyper-local sites. There was one I loved in Santa Barbara (http://www.edhat.com) that focused on hyper-local news. They would track police scanners, daily papers, hold events/contests (name that place!), talk about history, etc.

Edhat also allows lots of nasty racist commenters. Not so great overall.

LocalWiki has awesome potential but they're facing two large problems.

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.

The other weakness is mobile, that's really where LocalWiki could really shine.

Also a potential fragmentation problem:

"Vancouver": https://localwiki.org/vancouver/

"Metro Vancouver": https://localwiki.org/van/

There's a genuinely hard problem in trying to define discrete but sufficiently meaningful localities. People really like clean dichotomies, but locality is fractal.

For inactive regions, I'd rather see LocalWiki put up a signpost in the form of "This region got a start with five articles and two contributors but hasn't been edited in six months - would you like to help renew this project? Here's some guidance about how to contact those existing editors, find new collaborators, and set up local editing meetups; here's where to share advice with fellow people also starting and reviving LocalWikis for their regions." (I think this is quite possible, and I should probably file a suggestion for doing this...)

Instead of sweeping the inactive wikis away, LocalWiki can use whatever is there to help motivate newcomers to contribute - to say "you don't have to start from scratch here." I find that LocalWiki's inclusive and neighborly attitude is one of its strengths, and I think it can build on that strength instead of needing to develop Wikipedia-style rules.

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.

That Daviswiki allows for the accumulation of institutional knowledge from the student's perspective is just one of the things that makes it such a valuable resource. I learned so much more about the history and culture of the town and the university than I ever could have using sterile/stale facebook pages or univeristy websites.

Same here, I used it in 2007-2010 while studying at UCD for just about everything from finding apartments to bike routes.

Glad to see it got a nice facelift as well.

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.

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.

What do you think of http://wikitravel.org?

How do you plan to differentiate from http://wikitravel.org? Is http://localwiki.org supposed to be more localised / higher resolution? Targeted at locals instead of tourists?

I live in [redacted], 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.

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: https://localwiki.org/milwaukee/

How do you plan to avoid a commercial focus/ bias?

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