Davis Wiki?

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that a noticeable amount of posts in this community end up being about newbie questions as people find their way to our wonderful square.  And, as August winds down I'm sure there will be even more.  I love the fact that this is a great resource for those questions, however, after the first dozen times a question is asked about where to get a hair cut I start thinking maybe we should get a wiki going for these more common questions.
So I pose the following questions:

1) Do we have a wiki already?
2) Should we start making use of our wikipedia entry? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Square
3) Or we could use a wikispaces wiki I just set up. http://davissquare.wikispaces.com/
4) Maybe we should just make use of and point people towards Yelp.  http://www.yelp.com
5) Is there another option/suggestion I'm missing?

Let the discussion begin!

EDIT: Additional suggestions
1) Tagging Entries

EDIT: Conclusion
Looks like tagging is the preferred method.  The wiki however does exist so if people want to work with it, be my guest.

Comments

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Or one of the mods could go through and mark certain popular entries under "Memories." I know b0st0n does that and it seems to be somewhat effective.

managment

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

Or people could continue to tag their entries. We had conversations about tagging and having the mods add tag clouds to the community, but nothing ever came of it.

Re: managment

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I vote ron_newmon for mod! He seems willing and able to do the work, after all, and it's not the sort of thing I'd ever want to push on people who *didn't* want to.

Re: managment

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I agree with this. I'm all in favor of Ron becomming a mod. He already has special tag editing access anyway, and he does a great job.

I'm also in favor of the wiki that attackpenguin suggests.

Re: managment

[ron_newman]

If you want to make me a moderator, go ahead. Right now I think I'm able to add new tags and remove old ones, but I don't know about any other special tag-editing access.

Re: managment

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I have to get the okay from the other mods, but I totally vote Yes to you.

Other mods?

Re: managment

[ron_newman]

(By the way, a lot of the tagging you see here now happens because I do it.)

Re: managment

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

That would make sense, as well. I think a wiki would be a useful resource, but there's no reason to launch one from this community if we don't have to.

Re: managment

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

The flip side of that argument is that the wiki could grow beyond just the people on LJ and end up being an even better resource for these types of questions.

Re: managment

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Sure, but I'm lazy and narrow-minded, so I don't see things that way.

Re: managment

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

The way I see it this would only work if we have a moderator who is willing to tag religiously. Otherwise I see it going wrong for two reasons. First not everyone wants to or knows about tagging, particularly newbies asking questions. Second is that with out some sort of regular set of tags the tag cloud can quickly get useless and turn into a mess like 43things (http://www.43things.com/).

Re: managment

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

We've had a discussion addressing your points in the past. I'm too lazy to dig it up again at the moment. If the discussion was seriously re-opened, I'd go find it. So far the mods aren't interested.

Suffice it to say that even a half-assed tagging system (people have volunteered in the past) with some clear community standards and people pointing to them would work better than a constant repetition of "where can I get my haircut?"

Re: managment

[ron_newman]

I tagged this "lj community housekeeping". If you click on that tag, you may find the previous discussions.

[kelmit.livejournal.com]

The other DavisWiki (http://daviswiki.org/) is awesome.

(I may be biased...)

I've often wished we had one.

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

Now you are just stalking me ;-)

[kelmit.livejournal.com]

I'm deliberating between snarky replies, please help me choose one:

1. If you're seriously worried about being stalked, perhaps you'd better not post in a public forum? :-P

2. So replying to 2 of your posts in the course of a year is considered stalking? :-P

3. Do you playfully accuse all repeat commenters of stalking? :-P

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

#3 but only when they have tea with me first.

[kelmit.livejournal.com]

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! hi!

(totally didn't make the connection)

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

Haha, np

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Definitely not option 2 - "where to get a hair cut" isn't the kind of thing that belongs in an encyclopedia.

[spatch]

I'd advise a local Davis-type whatever stay out of Wikipedia altogether, because nobody needs the hassles that come with trying to deal with the Wikipedia community.

[tut21.livejournal.com]

What derspatchel said.

Wikipedians are obsessed with whether items and people are worthy of inclusion so Wikipedia, ironically, is an inappropriate place for a useful wiki about Davis Square.

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

I could potentially talk to the DARBI people about adding a wiki to YourDavisSquare.com (http://www.yourdavissquare.com/). I'm the volunteer webmaster for that site at the moment.

[attackpenguin.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a great idea, could you see if they would be willing to do that?

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

Question... Does anyone here have experience with what wiki software is the best to use? I installed a wiki on my own website and chose DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) but I don't really love it but then again I guess it's nice that I already know how to use it and configure it etc.

Here's what it looks like running on my site:
http://www.craftster.org/craftopedia/doku.php

The other one I was looking into is MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) which is what Wikipedia uses.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

My concern about that would be what if there was commentary about DARBI members and it wasn't always positive? Would it be deleted/changed? Does DARBI want to risk getting involved with that?

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

Yeah... Very good point. Maybe they wouldn't work out after all. I'll point this out to them as a possible risk and see what they think.

[tut21.livejournal.com]

Some amount of vandalism will happen to every wiki but the beauty of wikis are the volunteer communities that spring up around good ones to fix typos, add content and remove spam.

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There's vandalism and then there's the possibility that someone could post negative experiences they had at an establishment that's a member of DARBI.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I didn't mean vandalism or nastiness (which wouldn't be appropriate whatever the venue), just honest reviews that might sometimes not be positive.

Not that I expect that would happen often, but still.

No offense, but...

[ah42.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but I actually went cross-eyed looking at that link. I don't know why, but I cannot even force myself to focus on anything.

Actually, looking at it a a bit more, I'm thinking: the flickr and weather.com images maybe shouldn't line up so well with the google.map. That seems to draw my eyes too much. Maybe stagger the alignment? Also, it would seem there's an overuse of bold text on the top-half of the page. So much that my eyes don't know where to look. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.

This is positive criticism! I don't want people to NOT want to look at anything Davis Sq. related :)

Re: No offense, but...

[magpie-leah.livejournal.com]

I agree. They haven't hired a designer yet so it's basically just slapped together at the moment.

[makoshark.livejournal.com]

We might also want to make a page on http://wikitravel.org