The It’s Evansville Wiki had a few updates over the past week. Here’s the other changes from the past week.

• Evansville WiFi Hotspots - Thanks to Chris Meyers and Christine Murphy for helping with this page.
• Mesker Park Zoo - Thanks to Robyn for building this page.
• Evansville Mayors - Thanks to Chris Meyers for building this page up.
• Mesker Park Zoo
• University of Evansville - Thanks to Robyn for helping with this page.

This week’s Wiki project is to work on our other university’s page. I’ve setup stub pages for both USI and will work on expanding the content during the week and hope you can help as well.

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.

As our first project page for the new It’s Evansville Wiki I thought it’d be wise to leverage the knowledge of our vast photographer community to highlight some of the best destinations for capturing the essence of life in the Evansville area. In addition to just listing the locations, creating or updating a page for each destination with a sample photo from the location would go a long way towards improving the content on the site.

If you’d like to participate in this week’s project, you will need to setup an account on pbwiki.com (our wiki host) and request access to the It’s Evansville Wiki . Once I accept you as an author, you’ll be able to edit this page and any other page.

Happy editing!

It’s Evansville Wiki: Photography Hotspots

If you have suggestions for future pages you’d like to see updated on the wiki, email justin at itsevansville dot com

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/