Talk:PortlandWiki

Notes from WikiWednesday:

prepping work for talking to the city

Think about where it will live (i.e. domain)
What wiki engine? MediaWiki, MoinMoin?
Relation to City Hall?
- Publicity? Who can give it? Where else can we get it? (Knight Foundation, Meyer?)
Design work in skin/lo-go
Community Manager?

What are good short-term needs a wiki could fill?

I'm not sure this the right place to put this, but as would said at WW, let's get a couple things upon which to hang the whole structure. Just a couple ideas, let's expand. --Esprqii 21:23, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Portland public schools. Let's seed with the stuff already done over on Wikipedia (the PPS article and the high schools), then expand to create articles on the elementary and middle schools as well. Put in stuff that potential students/parents would be interested in: test scores, ratings, district map, enrollment etc. Stuff that would be good in a civic wiki but wouldn't survive on WP.
Portland parks and rec. Again, seed with what is on WP, then expand with detail.
Coffee shops and culture. List/descriptions of coffeehice. Could be a good jumping-off point to get external businesses interested.
Microbrew culture. The yang to the coffee culture yin.
Bike routes. It worked for Davis, it could certainly work here.
celebrities. People like the Reverend Phil and the chef from Nutshell.

I have a concern about this one: putting an emphasis on individuals opens the door to all kinds of ugliness (i.e., at the extreme, libel). Other sites have dealt with this in different ways: it appears that DavisWiki has its "People" link direct to user accounts. Wikipedia has an entire policy devoted to living persons, which is more restrictive than other policies. Encyclopedia Dramatica has throws all caution to the wind and lets you make whatever perverse and slanderous statement you like about whomever you like. I think this might be a reasonable approach: for the most part, permit only user-space pages about people, which are initially created by the person themselves, and giving the person absolute veto power over anything on there (including deleting it and all of its history). For very notable people (e.g. mayors, city commissioners...) allow a one-sentence factual description, with a link (or multiple links) to other sites, like Wikipedia, Oregon Encyclopedia, Portlandonline, etc. How's that sound as a general approach? -Pete Forsyth

traditions. Santacon and other local traditions that wouldn't necessarily be covered by Wikipedia because they're portland-specific.
businesses Most local businesses wouldn't merit a page on Wikipedia.

Very short-term/low impact/high utility projects

Most of the suggestions above are great, but highly ambitious. Are there more bite-sized projects we could take on in the early stages, to quickly produce something with obvious value, without a lot of outlay of resources (including time and energy)? -Pete Forsyth

Directory of Portland wiki communities (should be built to complement wikiindex.org)
build some wiki documentation
list of major portland institutions (city hall, art museum, library, Oregonian...could start of with just 20 or so, relatively light work leading to useful result)

I was not saying let's do them all right off, just throwing out a couple of ideas. Personally, I think the schools one would be a great place to start because a lot of that info already exists and could be ported over from WP.

And speaking of "just porting over;" can we do that, and how should we do it? In other words, for starters, can I just cut and paste the Portland Public Schools (Oregon) article into a new page called Portland Public Schools here? I mean, I know I can, but is that the way we are thinking of creating articles here, and are there any ethical/legal issues with cutting and pasting from Wikipedia? This line appears at the bottom of the page when you make a WP edit: "You agree to be credited, at minimum, through a hyperlink or URL when your contributions are reused in any form." Do we need to do that? Is an edit line summary (eg, "Initial version of this article excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Public_Schools_(Oregon)") in the first edit sufficient? There are certainly millions of mirror sites that have no problem copying and pasting from WP without attribution (so far as I know) but I'm just trying to set our highly ethical ground rules. --Esprqii

Fair enough, I suppose the schools and some of the others really wouldn't take all that much work. They're all good ideas, did not mean to shoot 'em down! As for copying vs. linking: I believe the GFDL and CC-BY-SA can both be satisfied with a link, but I'm not 100% sure. I know that GFDL permits listing only the top 5 contributors, if the list is really long. However, I think linking is probably best where content already exists...that way we don't need to maintain content in two places. (Though, adding more detailed info in addition couldn't hurt.) -Pete Forsyth 22:47, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

What are our long-term goals? areas of concern?

See also the "mission statement" section below.

Ownership of domain name(s), site: The site could be owned by individual(s), by a non-profit, or by a government entity. Starting off with individual ownership makes sense, be we should probably seek to transfer ownership to a more stable entity at some point. A foundation? a non-profit? Multnomah County Library? City Council? -Pete Forsyth

Ownership by a foundation or government seems like best in the long run... a personal wiki could evolve into this perhaps? If the content is open - cc-by or cc-by-sa then the government or a foundation could always fork it. haha :) Rain

What kind of resources would be helpful?

What could go wrong?

What has gone wrong on other wikis? Anything? Rain

Well, kotra observed that richmondwiki.org seems to be rather promotional in tone, when it comes to businesses etc...though I'm not sure that's "wrong" :) I think it would be good to interview some people who are active on some other civic wikis. I'm looking for the right person to talk to in Davis... -Pete Forsyth 22:49, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Do we want a mission statement, slogan, or similar?

It would help us focus our efforts. I think we should incorporate the line on the front page of the WikiWednesday main page: "Portland, the birthplace of wikis." Our wikipride should compel us to have the best civic wiki anywhere. --Esprqii 21:06, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

That's awesome, do you think somebody could photoshop Ward's face on this photo of Miles Davis? -Pete

possible concepts to incorporate

Promote/celebrate wiki culture in Portland
Promote/celebrate Portland culture in the wiki world
Help Portland n00bs learn about Portland, wiki n00bs learn about wiki
Provide a common space for existing Portland wiki communities to collaborate and build momentum in their projects (WP:ORE, Personal Telco, Shift to bikes...)
Build alliances with other civic wiki groups around the world

Technology

What platform should we use? What plug-ins or add-ons?

I would like to use Mediawiki; in addition, I think the way RichmondWiki.org has implemented forms (for business listings, etc.) is very useful, and would like to see that implemented on ours. In addition, the HotCat gadget is transformatively useful if we want to have categories be a major part of our site. -Pete

Real names

One of the many ways to deal with the problems of incivility on collaborative sites is to require the use of real names. Is this something we want to do on a Portland wiki? Do we want to require login? I note that DavisWiki.org does require real names. -Pete Forsyth

Seems like a good idea for the long term.... Rain

How to reach out to readers and contributors?

Partner with other organizations to get the word out:

Neighborhood associations
Business coalitions
OurPDX blog
bojack
City Hall
libraries
schools
seek press coverage
Word of mouth
search engines

suggested domains

orwiki.org and .net are available... it could be an oregon wiki... then either subdomains could be setup for cities...

portland.orwiki.org eugene.orwiki.org - etc - - -

or directories... just a suggestion. Rain

Oh, forgot to mention: Ray K. and somebody else (I forget at the moment) own relevant domains they're willing to use for this. I believe they are portlandwiki.org and oregonwiki.org (though I don't remember for sure). This was discussed in person at the last meeting, and didn't make it onto the wiki yet... -Pete Forsyth 22:50, 12 August 2009 (UTC)