LocalWiki is a collaborative project that aims to collect and

open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001 * ''Open'' (Y ...

the world's

local Local may refer to: Geography and transportation * Local (train), a train serving local traffic demand * Local, Missouri, a community in the United States * Local government, a form of public administration, usually the lowest tier of administrat ...

knowledge. The LocalWiki project was founded by

DavisWiki daviswiki.org is a wiki based in Davis, California about the people, events, universities, bands, places and other things of the city. For example, it includes information about local events, advice for classes to take or not take at UC Davis, lo ...

creators Mike Ivanov and Philip Neustrom and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. LocalWiki is both the name of the project and the software that runs the project's websites.

History

In 2004, Ivanov and Neustrom started

, an experimental project to collect and share local information about the town of

Davis, California Davis is the most populous city in Yolo County, California. Located in the Sacramento Valley region of Northern California, the city had a population of 66,850 in 2020, not including the on-campus population of the University of California, Da ...

, editable by anyone. It became a large and active community

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

. According to its founders, at least half of the local residents use it. The LocalWiki project aims to provide "institutional memory" and context for local news. LocalWiki is built on the Django framework in Python. In June 2010, LocalWiki won a $350,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge. After winning the grant to develop the software, they ran a

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, K ...

project to raise $25,000 to help fund outreach, which was successful. In December 2011, the project announced its first "focus community", Denton, Texas. Its second focus community was the Triangle region of Durham, North Carolina, with initial contributions about transportation infrastructure and parks, and a goal of compiling information about historic events. A nonprofit in

Tallahassee, Florida Tallahassee ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2020, the populatio ...

helped start TallahasseeWiki with knowledge from residents. The LocalWiki project for Oakland, California is supported by volunteers meeting in person to collaborate on historical information. In 2012 the LocalWiki team assembled a comprehensive high-definition map of the Antarctic continent, available on "Open Antarctica", a LocalWiki instance for Antarctica. Neustrom explained that the map was "pieced together from very-hard-to-find NASA aerial imagery and coastline datasets". In April 2015, Idmloco focused on Davis LocalWiki as part of a public relations operation for U C Davis chancellor

Linda P.B. Katehi Linda Pisti Basile Katehi-Tseregounis (born January 30, 1954) is a Greek-American engineering professor and former university administrator. Katehi was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for contributions to three-di ...

Functionality

The LocalWiki software includes a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

editing interface to help make editing simpler. It also includes mapping features: each article can have an associated annotated map, and the website has an overview map with those annotations.

Notable LocalWiki communities

As of 2013, major LocalWiki communities include

Santa Cruz County, California Santa Cruz County (), officially the County of Santa Cruz, is a county on the Pacific coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 270,861. The county seat is Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz County comprises the San ...

;

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

;

Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina The Research Triangle, or simply The Triangle, are both common nicknames for a metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill, home t ...

;

Denton, Texas Denton is a city in and the county seat of Denton County, Texas, United States. With a population of 139,869 as of 2020, it is the 27th-most populous city in Texas, the 197th-most populous city in the United States, and the 12th-most populous ...

; Ann Arbor, Michigan;Ann Arbor’s Wikipedia: Writing what you know about in town
Ann Arbor Observer, July 2013 and

Tokyo, Japan Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.4 ...

References

{{reflist, 30em

External links

* Official LocalWiki website
LocalWiki repository on Github
Collaborative projects Creative Commons-licensed websites Organizations based in San Francisco Wikis English-language websites Spanish-language websites Content management systems Internet properties established in 2004

History

Functionality

Notable LocalWiki communities

See also

References

External links