Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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