City wiki
A city wiki is a wiki used for geographically localized information. This kind of wiki focuses on information relating to a city or town.
General
Where Wikipedia is for more global information, a City wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places; information that might not be appropriate for Wikipedia, but appropriate for a wiki with more localized content and viewers. Open Guide to London is probably the oldest of the city wikis. Stadtwiki Karlsruhe is the largest city wiki with over 11000 articles (March, 2007), although this standing is debated as many of these articles are empty and computer-generated. Davis wiki is probably the second largest, although there seem to be other large city wikis that haven't been found yet by those maintaining this information.
A city wiki could also contain information about the following subjects, that may or may not be appropriate for having an entry in Wikipedia:
- Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centres.
- Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop.
- Statistical information about a specific road in a city.
- Flavours of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlour.
- A biography of a local mayor and other persons
There are a sub group of city wikis that all use the Open Guide software and all have the openguide.org domain in their URL. Most of these are for Cities in Europe as well as a few other cities in the rest of the world.
A list of most of the worlds city wikis can be found at CityWikiList (see external links).
Known city wikis
City Wikis in English are known to exist in the following metropolitan areas:
- Toronto, Ontario Canada
- Mississauga, Ontario Canada
- Akron, Ohio
- Anchorage, Alaska (just being started)
- Ann Arbor, Michigan (Wikipedia page)
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Bloomington, Indiana
- Cleveland,Ohio (being re-launched)
- Davis, California
- Denver Colorado
- Gibraltar, GI
- Houston, Texas
- Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania (just being started)
- Melbourne, Australia (just being started)
- Maastricht, the Netherlands [1]
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- New York City, New York
- Oregon City, Oregon
- Portland, Oregon
- Rochester, New York
- Seattle, Washington
- Burlington, Vermont
- Santa Cruz, California
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- St. Louis, Missouri
- Bangalore India
- Sacramento, California
Open guides
- Boston, Massachusetts
- London, UK
- Vienna, Austria
Other languages
- Karlsruhe, Germany (in German)
- Kassel, Germany (in German)
- Wiki o Kurowie (Wiki about Kurów) (multilingual encyclopedia, mainly on Polish)
External links
- city-wiki-center, city-wikis have homepages on it
- A guide to running a City Wiki by Mark Krenz from Bloomingpedia