Welcome to the LocalWiki for Raleigh — a free, openly-editable, community-centric website for local history, media, opinions, interesting characters and everything else about Raleigh, North Carolina USA. It’s a transformative and empowering project for the Oak City and one that will increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the region. If you're new to the LocalWiki for Raleigh, thank you for visiting! Please check out the Wiki Guide for detailed instructions on how to contribute content.

Raleigh (TRIANGLE) WIKI HISTORY


Triangle Wiki, serving the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, region, was started in September of 2011. The folks behind the project met at Raleigh’s first City Camp, an open "un-conference" focused on open-source civic technology. As the Triangle is a large region, they focused on building out Raleigh in the beginning.

Reid Serozi, who initially spearheaded the project, and Philip Neustrom connected in 2006 after Reid had seen the DavisWiki and thought the Raleigh-Durham region could really benefit from something similar. At the time, Reid experimented with using the legacy DavisWiki software to start something in Raleigh-Durham. He ran into issues with usability: to contribute content you had to know a certain mark-up language, making adoption outside of the tech elite extremely unlikely. He also didn’t have any other partners in crime to help drive the project. As such, the older project never got started.

In the Fall of 2011 Reid pitched the idea of using the new LocalWiki software to several Raleigh City Camp Staffers to develop the Triangle’s first local wiki. The group accepted the challenge with little hesitation. Meet the founding Triangle Wiki organizers: Scott Reston, Philip Poe, Hilary Stokes, Jim Belt, Manuel Monserrate, Leo Suárez, Laura Hamlyn, Bonner Gaylord and Reid Serozi.

In 2014, LocalWiki for Raleigh was spun off from TriangleWiki.org. Same content, same people, just a different hyper-local home. 


ABOUT LOCALWIKI 

The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. And we have already proven this basic idea can work and provide tremendous benefits to a community.

So much of the unique knowledge and experiences we acquire through years of living in a community gets spread only by word of mouth, or worse—just stays “locked up” in our heads. But this is great stuff, valuable expert knowledge that can benefit everyone — after all, when it comes to the communities where we live, we are all experts!

With your help, we want to help as many communities as possible realize the full potential of such an amazing, collaborative information resource. We have received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Knight News Challenge, to develop the next generation of wiki software that is tailored to the needs of local communities.

Knight News Challenge: Local Wiki from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

 

THE DAVIS WIKI

In 2004, the Davis Wiki, an experimental project to collect and share interesting information about the town of Davis, California, editable by anyone, that soon became the world's largest and most vibrant community wiki.

Today the residents of Davis use it for everything from learning about local news and local history to helping return lost pets to their owners — and it's become the largest, most used media source in the city. In week, nearly half of residents use the Davis Wiki; in a month, nearly everyone uses it. And 1 in 7 residents contribute material to the Davis Wiki.

 

This page is part of the Wiki Community collection.  If you're interested in getting more involved with the project, brainstorm ideas for content development, or if you'd like to meet the team that's heading up the efforts to build momentum, head on over to the Triangle Wiki Discussion Group on Facebook and check out the rest of the wiki community pages. 

 

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