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| Original author(s) |
|
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | LocalWiki |
| Stable release | |
| Preview release | |
| Written in | Python |
| Website | localwiki |
LocalWiki is a collaborative project that aims to collect and open the world's local knowledge. The LocalWiki project was founded by DavisWiki creators Mike Ivanov and Philip Neustrom [1] and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization [2] based in San Francisco, California. [3] LocalWiki is both the name of the project and the software that runs the project's websites.
In 2004, Ivanov and Neustrom started DavisWiki, an experimental project to collect and share local information about the town of Davis, California, editable by anyone. [2] It became a large and active community wiki. [4] According to its founders, at least half of the local residents use it. [5] The LocalWiki project aims to provide "institutional memory" and context for local news. [6] LocalWiki is built on the Django framework in Python. [7]
In June 2010, LocalWiki won a $350,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge. [8] [9] After winning the grant to develop the software, they ran a Kickstarter project to raise $25,000 to help fund outreach, [10] which was successful. [11]
In December 2011, the project announced its first "focus community", Denton, Texas. [12] Its second focus community was the Triangle region of Durham, North Carolina, with initial contributions about transportation infrastructure and parks, [13] and a goal of compiling information about historic events. [14] A nonprofit in Tallahassee, Florida helped start TallahasseeWiki with knowledge from residents. [15] The LocalWiki project for Oakland, California is supported by volunteers meeting in person to collaborate on historical information. [16]
In 2012 the LocalWiki team assembled a comprehensive high-definition map of the Antarctic continent, available on "Open Antarctica", a LocalWiki instance for Antarctica. [17] Neustrom explained that the map was "pieced together from very-hard-to-find NASA aerial imagery and coastline datasets". [18] [19]
In April 2015, Idmloco focused on Davis LocalWiki as part of a public relations operation for U C Davis chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. [20]
The LocalWiki software includes a WYSIWYG editing interface to help make editing simpler. [7] It also includes mapping features: each article can have an associated annotated map, and the website has an overview map with those annotations. [7]
As of 2013, major LocalWiki communities include Santa Cruz County, California; Oakland, California; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Denton, Texas;[ citation needed ] Ann Arbor, Michigan; [21] and Tokyo, Japan. [22]
Davis is the most populous city in Yolo County, California, United States. 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, Davis, which was over 9,400 in 2016. As of 2019, there were 38,369 students enrolled at the university.
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of cross-platform applications such as Amarok, digiKam, and Krita that are designed to run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.
A wiki is a form of 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 public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
GNOME Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in multiple editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of things devices and robots. The operating system is developed by the British company Canonical, and a community of other developers, under a meritocratic governance model. As of October 2023, the most-recent release is 23.10, and the current long-term support release is 22.04.
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, locations of the cleanest bathrooms in town, and ways a poor student can best pack a to-go box from the local restaurant buffets. Newcomers or anyone with a question about life in Davis are often asked by "wikivangelists", "Did you check the wiki?", much in the spirit of RTFM. It was launched in June 2004.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and as a result commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own topology to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine and editor.
Wikimapia is a geographic online encyclopedia project. The project implements an interactive "clickable" web map that utilizes Google Maps with a geographically-referenced wiki system, with the aim to mark and describe all geographical objects in the world.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. It is best known as the host platform for Wikipedia, the largest crowdsourced online encyclopedia in the world, but also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.
Ushahidi is an open source software application which utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" – the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geographic information. Ushahidi allows local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the Internet, creating an archive of events with geographic and time-date information. The Ushahidi platform is often used for crisis response, human rights reporting, and election monitoring. Ushahidi was created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence reported by email and text message and placed them on a Google Maps map.
Smári McCarthy is an Icelandic-Irish politician, innovator and information activist known for his work relating to direct democracy, transparency and privacy.
WikiTrust is a software product, available as a Firefox Plugin, which aimed to assist editors in detecting vandalism and dubious edits, by highlighting the "untrustworthy" text with a yellow or orange background. As of September 2017, the server is offline, but the code is still available for download.
California Watch, part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, began producing stories in 2009. The official launch of the California Watch website took place in January 2010. The team was best known for producing well researched and widely distributed investigative stories on topics of interest to Californians. In small ways, the newsroom pioneered in the digital space, including listing the names of editors and copy editors at the bottom of each story, custom-editing stories for multiple partners, developing unique methods to engage with audiences and distributing the same essential investigative stories to newsrooms across the state. It worked with many news outlets, including newspapers throughout the state, all of the ABC television affiliates in California, KQED radio and television and dozens of websites. The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch with $3.5 million in seed funding. The team won several industry awards for its public interest reporting, including the George Polk Award in 2012. In addition to numerous awards won for its investigative reports, the California Watch website also won an Online Journalism Award in the general excellence category from the Online News Association in its first year of existence.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages. TDF does not provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprise-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
The KDE Gear is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and released on a common release schedule.
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Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
