Last week I launched the St. Paul neighborhood wiki. Very much a work in progess, lets call it beta. The idea came from my buyers who are relocating. Our fair city has 17 districts and 127 neighborhoods, and 13 MLS districts. This all creates a lot of confusion, so I am trying to organize the entire mess over time to make it easier.
Wiki's are designed to be collaborative. The neighborhood pages can be edited by anyone with an account. Assuming I have the security set up correctly, anyone can create an account on their own and I will be notified via email that they have. I am using media wiki, the same software that wikipedia is on, and am hosting it on my own server.
It took a few weeks between the time I loaded the software until I was able to set anything up. I found the online help to be cryptic and ended up asking for help. I asked several people and no one really seemed to have a handle on how to start such a wiki. My questions were mostly about structure,such a wiki has to have a logical structure,
The next steps include putting instructions in the on-line help section, getting all 127 neighborhoods listed with a section on average home values and marketing the wiki so that people know about it and can find it. It is linked into my blog, which is getting a kind of makeover, and has a new menu bar across the top.
If there are any Active Rain members who have experience with media wiki, I would appreciate any advice I can get.
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