Arborwiki is a local encyclopedia about the Ann Arbor area that anyone can edit. Up til now, it's been running on the same Mediawiki software that powers Wikipedia, but we're in the process of moving it to a new Localwiki instance.
Localwiki is wiki software designed especially for using in city wikis. It's based off of ideas learned from DavisWiki, a very successful wiki based in Davis, California. The Localwiki software is especially good at handling maps, and so it should be that much easier to map out the streets and roads of Ann Arbor and surrounding Washtenaw County.
There's now also a new Facebook group to discuss Arborwiki, which has been handy for sorting through restart visuals. I'll make sure to invite everyone who has touched the project so far to it.
In response to some questions:
The migration process has been relatively smooth so far, with about 10,000 pages moved in without much in the way of hand-editing things to patch them up. There's an importer for Mediawiki pages into Localwiki that handles a lot of the heavy lifting. We had to redesign the home page to take advantage of the new include file syntax, and there are some Mediawiki templates that I used for automatically generating links to news clippings that I'll have to reimagine. Localwiki founder Philip Neustrom has been a big help, and we're running on a Ubuntu instance that Ryan Eby at the Ann Arbor District Library spun up for us.
Not a lot of the Arborwiki pages had maps on them, so Philip wrote a little bit of custom code to make that happen more frequently by automatically recognizing some pages with addresses on them.
