Some weeks ago, I was doing some research online and I happened upon the wiki page of a small town I’d never heard about in this state. It got me to thinking about my own home area and whether we had a wiki page or not.

Turns out we did, but in my opinion it’s not very good. It looks nothing like a wiki page, based on what I saw on the other page and of course the big Wikipedia site. I started wondering what it might take to have a better one for this area.

Then I was at the health club and one of the guys I know from Twitter, Keith, who also does computer stuff, showed up. I broached the subject with him and he mentioned that when he lived in Rochester, NY, that they’d had a wiki page and he loved it. I took a look at that page, and though it’s kind of plain, it worked much better than the one for Syracuse.

I started thinking that maybe we needed to build a brand new page to get it right. However, I knew it would be a major undertaking, and I decided I wanted to put together a dream team of sorts to discuss the issue. Besides me and Keith, there’s Josh, Patrick, and Chris (only first names because I can’t spell Patrick’s last name, and I’d probably get Chris’ last name wrong as well). We all met at a Chinese buffet on Erie Blvd near Thompson Rd (the local folks will know it) to talk about it.

The main discussion fell into two categories. One, whether locally people would care all that much, and then whether they’d want to try to build up the one that’s not great (that is if we can find the originator of the site, because we’d like to really dig into it) or go about creating our own from scratch. I purchased one of the domain names to protect it, but I’m willing to share it with everyone else, and Chris has server space he’s willing to donate so there won’t be any other costs associated with it.

What we all agreed upon is that we would put out a survey and ask Syracuse folks if they’d complete it and give us our opinion. The link is on Survey Monkey, and it’s 3 simple questions. It should prove to be interesting, no matter the outcome. And who knows; this post might get some of the rest of you who aren’t in Syracuse to think about one for your area. I’m definitely no community organizer, but this will be my entry into the market, and probably my only one.