Starting a civic wiki never really occurred to me until I started using ArborWiki in Ann Arbor, MI. The ability to help define a geographic place is an incredibly powerful thing. Long story short, I moved to Ann Arbor a little over a year ago from Richmond. I didn’t know anybody except my wife, and between the two of us we knew of only one restaurant in town that wasn’t even open any more.
There were few local sites that turned out to be as useful as ArborWiki. Sure, the local news sites helped us figure out who was doing what around town but the scope was limited to current events and recent archives. We needed a current database of restaurants and events that we could tap into when looking for things to do. ArborWiki, with its wide variety of user-generated content, filled that need nicely.
Now that my wife and I are only a few months away from moving back to Richmond, I wanted to create a similar site to serve as a useful community resource. By tapping into the collective intelligence of a great city, we can create extremely useful information for everybody.
In addition to the conceptual inspiration from ArborWiki, I derived some design and functionality inspiration from two other great civic wikis: UMassWiki (serving UMass Amherst) and WikiPhilly (serving Philadelphia). Both have managed to create very useful, robust, and user-friendly wikis for their communities. My hope is to do the same with RichmondWiki. Please feel free to leave a comment on the blog or better yet, a note on my user talk page with any feedback, questions or comments about RichmondWiki.
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Thanks for the article on adding nofollow to MW links. I live in Ann Arbor and created the dKosopedia, so we have A2 and MediaWiki in common. And, oddly, I was born in Richmond, Va. I hope one winter here didn’t drive you away.
Please continue with MW posts, they’re very helpful.
Will do! Thanks for the comment. I might reach out if I run into any MW questions that I can’t figure out…always nice to talk with others running the same system.