Triangle Wiki: Call for Contributors

Guest post by Laura Hamlyn. Photo of Crabtree Creek Watershed by Hal Goodtree.

Cary, NC – Best place to live. Home to SAS. Highly educated workforce. We know these Cary stories by heart. But there are so many more waiting to be told.

Where are the best dog parks? What’s the story behind those glass head sculptures in front of the Cary Arts Center? Are there any truly vegan local restaurants? Where are the best road biking routes originating in the city limits? And here’s the answer: www.TriangleWiki.org.

Triangle Wiki

Everyone with a computer knows Wikipedia. The Triangle Wiki will also be an online encyclopedia of information, only from a very hyper-local perspective. Imagine a single source for everything locals know about our city. The only barrier to entry is a simple registration form. Anyone can contribute.

The site is the brainchild of participants in last summer’s Raleigh City Camp, an open source group dedicated to using technology to solve local government issues. The wiki was one of many bright ideas that resulted from the three-day event. The founders quickly received permission to become a pilot for open source software from LocalWiki in Davis, California.

Cary Wiki

I volunteered to head up the Cary Triangle Wiki team to create a vibrant, living diary of not only the buildings and events in Cary, but of the people who love this town enough to share its stories. The Triangle Wiki can help define our community by uniting residents around a common mission. Imagine it as a gift to a new resident. Or a space for long-time residents to record stories in danger of being forgotten. We can bring this town to life through ideas, stories and pictures in a way nothing else can. I’m sure everything I don’t know about Cary could fill a website.

The Triangle Wiki isn’t live yet. We want to make sure we have enough pages to keep it interesting for our first visitors. If you visit the website before the launch date, you will be prompted to sign up and become a contributor. Once you’re registered, you’ll have full access to all the pages created so far.

Be a Contributor

Everyone in Cary has something to contribute. Here’s the perfect way to start: Join us on Saturday, February 25 at Red Hat as Triangle Wiki contributors (writers, photographers, civic-minded individuals and coders) will gather for the first time to crank out as many wiki pages as we can. No previous wiki experience required.

Please visit TriangleWiki.org to sign up as a contributor, join our Cary Triangle Wiki LinkedIn group. Also, visit the TriangleWiki Facebook page for the latest updates.

Maybe Cary will build more pages than Raleigh will. You never know.