A wikipedia fork for stakeholders in urban planning
City planing wiki project
City planning wiki is an initiative to use a specialized Wikipedia-like platform in which knowledge and experience about planning, operating, and changing cities can be shared, throughout the world. The platform aims to facilitate sharing the lessons learned in interventions in infrastructure, and regulation. Also to make the established body of academic work in various domains like transportation, urban planning, and urban economics accessible to practitioners and authorities. Related software tools and private industry solutions can also be introduced, using the platform. In future extensions, it aims to facilitate collecting, sharing, and searching data about cities in a semi-standardized format. The website is not a place for an in-depth discussion and answering open questions, rather the first gateway for professionals and citizens for getting familiar with urban dynamics and potential urban solutions, holistically and through as many perspectives as possible.
== Example of topics ==
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Current profile of every city, describing the design, infrastructure, demographic, industry, job market, mobility, etc. Every city is also indexed as much as possible, by its key descriptive and performance indicators, such as population, size, age, density, demographic, km of metro lines, number of jobs, employment rate, etc.
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City challenges including both topics describing the general issue and city-specific pages discussing the context, history, and causal links in more detail. Some example topics are congestions, carbon footprint, air quality, gentrification, citizen participation, low mobility, overcrowding, affordability.
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City interventions, describing their initial targets, execution, post-execution measures, unintended consequences, and lessons learned. City interventions are also indexed by budget, scope in space-time, and the main challenge they aim to tackle. More broad categories/tags can also be assigned, for example, intervention in policy, or infrastructure, or via marketing campaigns.
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Scientific concepts, definitions, behavioral relationships that help to make decisions on land use, urban design, transportation, and infrastructure. Most often they are design guidelines or models that help to predict the consequences of decisions in advance. Furthermore, common definitions facilitate quantification of the urban experience, which in turn helps communication, accountability, and worldwide comparison of cities.
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Softwares helping with city planning and operations for example via city simulation, sensing, data collection, and city traffic operations.
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Trends and paradigms in mobility and design, and marketing that have recently received attention, like micro-mobility.
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Careers and professional titles involved in various planning and operating aspects of cities.
== Q&A ==
- What is the difference with Wikipedia?
For readers interested in city planning, the platform has significantly less noise than Wikipedia. Both concerning content in any single page and types of linked and related articles. This helps maintain the focus on the planning aspect, and reduces the cost of obtaining relevant information. The experience of navigating in the platform will become bolder, by providing alternative maps of the platform. This means the editors can suggest their own categorization of articles in the platform, to obtain a better overview of various perspectives of planning cities. With that readers should receive better assistance from their peers on not just reading one article but exploring one domain. The platform can gather a community of professionals and thus motivate more contributors by providing relevant status in the field. It allows for city-planning-specific search features and search APIs.
- What is the relation to other mediums such as blogs, podcasts, and academic publications?
The life cycle of a page is more like an academic publication than a blog post or podcast or social media post that deals mostly with news, city announcements, tech developments, interviews, and trends. However, when a story about a city makes it to several podcasts and blogs over an extended period of time, this is the cue for it to also be documented on the platform. Like Wikipedia itself, the platform is not for original research, meaning it can report your work after it is published and becomes part of accepted knowledge. In regards to the complexity of language and depth of the topic, is also similar to Wikipedia, depending on the feedback of the community it can be higher and deeper. However, the level of the reader's knowledge assumed will remain far from academic papers. Perhaps the most significant difference with academic publication is in the narrative. While a journal article is bringing across the point of view of one research group, ending with a conclusion, the articles on the platform present an inclusive view of the topic and ending broadly.
== Next steps in the project ==
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Designing a reputation system for editing rights. (The reputation system can also serve as an incentive for more contribution?)
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Define the topic for the first 100 articles. Who to ask about these topics? who can we reach to fill these articles?
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Define initial templates for the known topics. Who can we ask for feedback?
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Define simple rules or guidelines for making new pages and new templates and the length of articles. Steal some editing best practices from Wikipedia to start with.
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Design first concept for indexing pages. Then, the design concept of how people can make a fork of these indexes and change them, and how can the readers view different index systems.
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Move project from Bitnami to GitHub and try to deploy it from there. Make sure we can easily migrate the database if we lose editors' contribution, we will never get them again.
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Think what would be the motivations of our editors for contributing. Is there any at all? can we maintain or increase it?
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Concept for searching in known categories and unknown categories. Can people make their own search API or user interface?