DavisWiki - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Started in June of 2004, daviswiki.org is a wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

based in Davis, California

Davis, California

Davis is a city in Yolo County, California, United States. It is part of the Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville Metropolitan Statistical Area...

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

RTFM

RTFM is an initialism for the direction "Read The Fucking Manual". This instruction is sometimes given in response to a question when the person being asked believes that the question could be easily answered by reading the relevant user's manual or instructions...

Size and activity

DavisWiki was at one point the largest City Wiki

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 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...

in the world. Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe

The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...

's city wiki Stadtwiki Karlsruhe

Stadtwiki Karlsruhe

The Stadtwiki Karlsruhe is a City wiki of the German town Karlsruhe and its surroundings, which is the largest in the world.- History :It was founded by the former pupil Hauke Löffler on the 22nd of Juli 2004...

has since surpassed DavisWiki in total page count, but differences in the wiki software, varying content/page densities, make drawing conclusions from page counts problematic. As of November 2009 DavisWiki has over 14,945 pages, 11134 registered editors, 301 editors who have made over 100 edits, and 35 editors who have made over 1000 edits.

Community involvement

Based on the above activity, and the interest that local politics have on daviswiki, the Davis Human Relations Commission awarded the daviswiki the Thong Hy Huynh Award for Excellence in Community Involvement.

Neutral Point of View?

Davis Wiki includes long discussions on its pages regarding local politics, local elections, development, city policies and similar material. This is a bit counter to many wikis, which strive for a neutral point of view in all articles. Articles on the Davis Wiki are balanced by consolidating commentary to present an aggregate set of multiple points-of-view, intending to reflect the actual Davis community.

WikiSpot

WikiSpot is the Wiki Farm

Wiki farm

A wiki hosting service or wiki farm is a server or an array of servers that offer users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis...

that hosts the DavisWiki and other local community and topic specific wikis. WikiSpot neither charges for its hosting or has advertising, but the content should not be for commercial gain.

WikiSpot runs on Sycamore, a software package

Wiki software

Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers...

forked from python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

-based MoinMoin

MoinMoin

MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. The MoinMoin code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2, or any later version .A number of organizations use MoinMoin to run public wikis,...

. The user interface is simple and it does not offer WYSIWYG. A 'quick edit' feature allows the user to double-click on a paragraph to edit it directly.

Funding

DavisWiki and WikiSpot are financed by the Wiki Spot charitable 501(c)3 organization.
They are run advertisement-free through community donations and fundraising events.

LocalWiki

Some of the Davis Wiki team, including co-founders Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov, are now working on the Local Wiki project.
The The Local Wiki project aims to be an ideal platform for sharing local community information, which could become a new form of local media.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.