The following is a timeline of the events relevant to the history of this wiki as a project.
Prehistoric Times
Before this wiki ever existed, several residents of Davis, California had thought about creating something like it. For instance, in 2002, Jaime Raba wanted to create a wiki devoted to Davis. In early 2004, then housemates Philip Neustrom, Paul Ivanov, and Mike Ivanov sat down over some tasty burritos to discuss several ideas for implementing a freely accessible, freely editable, and extremely user-friendly website where useful and entertaining information about the city and the university could be collected. The central concept was the ability for anyone to create an illustrated "entry" describing a place, event, person, or idea related to Davis, and make it possible for others to find and reference the entry in order to organize and build on the content. In addition, an intuitive interface built around a geographic map of the city was discussed. Above all, emphasis was placed on usability and dynamic content.
In the Beginning
Deciding to jump right in rather than build the web site's backend from the ground up, on June 24, 2004, Philip Neustrom installed and configured a copy of the popular open-source wiki package MoinMoin on his laptop, an iBook G4. The choice of the "MoinMoin" package was largely arbitrary, and inspired partly by Tobin Fricke's BerkeleyWiki project. He named it, naturally enough, "Davis Wiki," and chose the bike circle, a symbol especially recognizable in Davis, as a tentative logo (see Wiki Logo). He created a few pages, including UC Davis Principles Of Community, and opened up the wiki for contributions from friends (see User Statistics for dates users joined).
Although the MoinMoin wiki, generic as it was, did not exactly fit the original concept for the website, and although accessing it on Philip's laptop was far from convenient, it is fair to say that the potential was immediately felt by some of the early users. On June 29 Philip acquired temporary hosting courtesy of JoshuaGo, and together with Mike began the process of transforming the MoinMoin package into the vision of Davis Wiki.
On July 2, 2004, much to the surprise of Philip, Mike registered the domain www.daviswiki.org and set it up to redirect to our temporary hosting. Work was progressing on customizing the wiki and making it easier to use. The top priority was designing a new theme that was more user-friendly and visually appealing than the default themes available in MoinMoin at the time. At this point Mike did some initial proof-of-concept coding of the interactive map.
On July 5, 2004, the wiki was put on permanent, reliable hosting. Or so we thought at the time. It would turn out to be neither reliable, nor permanent. Still, it was much better than what we had before, so there was much merriment. During the summer Mike and Philip were involved in the mathematics VIGRE summer research program, but Davis Wiki was taking up more and more of their time.
By late July, the new theme was nearly complete. It looked almost nothing like the original theme and featured CSS tabs for intuitive navigation, a simplified login screen, and a unified search interface. A MoinMoin developer even complimented us on the look of our wiki, and apparently liked it so much that the new MoinMoin Wiki now looks remarkably similar to our own. In addition, Philip and Mike added many new features, such as the comment box, an XML-based Events Board complete with an RSS feed.
The development of the wiki slowed down somewhat over the next two months, partly to allow for some rest, and partly because school started in late September. Nevertheless, the content grew steadily and more users joined every week. The one major development in August was the move away from CamelCase, which allowed for more natural page names.
Going Public
The start of the 2004-05 school year was always the target for "going public" with the website. This meant finalizing all the interface tweaks, testing the features, and removing the password protection in order to allow anyone to view and join the wiki. As a purely historical note, our password used to be "bikecircle69".
The wiki was not quite ready at the start of the school year, but it was close. In the final push to make the wiki publicly available, Philip rehauled the search interface to implement powerful indexing software called Xapian, and Mike rushed to complete the interactive map Java applet. After tying up some loose ends, the stage was set for the public release of DavisWiki.org. We unlocked the site on October 27, created some nice flyers and posted them around town.
Growth
Over the first three weeks of being open to the public, the number of Davis Wiki users quadrupled to over 100, and the number of pages doubled to over 600 pages. The amount of content on existing pages had also grown considerably.
The wiki was hosted on a dedicated machine via 1and1.com for much of its youth, but at the ripe old age of 2 years it moved into its own purpose-built hardware.
Wiki Spot
As the Davis Wiki is regarded as one of the most successful wiki projects, many other groups decided that they wanted to use our software, known as LocalWiki at that point. Tobin Fricke, who had originally started the Berkeley Wiki (not the current version), decided to try again at his new location in Rochester, New York. This project also turned out to be fairly successful. With more programmers contributing code, LocalWiki evolved into to Sycamore, which, among other things, replaced the flat file backend with a faster SQL database.
But what became clear is that many other groups wanted the ability to host wikis such as Davis Wiki for their towns, but without having to handle installation and system administration. The Davis Wiki machine, hosted with Cernio Technology Cooperative, also hosted Santa Cruz Wiki, Rochester Wiki, Chico Wiki, and others. Philip Neustrom embarked on a new project — create tools so that any person could easily start a wiki using Davis Wiki's software. This project became Wiki Spot, a place where a whole network of nonprofit wikis can grow. On April 3, 2007, Wiki Spot officially launched. Davis Wiki serves as the flagship wiki of Wiki Spot (primarily because it is the biggest wiki).
Wiki Spot was also a formalized, legal entity associated with the project. It was incorporated and had its first meeting on 2009-01-243. 501(c)3 non-profit status was obtained on 2009-12-9.
Local Wiki
And it came from on high to Philip Neustrom, and yea he should have a new vision, and that vision was Local Wiki. So it came to pass that he applied to the Knight Foundation, and they awarded Wiki Spot $350,000 in US dollars to build this new vision. The grant was awarded on June 16, 2010.
The vision is this: build a new wiki software from the ground up designed for local community use from the ground up, using modern frameworks like Django and a GUI editor. This will provide a better user experience and a more welcoming community. And we're just getting started... we'll need your help to help us make the best wiki yet.
Eagan Wiki
And that brings us to the start of the Eagan Wiki. On June 24th, 2019, Todd Harper, a 2011 graduate of UC Davis who was a frequent use of the Davis Wiki back in his college days and now a resident of Eagan for the past 9 months, started the Eagan Wiki.
Born out of a frustration with the limited functionality of the Eagan Neighbors Facebook Group, Todd created the Eagan Wiki as a tool for his fellow Eaganites to share anything and everything about Eagan. He hopes you enjoy this new tool!
