Wikilocal

The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a closed Meta-Wiki request. Please do not modify it.

I am closing this per procedure. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 01:23, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Propsed: Wikilocal, a database of town/city/county-specific information, somewhat akin to Google Local. Such a database could include (but not be limited to) information regarding local stores, restaurants, entertainment venues, hotels, etc. listing (at minimum) the name and address of such a location. Such a database should also include details of local points of interest such as relative cost, quality of service, hours of operation, and contact information. Ultimately, the databased should be cross-referenced to allow access based on location (by town or county), by chain (for instance to find a McDonalds in a certain area), by cost (inexpensive, moderate, expensive), by interest (such as by age range or general topic like "sports" or "music"), and/or by distance to/from a certain point. Such a project could also be integrated into the proposed Wikimaps.

Sadly, this runs afoul of NPOV ideology, a backbone of all wikimedia technologies. This idea, while useful, would not have much need for the wiki style of editing, and would mostly serve to add new places, something better handled by other websites (though the names elude me at the moment, most likely yahoo and such.) Please see wikilist, another proposed project. Thanks, Mysekurity

I would have been for this a while back but now I'm leaning toward just letting Wikipedia be a gigantic agglomeration of all things in space and time, even the pettiest local person, place, thing or issue. It's obvious that what we're doing is going past (I don't mean in quality, I mean in kind) the great European encyclopedias that matured in the 20th century. We're creating a publication that in its exhaustive detail will dwarf all other compendiums from the Encyclopedia Britannica to the Talmud to scientific databases. It will someday be bigger (in units of information, some mixture of "bytes" and "Memes") even than the largest physical library when that library is itself looked at as a single compendium. It would be best for us to stop calling it an encyclopedia, because that term implies boundaries we've already gone past. It should be something like WikiPendium, or better yet, dispense with the "wiki" altogether (the enabling software is important but ultimately secondary)... I go into this bloviation because it's the rationale for including even the most annoyingly trivial entry. All of it should be subject to the master search (and, mercy, the search function will have to be a hundred times better than present, using something like "dtSearch" (www.dtsearch.com)). However, and I hope this is a big however, perhaps the growing use of subarticles could be formalized to create a reliable hierarchy that tells the user when he/she is coming upon absurdly local material. He/she can steer away or continue at that point. These hierarchy levels could have their own identifying tags so they could be filtered out via checkbox from the Master search. I would foresee about 20 levels. Level 1 is "Encyclopedic information of prime, lasting significance". Level 20 is "Information almost infinitesimal in scope and lasting significance". The user could then set his/her own default "Universal Importance Scope" (UIS^tm) for unstructured searches (that is, project-wide plaintext search of the type championed by the WWW, as opposed to structured database queries of the type championed by all the database companies that were knocked on their asses by the WWW but which will also eventually be used in this project). A typical default UIS would be maybe Levels 1-13... Jeez I wish I could free myself up to devote a pure 10 months to Wikipedia. I would work hard to flesh out these ideas, get them accepted as forward-looking policies of some sort, and also work as a developer on an improved Search function. Not gonna happen, though... JDG 16:59, 17 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the "let it be all things" approach. For example, in genealogy (family tree research), wiki is one of the first places I come for any person who I think might be slightly significant. It is an absolutely outstandingly most-fabulous place for people to combine their own research into createing one unified biography. In most cases, it works out fine. There are only a few highly controversial places where it doesn't. Wjhonson 17:33, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And btw, my vote for the new name is "Trans-Galactic-Megapedia". Wjhonson 17:37, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikia

See Cities, a wikia that serves this exact purpose. - Kookykman

The above request page is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Comments about this page should be made in Meta:Babel or Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.