Monday, September 29, 2008

Wiked Venipedia

This week, upon returning from the whirlwind tour, we passed the halfway point in our preparation for the term in Venice.  The work produced by this year's teams is being placed in our wikivenice a.k.a. venipedia.  Using the wiki as our ongoing repository has spared us the trouble of creating independent web pages as we did in the past several years.  The cream of what this year's teams will create will be distilled in clean and neat venipedia entries that will constitute a permanent contribution to Venice knowledge.  Our final aim is to provide an English-language crowdsourcing platform completely dedicated to Venice.   We suspect that our wikivenice may be too hyperlocal to be worthy of full integration into wikipedia itself, but Kyle's checking on this assumption...  We also intend this site to be different from the more commercial venicewiki site, which has a tourist slant to it and is currently only in Italian, even though it contains an invitation to non-Italian speakers to help with their contributions.  Kyle and I will also establish a contact with the wikivenice administrators to avoid overlaps and to clearly divide our efforts along language lines, while providing links to each other, if they are amenable to it.  Meanwhile, we will chip away at the project and invite our Venice Project Center alumni to help us populate the site before we let the public at large edit the entries after the end of the anniversary year in the summer of 2009.