PortlandWiki:Community Portal

Current discussions

Template talk:Welcome simple - is PortlandWiki an encyclopedia of Portland? PortlandWiki:Hosting - choosing a more community-owned host Other site-wide discussions are found here.

→ add/remove discussions   → watch for changes

Does this PortlandWiki planning board look like gibberish to you? Yes? That's because it is gibberish.

The community portal is where the wiki community comes together to organize and discuss projects for the wiki. -- from World of Warcraft Wiki

We're building a wiki for Portland, and we'd like you to help!

Get Involved

We invited you to get involved.

• Introduction - Learn more about PortlandWiki and how you can contribute!
• Weekly Wiki Workouts! (aka Meet Ups) - OMG! They're so much fun! Come workout with other wiki nerds. Weekly.
• Wiki Page Basics - Quick tips on writing a basic PortlandWiki page.
• To do - stumped on what to do? Check out our to do list for open activities, big and small.
• Community Portal - Where we discuss what is needed to make PortlandWiki succeed.
• PortlandWiki Policies - Best practices to follow when adding content.
• Administrators - Names of some of PortlandWiki's more active admins, what they do, and how to contact PortlandWiki.
• Article ideas - Suggest an article topic, or find an article to start building!
• Add Content Here! - Help PortlandWiki flesh out skimpy articles crying out for your content contributions.

Tell us how you found out about PortlandWiki!

• Like most places on this wiki, this page is work in progress with ever changing information, participation and ideas. We're excited that you're here!
• Feel free to add some article ideas or just start writing articles!
• Are you a policy nerd? PortlandWiki Policies is a place to develop a baseline of policies, guiding principles, etc. for the wiki.
• Portland Neighborhoods! PortlandWiki is currently motivated to improving its content on Portland Neighborhoods. We'd love your input!

Some links, Portland content

These are just a handful of sites, we're sure you know of others. See the Local Blogs page for a list of cool sites that post on Portland news, culture, arts, events and other musings.

• Wikipedia Oregon Portal
• Oregon Encyclopedia
• Dave Knows Portland
• Silicon Florist
• PDXStump
• PortlandTech
• Planet PDX
• the Nature of Portland
• 365 Things To Do In Portland, Oregon
• PDX Pipeline

Interviews and culture

• Brief interview with Ward Cunningham and Jimmy Wales, two giants of the wikiverse. full interview (may require login with library card)
• An interview with WikiProject Oregon, the folks working on Oregon-related Wikipedia content
• Blog and audio archive from Think Out Loud program on WikiProject Oregon and the Oregon Encyclopedia

Other civic wikis

We're building a list of other civic wikis to show the dynamic work that is done in other cities and towns. Each is quite unique and offer ideas that we can build on for our own Portland Wiki!

Other Portland wikis

moved to WikiNode

Collaboration Tools

• TypeWith.Me etherpad collaboration space
• On wiki discussion about the wiki or whatever else... maybe...

InstantCommons

What do you guys think about installing InstantCommons, which would make it possible to embed photos and other media from Wikimedia Commons? I think it would be really useful. (Of course, it's still nice to have the ability to upload stuff here locally, I'm not suggesting we turn that feature off.) -Peteforsyth (talk) 08:16, 28 July 2010 (PDT)

I think that that is a splendid idea. :) Michael (talk) 17:27, 28 July 2010 (PDT)

It's not really necessary to have a whole extension. A single statement is all that you need. 71.59.195.198 17:06, 24 October 2010 (PDT)

# directly use images sourced from wikimedia commons
$wgForeignFileRepos[] = array(
       'class'            => 'ForeignAPIRepo',
       'name'             => 'shared',
       'apibase'          => 'http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php',
       'fetchDescription' => true, // Optional
);

Definitely, this will be a great benefit! I was thinking about this for a while but didn't know the actual argument code for it. I think since we're using mediawiki version 1.16, we can use the shortened form, $wgUseInstantCommons. I'm going to try it once Dave and I clear up some server issues. -kotra (talk) 19:53, 25 October 2010 (PDT)

This is done! Go ahead and use any image from the Wikimedia Commons as you would any other: [[File:Portland Night panorama.jpg|thumb|300px]] results in:

-kotra (talk) 19:45, 7 March 2011 (PST)

Installed the configuration shown here: Manual:$wgUseInstantCommons -WikiMaster (talk) 23:05, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Another suggestion

I think it would be really excellent if we could embed Google Maps (or similar, like maybe Open Street Map). Here's something I did a while ago on AboutUs, which I think shows the potential: [South Tabor neighborhood map

Doing it that way is pretty tedious, you have to be willing to work with a bunch of code. So I'm not suggesting we use the same extension/approach that AboutUs does. But, the "My Maps" feature has embed code -- is there a way to make that work on our wiki?? -Peteforsyth (talk) 10:32, 12 October 2010 (PDT)

Slogan?!

Would it be helpful to have a pithy little slogan to associate with our name, to help people understand what we're about? (This question otherwise known as: what are we about??) -Pete (talk)

Some thoughts:

• "Your friendly local on-ramp to the wider wiki way!"
• "Documenting Portland. Having fun."
• "A not-for-profit home for all your Portland lore."

This is a great idea! We need a mission statement/tagline for the site bad. Just as note, use of "your" is preferable to "my" or similar options because it encourages a sense of ownership. My ideas for a tagline/statement that would be ideal for both telling people and putting under the logo, ala "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."...

• "Your community wiki"
• "Your city, your wiki"
• "Your city, your knowledge"

Let me know what you think, Steven Walling (talk) 12:44, 19 October 2010 (PDT)

All great ideas. I think I like the shorter ones best, they are easier to remember. A few more, bulding off the above:

• "Documenting PDX"
• "Your city's knowledge"
• "Share your PDX"

Would be nice to ask more people's opinions on them, see which they like best. -kotra (talk) 20:09, 25 October 2010 (PDT)

Question-based content

The one thing I've discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off.

— Susan Orlean, found at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/susanorlea494708.html

This quote got me thinking: what if we instituted some way to automatically list a bunch of questions - open-ended or precise - on every article? And make it easy for people to answer them, thus giving people an easy way to build articles? Template-based, perhaps. -kotra (talk) 13:13, 10 June 2013 (PDT)

I love this idea - similar to one I have always wanted to try. Have someone ask a questions, as a page name - create if not answered, redirect to one that is answered or go to the answer. new questions get auto categorized as needing an answer, etc. yay! ~~ MarkDilley