Toledo Talk "Lewiki:About" id 87

Lewiki is a wiki for the Lake Erie West region. Well, that's the plan, anyway. Whether or not it gets used for maintaining info beyond just the Toledo area remains to be seen. Hopefully, it won't be focused on only Toledo.

MetaFilter.com inspired the creation of Toledo Talk, so that our area had a community site to discuss local issues and events and whatever.

So why not have a Wikipedia type of site that collected facts about our area? Some info about northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan can be found at Wikipedia, to be sure, but the nitty-gritty, low-level details about all the communities in our region, including info about festivals, parks, neighborhoods, schools, sports, history, etc., won't be at Wikipedia.

Sidenote: Since my documentation skills suck, you may not understand what I'm trying to say, and you'll probably have trouble understanding the help page. Everything here is a work-in-progress. It should get better over time.

Anyway, I posted a comment to Toledo Talk on Aug 19, 2005 where I tossed out the idea of a Wikipedia-like site dedicated to our area.

Blogs or message boards, unlike wikis, don't allow for good organization of info. Catagories or tags in blogs don't provide the same kind of taxonomy available in a wiki app. They're designed differently. One isn't better than the other. Both are good and have their purpose. Wikis are good for updating and aggregating information, while blogs or message boards are good for discussing current events.

I've thought about adding a wiki area to this site, where logged-in users could add, edit, and update information about northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan, I mean Lake Erie West. It would sort of be a mini Wikipedia or encyclopedia of just our area where the users are the content providers.

Some people may not be interested in discussing or debating issues on a message board, but they may be interested in sharing their knowledge about this area. In a wiki, no single user owns any of the content. It's sharable. If I started a wiki page on the history of the Swan Creek area in downtown Toledo, I would expect many others to edit the page and contribute info and correct mistakes.

About that Swan Creek mention, last summer I saw an excellent two-hour slide-show presentation at the Downtown Latte that was about Swan Creek in the Warehouse District. That kind of fascinating and detailed history should be made easily available over the web.