LocalWiki is a
collaborative project that aims to collect and
open 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 creators Mike Ivanov and Philip Neustrom
and is a
501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
based in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " 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 fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
,
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 m ...
.
LocalWiki is both the name of the project and the software that runs the project's websites.
History
In 2004, Ivanov and Neustrom started
DavisWiki, 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, Davi ...
, editable by anyone.
It became a large and active community
wiki. 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
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
.
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 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.
Functionality
The LocalWiki software includes a
WYSIWYG 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;
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.
See also
* Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, a ...
* Code for America
* DavisWiki
* OpenStreetMap
* and list of Regiowikis
* Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
* Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
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