- City wiki
-
A city wiki is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for a specific geographical locale. The term 'city wiki' or its foreign language equivalent (e.g. German 'Stadtwiki') is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. A city wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. Much of this information might not be appropriate for Wikipedia (e.g., articles on every retail outlet in a town), but might be appropriate for a wiki with more localized content and viewers. A city wiki could also contain information about the following subjects, that may or may not be appropriate for a general knowledge wiki, such as:
- Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers.
- Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop.
- Statistical information about a specific road in a city.
- Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor.
- A biography of a local mayor and other persons
The Open Guide to London is probably the oldest of the city wikis.[1] It is part of a sub group of city wikis that use the OpenGuides software, and most have the openguides.org domain in their URL. Most of them are for cities in England. Although Cityultima, formerly Cityunlimited was founded in February 2007. The Stadtwiki Karlsruhe is the largest city wiki.
Contents
Largest city wikis
The table below, adapted from a more detailed table on the Omaha Wiki, provides information on the 30 largest city wikis worldwide, ranked by the number of articles as of August 31, 2010. Twenty-six of the city wikis use the Mediawiki software, three use the Sycamore software (Davis, Rochester, Santa Cruz), and one uses the OpenGuides software (London). Some of the methods for reporting metrics vary between the different types of wikis and thus care should be used when comparing across them. For example, the Sycamore stats do not break out counts for pages outside the main article namespace (e.g. user, project, image, template, help, category namespaces in Mediawiki) so the article counts between the Mediawiki and Sycamore wikis cannot be directly compared. For the Mediawiki sites, over half of the pages are in these supporting namespaces and are not included in the counts below. The user counts for most Sycamore wikis show only users with at least one edit while the user counts for the Mediawiki sites include users who have not made any edits. Given these differences, the numbers below tend to overstate article counts for Sycamore wikis and understate the number of users.
The columns below can be sorted by clicking on the symbol below the column heading. The "Total" columns show all activity since the wiki was founded.[2] These metrics will be updated at the end of each month.[3]
Founded City Wiki Total Articles Total Images Total Edits Total Users 2004-07-22 Stadtwiki Karlsruhe, Germany 21,298 16,331 363,222 4,030 2004-06-24 Davis, California 14,813 20,957 300,448 13,354 2006-03-22 Córdoba, Spain 14,054 11,226 125,200 4,555 2005-04-18 Hamburg, Germany 12,594 446 82,056 3,357 2007-02-27 Salzburg, Austria 13,393 12,336 193,636 1,729 2006-08-28 Kassel, Germany 11,409 7,464 165,359 948 2006-03-15 Birmingham, USA 8,344 3,351 78,678 334 2007-02-06 Omaha, USA 7,086 1,408 39,767 622 2005-12-15 Rhine-Neckar, Germany 6,631 1,607 53,102 439 2005-09-09 Ann Arbor, USA 6,132[4] 780 40,409 934 2005-01-18 Rochester, USA 6,040 3,003 75,019 3,101 2006-04-03 Hamm, Germany 4,816[5] 3,740 2007-09-01 Ahrweiler, Germany 4,439 1,364 22,471 163 2006-12-05 Mankato, USA 3,984 572 15,254 99 2006-04-29 Pforzheim-Enz, Germany 3,959 2,042 48,898 296 2005-07-15 Kyiv, Ukraine 3,742 1,892 18,990 398 2008-02-20 Niederbayern, Germany 3,663 4,962 41,615 540 2005-03-23 Munich, Germany 3,412 1,027 41,342 589 2007-03-30 Göttingen, Germany 3,371 2,146 21,312 596 2006-10-02 Bielefeld, Germany 3,357 126 10,347 109 2006-02-27 Santa Cruz, USA 3,135 1,603 16,497 98 2007-10-02 Nuremberg, Germany 2,965 702 42,064 344 2006-12-09 London, UK 2,920 21,903 2,649 159 2005-07-18 Bloomington, USA 2,717 1,159 22,762 2,480 2006-07-19 Chico, California 2,495 2,071 18,245 90 2008-06-22 London, England 2,459 15,411 108,973 371 2006-06-12 Warsaw, Poland 2,321 2,899 36,113 2009-09-28 Portland, Oregon 1,001 1,032 14,157 149 See also
Notes
- ^ OpenGuides: City Wikis in Perl by Kake Pugh, 7 May 2007, accessed 11 August 2008
- ^ The dates of founding were based on (a) the first edit done on the Main Page (Hauptseite) for Mediawiki wikis or (b) the first edit for Sycamore wikis. If the city wiki uses the Mediawiki software, the article page count is accessible by requesting the Special:Statistics?action=raw page. If the Sycamore wiki engine is used, the /User Statistics page is accessed, all text is selected and copied into an Excel file, and totals are calculated for number of articles, number of edits, and number of files. The Sycamore statistics do not include new article creation as an 'edit' (Mediawiki does), the numbers reported above as 'edits' for the sites using Sycamore is the sum of new articles created plus and edits to these articles in order to provide comparable numbers.
- ^ If anyone is aware of a city wiki with more articles than 1,000 articles (legitimate content pages), post a comment on the discussion page with the name and URL of the City Wiki and its statistics will be checked on the next monthly update.
- ^ http://arborwiki.org/city/Special:Statistics
- ^ Site down on March 31, this was Google's cached page and image count from March 29
References
- Andersen, Michael (November 6, 2009) "Welcome to Davis, Calif.: Six lessons from the world’s best local wiki." Niemen Journalism Lab. Niemen Foundation/Harvard University
- McGann, Laura (June 18, 2010) "Knight News Challenge: Is a wiki site coming to your city? Local Wiki will build software to make it simple." Niemen Journalism Lab. Niemen Foundation/Harvard University
External links
This article uses content from the Omaha Wiki. The original article was at Omaha_Wiki:Largest_City_Wikis. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Wikipedia, the text of the Omaha Wiki is available for reuse under the GNU Free Documentation License. Categories:- Wiki communities
- City
- Citizen media
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.