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Today I pointed someone to DavisWiki today, so I thought I might mention it here. I've never been to Davis, California, and frankly the only thing I knew about the town was about its slightly icky fistualted cows. Although I have no familiarity with Davis, a lot of the entries are entertaining. It also seems like it has the potential to be a useful way to share information about the cities. If I were moving there, I would find this page about local coffeeshops useful. The Wiki also includes the entire Davis municipal code. It's also up on the city's Website, but having it in the Wiki could make it easier to integrate into discussions about local issues.

I thought about WikiProject:Seattle, which is a project to create articles in Wikipedia about local issues in Seattle. I wondered why you would want to create a separate Wiki for Davis, rather than start a Wikiproject. One advantage a separate site might provide is that you can nurture a different culture from Wikipedia. Wikipedia's culture is pretty established and pretty rigid. This rigidity might prevent giving the writing a local flavor and might intimidate people who would otherwise find a local wiki a useful tool.

in contrast, DavisWiki emphasizes having fun and nuturing a community that exists on- and off-line. One of the main tabs on each page is a list of individual user pages, where users can list their interests and post photos. Wikipedia offers similar functionality, but it is not a prominent feature. The Wikipedia profiles are geared toward sharing quasi-professional qualifications and interests, while the profiles on DavisWiki tie users to the community. There seems to be an effort by some users to use the site for establishing contacts offline.

DavisWiki doesn't seem to follow the Neutral Point of View policy at Wikipedia. NPOV seems to abate a lot of the flame wars or at least provide a roadmap for resolving disputes. (I'd argue that the policy also generates a fair number of disputes, but those disputes are often interesting.) For a local site, this policy might be too restrictive and limit otherwise useful content. For example, an activist might want to document a protest, but might be too constrained by the policy to share explain the protest and share information.

The norms of Wikipedia would also quash some interesting content. An entertaining section like the one about "Environmental Impact Reduction" in the entry on kegs would be deleted in WIkipedia. This post is sophomoric, but it provides the reader with some flavor of the college town, The Mystery Picture feature would make little sense on an international site like Wikipedia, but here it engages readers with their community. DavisWiki makes an effort to engage with the community, and it could mature into a useful resource for the town.