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.
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!
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)
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: File:Portland Night panorama.jpg
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.
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
Domain Name
What do you guys think about moving the site from PortlandWiki.org to Portland.wiki as it becomes available? Ray (talk)
Sounds great to me, as long as there's a redirect left behind from portlandwiki.org! -kotra (talk) 09:42, 26 February 2014 (PST)
yes, hard part is to redirect every page so that portlandwiki.org/pagename goes to portland.wiki/pagename. so we protect the search engine love. I'm going to look into it more ... Ray (talk)
I think we can do that with a server redirect in the .htaccess file (using mod_rewrite). But Dave and I are working on migrating the server hosting to DigitalOcean at the moment, so it may be some time before we're ready to do that. Also I don't yet know if Dave agrees that it's a good idea to switch domains, but I'll be seeing him tonight and will get his opinion. -kotra (talk) 14:06, 28 February 2014 (PST)
Hi Ray & kotra: Sounds great. Count me in. As for the redirects (in addition to whatever we do with .htaccess rewrites), we can probably write a batch file to create redirects for each page. I'll look into that too. Kind regards, WikiMaster (talk) 07:28, 1 March 2014 (PST)
