Davis Wiki: what a good idea
While poking around the KDVS website looking for open format radio links, I came across:
If you don’t know what a wiki is, I’m not going to tell you. But I will bruise the “you can’t use a word in a definition for that word” rule by suggesting you read the article on wikis at the Wikipedia, which is of course an encyclopedia built on a wiki. Here it is.
The Davis Wiki looks great. I do love community, and I love it when people take ownership of their communities (physical) thus inevitabily strengthening their communities (social). Weee. The Davis Wiki is exactly that, a whole bunch of people sharing their ideas and impressions of the place they live, incidentally using a tool (wiki) which is designed from the ground up to make dispersed community creation easy. So that it is easy. So people seem to be doing it. Ahhh.
The Davis Wiki website is advertising their 1000th entry. Take a look, for instance, at people’s impressions of various construction sites on the university campus, this index of local musicians, this commentary on and picture of Russell Avenue and the Payphone Project.
The content is heavy on the campus side and maybe a little light on the community side. But whatever.
It doesn’t exactly make me miss Davis. I was never a huge fan of Davis. Why was I more fond of Squamish, where there is almost nothing, than Davis, where there are at least things? Squamish is what it is, I suppose, and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. Davis fronts. Squamish has character, wether you like it or not. Davis has competing brands. Squamish is a surly boring mutt hound with flees, Davis is oh forget it. I certainly do miss certain Davisites, and Davisian microscenes. And California, California is great. What this makes me miss is being in a place where there are at least people who occasionally try to do things. So cheers to you, Davis people who do things, like this very nice Davis Wiki. If it is the people that make Davis an OK place to be, this effort to inject more peopleness into Davis is a hell of a good idea.