Hot off the Oakland Wiki digital future-presses...
December 2014
Lots of big updates today! Details over on this page over here. Things may be a bit sluggish throughout the day, but will become more snappy in a couple of hours.
August 2014
Emergency resources love <3
A lot of work has been put into the Resources portal, which now includes Emergency Room coverage due to the mediocre results on Google for "emergency room Oakland". Our hard work and commitment to our community is getting noticed!! :D
"As word gets out about the Oakland Wiki resources portal I hope that more people will contribute so that we can have a more nuanced and intricate understanding of Oakland's services landscape." -eekiv
July 2014
Mind the Gap(s)
While the growth of the Oakland Wiki continues unabated, so do the number of pages that are wanted, needs work, etc. Of our 6,227 pages, over 800 are marked 'wanted', and over 1,000 are marked 'needs work'. So if you're at a loss for what to work on, consider helping fill in some of the gaps. (As of August 5, there are still 804 'wanted' pages.)
Oakland Wiki...The Musical?
No. Not even Oakland Wiki: The Book. But there are early talks about creating an Arcadia Publishing book, Legendary Locals of Oakland, and clearly the Oakland Wiki would be a great resource for the book. That's why you may have seen the 'legendary locals' tag starting to appear on pages.
Sudo Room is Moving
While the Oakland Wiki lives on the web, Sudo Room has acted as our home in Oakland (with the Oakland History Room as a close second.) Sudo Room is moving from Uptown to The Omni in Temescal. The wiki meetup planned for July 3rd has been postponed to Thursday, July 17th, 7PM, to accommodate the move.
Mapping POPOS
Earlier in June there was some excellent collaborative mapping on the topic of POPOS - privately-owned public open spaces. These are spaces like parks that seem public and are open to the public but that are actually privately owned. A really good example of a POPOS is the Kaiser Roof Garden. The idea to map these out first started out with a discussion on twitter which then turned into the POPOS page and even an in-person scavenger hunt with people going to places in person to see if they were open to the public! :) While the POPOS page is a great resource now, surely there are more POPOS out there waiting to be discovered, documented, and mapped...by you and all of us :D
Upcoming Events
Come join the edit party at the Golden Gate Branch library on Monday, July 14th, from 6:00-7:30pm. This is a follow-on to the Oakland Urban Paths walk with artist Sue Mark through the Golden Gate district in North Oakland.
March 2014
Oakland Wiki files beat number of pages
March 2014: As of late February/early March of 2014, there are now more total files on Oakland Wiki than entries. Why is this big news? While seemingly more symbolic than measureable, it means that pages are getting filled with photos, videos, and other media! mmm that sweet ratio...
New illustrations for entries made during Mar. 7th "Draw Oakland" event
On March 7th during First Friday, folks gathered at the Sudo Room hackerspace to Draw Oakland. These are the entries that now have beautiful illustrations made during the event:
The first week of March saw some really sweet collaborative creation of knowledge about three rad buildings
- First up was the McMann apartments, you know, the New York-style building in Uptown that houses Rock Paper Scissors Collective. This started with a tweet on Feb. 28th with a photo of the building captioned "A slice of an Oakland that never was." It turned out that the wiki already had information about RPS Collective, but no info about the building. We started an entry and pinged a few of our friends who like to work on history via twitter to see if they knew more. Within a few hours, they wrote up a lovely, referenced entry and even asked the person who posted the initial tweet about the license on his photo and included his photos. Now we all know - this building was NOT wedged between other tall buildings, but for some reason (no one knows - yet!) was built much taller than the buildings around it. Another mystery solved!
- Next up was Tudor Hall Apartments, a sweet castle-like apartment building in the Lakeside neighborhood on the downtown side of Lake Merritt. On Mar. 5th we started out with a picture and some basic info about this cool building that really stands out from everything else in the neighborhood. Over the course of the day, the entry was filled out with historic photos, blueprints, and more. Questions remain, but this is a great start.
- Finally, on Mar 7th, folks worked on the entry for the De Domenico Building, one of the buildings in OscarPlatz downtown. Work on this was spurred by npm moving into this building and adding some information about it. The entry now includes historic photos, blueprints, and more. Additionally, this is one of the many buildings that had to be rehabbed after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 - once you start learning about the histories of the buildings in Oakland, you can't get too far without running into Loma Prieta, a significant influence on the built environment of the city today.
Feb 2014
Oakland Wiki won a Partners in Preservation award from the Oakland Heritage Alliance in the Education category
Oakland Wiki won the Oakland Heritage Alliance's 2013-2014 Partners in Preservation Award in the Education category for all of the amazing work that wiki contributors have done documenting Oakland history. The awards ceremony was February 20th, 2014 at 7pm at the Rockridge Masonic Temple. Photo and more info here!
August 2012
Oakland Wiki is crawled for the first time by the Internet Archive!
Get all nostalgic and look at one of the first iterations of Oakland Wiki here. <3 <3 <3
