What's new:

Much better mobile viewing (and some editing).Explore pages on the new "Explore" page.

  • Oakland Wiki is now a more integrated part of the non-profit LocalWiki effort. Visually, this means you'll notice some small UI changes. We did a ton of work to make sure the oaklandwiki.org domain will remain as before, as will the logo (though it was edited a bit for space reasons). This is still a bit of an experiment, so we hope to work out the kinks over the coming months.
  • Mobile support - pages now look great and snappy on mobile phones! Editing is possible on iOS devices, but currently limited to just HTML text editing on Android and other devices.
  • Streamlined Front Page design - the Front Page has been made a little less ad-hoc in order for it to be more flexible and work better on mobile devices.
  • Little user icon things - you can now upload a gravatar and you'll see it when making edits, etc.
  • More prominent acknowledgement of contributors - at the bottom of a page, you'll now see a list of the top contributors to the page.
  • Explore page - you can now click on 'Explore' to see a beautiful list of interesting pages. The pages are ranked according to a rough measure of # images, maps, links, etc. You can still get to the old "all pages" view at the bottom of the Explore page.
  • "Random tour" - on the Explore page, you can click 'random tour' to get an interactive, random stroll through pages.
  • Easier way to add new pages, especially for newcomers - just click "Add a new page" up in the top header. This was one of the most confusing things for newcomers.
  • You can now add a page directly when viewing the main Map page. Just click "Add a new map" when viewing the main map. This also means you don't have to create a page before creating a map.
  • Following pages and getting email updates - you can now click on the star icon in the page header to follow a page. This mean you'll get email updates whenever the page is edited. You can also follow other people as well as other LocalWiki regions by clicking the star on the user's page or the region Front Page, respectively. You'll also see updates to everything you follow if you're logged in and go to the main LocalWiki homepage here.
  • Nearby pages - you can now click the "Near You" menu item to see pages that are near where you are. This doesn't work perfectly yet and we're revamping it right now.
  • Nearby tags, global tags, & other nearby things - when you click on a tag, e.g. "neighborhood," you'll noConnect knowledge across communities using tags.w see, at the bottom of the page, a list of other nearby pages with the tag "neighborhood." You can also click "See all LocalWiki pages tagged .." to see every page with that tag. This is really powerful, and allows us to really easily tie together knowledge across geographical boundaries. This is especially important when it comes to topics and resources that don't exist in just Oakland -- health resources, parks, social services, bart stations, surveillance activities, murals, etc.
  • Better integration with OpenStreetMap - when editing a map, you'll now see a search box in the map editor area. You can use this search box to find named objects inside of OpenStreetMap.  Picking an item from the search box will import the item directly from OpenStreetMap into the map, meaning you won't have to trace the map picture in some cases.  E.g. "Mountain View Cemetery" will pull in the already-found OpenStreetMap map for the Mountain View Cemetery. Note: this search isn't great for finding addresses or intersections right now, but you can input a latitude and longitude directly now.
  • SSL support - all communication is now encrypted using SSL (HTTPS), making it much harder for your communications to be intercepted or surveilled.
  • Lots of other little fixes and improvements.

 

We're working on putting the finishing touches on the LocalWiki platform, which we hope to polish up and officially launch in the coming weeks.  Until then there may be glitches and bugs!  In particular, things may be sluggish for the next day or so, but will get gradually snappier over time.  If you see something urgent, please shoot an email to [email protected] or [email protected] !

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