Project: The It’s Evansville Wiki

I’ve been thinking about ways to expand the reach of It’s Evansville for the past few months. Traffic to the site has been growing steadily over the past six months, which I think can be seen by the uptick in user participation in the comments. Thanks for reading and telling your friends about the site.

With the influx in new readership, I’ve tossed a few ideas around about how to expand the site while still keeping the majority of the focus on the actual It’s Evansville site itself. I’ve toyed with expanding to add a video or audio element to the site, but the cost is a bit prohibitive. I’m not one to just plug in a USB mic and start yapping. I need a professional setup so that it sounds or looks professional.

My other idea, which I’m announcing today, is to build a wiki around our city. A wiki is a user-developed database of information about a variety of subjects. Probably the most known wiki is the Wikipedia. My goal is to build a smaller-scale Wikipedia that focuses on the Evansville area: history, local attractions, restaurants and more. Think of it as a mixture of a history book and a Frommer’s City Guide.

I don’t think we necessarily need a three page article for each thing in the city, but giving it enough information to make it a useful resource. Here’s an example page I put together for the Four Freedoms Monument. If someone knew more about the subject, I’d love for them to contribute an update to the page with their knowledge.

This is definitely a long-term undertaking and I need your help to make it a success. This will be a very boring, useless project without participation by third-parties who can contribute fresh content, update existing content and correct mistakes where appropriate. To help with the contribution part, each week I’m going to suggest a general page that everyone can work on to improve the content. I’ll announce our first page in a followup post.

The Wiki is still in its very early stages, but we’ve tried to stub out a bit of content to get it started. I will continue to update it as I have time, but I also hope that others will want to contribute about topics they are knowledgeable on so we can have a reference database for our city that is useful to not only us, but people visiting the city.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the wiki project, let me know. I want to build something that is useful to everyone in the city, not just the people reading It’s Evansville.

The It’s Evansville Wiki: http://wiki.itsevansville.com/