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.

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

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

Feel free to add some article ideas or just start writing articles!
Are you a policy nerd? Portland wiki policies is a place to develop a baseline of policies, guiding principles, etc. for the wiki.

Some links, Portland content

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

Many other cities have established general wikis, with varying levels of success. There is a long list at WikiIndex. DavisWiki, Santa Cruz Wiki, ArborWiki, RichmondWiki and Bloomingpedia are a few of the longer-standing and more successful ones. (also see AboutUs:List:Civic Wiki)

Biggest civic wiki list

Other Portland wikis

moved to WikiNode

Collaboration Tools

Suggestion

What do you guys think about installing the MediaWiki Extension "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
);

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)