City wiki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A city wiki is a wiki used for a city or town. The term 'city wiki' or its foreign equivalent (e.g. 'Stadtwiki') is sometimes used for a wiki that covers not just one city, but a broader region incorporating several cities or region within a country (e.g., Rhein-Neckar). Where Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopedia for a global audience, a city wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. Much of this information might not be appropriate for Wikipedia (e.g., articles on every retail outlet in a town), but might be appropriate for a wiki with more localized content and viewers. A city wiki could also contain information about the following subjects, that may or may not be appropriate for having an entry in Wikipedia:

  • Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers.
  • Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop.
  • Statistical information about a specific road in a city.
  • Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor.
  • A biography of a local mayor and other persons

The Open Guide to London is probably the oldest of the city wikis. There are a sub group of city wikis that all use the OpenGuides software, and most have the openguides.org domain in their URL. Most of these are for cities in Europe as well as a few other cities in the rest of the world.

Contents

[edit] Largest city wikis

Growth of article count on the Karlsruhe Stadtwiki
Growth of article count on the Karlsruhe Stadtwiki

The table below, adapted from a more detailed table on the Omaha Wiki, provides information on the 25 largest city wikis as of May 30, 2008, ranked by the number of articles. Twenty of the city wikis use the Mediawiki software, four use the Sycamore software (Davis, Rochester, Toronto, and Santa Cruz), and one uses the OpenGuides software (London). Some of the methods for reporting metrics vary between the different types of wikis and thus care should be used when comparing across them. For example, the Sycamore stats do not break out counts for pages outside the main article namespace (e.g., user, project, image, template, help, category namespaces in Mediawiki) so the article counts between the Mediawiki and Sycamore wikis cannot be directly compared. For the Mediawiki sites, over half of the pages are in these supporting namespaces and are not included in the counts below. The user counts for most Sycamore wikis show only users with at least one edit while the user counts for the Mediawiki sites include users who have not made any edits. Given these differences, the numbers below tend to overstate article counts for Sycamore wikis and understate the number of users.

The columns below can be sorted by clicking on the symbol below the column heading. The "Total" columns show all activity since the wiki was founded [1]. These metrics will be updated at the end of each month[2].

Article Rank
 Founded
 City Wiki
 Total Articles
 Total Images
 Total Edits
 Total Users
1 2004-07-22 Karlsruhe, Germany 15430 7774 225033 2290
2 2004-06-24 Davis, California 11161 14375 200932 7062
3 2005-04-18 Hamburg, Germany 10807 289 44796 239
4 2006-08-28 Kassel, Germany 10572 3663 83364 440
5 2005-01-18 Rochester, New York 6006 1869 54029 3188
6 2007-02-06 Omaha, Nebraska 5569 1288 34168 397
7 2006-07-26 Salzburg, Austria 5289 1917 60710 512
8 2005-12-15 Rhine Neckar area, Germany 5207 1203 33505 243
9 2006-04-03 Hamm, Germany 4004 1071 19433 28
10 2006-04-02 Passau, Germany 3979 1398 23780 73
11 2006-12-05 Mankato, Minnesota 3883 458 11732 79
12 2006-04-29 Pforzheim-Enz, Germany 3514 1563 40061 205
13 2005-03-23 Munich, Germany 3211 965 31862 503
14 2006-10-02 Bielefeld, Germany 3207 71 9518 82
15 2005-07-18 Bloomington, Indiana 2412 942 19600 2198
16 2006-02-27 Santa Cruz, California 2333 776 9490 75
17 2006-12-09 London, England 2219 1508 14114 111
18 2005-09-09 Ann Arbor, Michigan 2031 163 14142 530
19 2003-07-31 Dresden, Germany 1990 327 11742 56
20 2006-06-12 Warsaw, Poland 1667 1188 19868
21 2006-06-03 Münster, Germany 1650 12494 983
22 2007-03-30 Göttingen, Germany 1563 949 12355 426
23 2006-11-21 Murgtal, Germany 1510 586 8345 135
24 2007-02-16 Toronto, Canada 1484 566 5564 111
25 2007-10-02 Nuremberg, Germany 1160 301 15879 218

Regularly updated statistics on the largest city wikis is provided in German on the Stadtwiki Karlsruhe, with additional detail such as number of page views.

[edit] Known city wikis

City Wikis in English are known to exist in the following metropolitan areas:

[edit] Open guides

[edit] Other languages

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The dates of founding were based on (a) the first edit done on the Main Page (Hauptseite) for Mediawiki wikis or (b) the first edit for Sycamore wikis. If the city wiki uses the Mediawiki software, the article page count is accessible by requesting the Special:Statistics?action=raw page. If the Sycamore wiki engine is used, the /User Statistics page is accessed, all text is selected and copied into an Excel file, and totals are calculated for number of articles, number of edits, and number of files. The Sycamore statistics do not include new article creation as an 'edit' (Mediawiki does), the numbers reported above as 'edits' for the sites using Sycamore is the sum of new articles created plus and edits to these articles in order to provide comparable numbers.
  2. ^ If anyone is aware of a city wiki with more articles than 1,000 articles (legitimate content pages), post a comment on the discussion page with the name and URL of the City Wiki and its statistics will be checked on the next monthly update.

[edit] External links


This article uses content from the Omaha Wiki. The original article was at Omaha_Wiki:Largest_City_Wikis. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Wikipedia, the text of the Omaha Wiki is available for reuse under the GNU Free Documentation License.


Languages