grahl/ch

Shutting down stgallenwiki.ch

Localwiki was one of the very early projects on Kickstarter and succeeded in their funding way back in 2010. Since then they have created several great model communities to show off how (hyper) local wikis can be a community enabler. The idea still seems so obvious to me, like Wikipedia is in hindsight, that I am still confused why the idea has not taken off exponentially.

Running a localwiki

Creating a localwiki was really easy with the documentation provided by the maintainers, it amounted to spinning up a virtual machine with Ubuntu on one’s preferred hosting plattform, adding one repository and installing one package, to get up and running. Which is just what I did under stgallenwiki.ch to get to know the platform itself (not having any Django knowledge) and to get to know my current city better. 

In the beginning of 2014 the service providing free mapping tiles went away and individual localwikis could choose to either migrate to the centrally managed architecture of the core development team or to acquire a license key to continue receiving tiles for maps. Since I have not been able to find enough people in St. Gallen to work on this project and am alone not motivated enough to work on it further I have now taken the site down.

I am writing this post to document this canceled project and provide an archive of the few pages which were created should anyone care to try something similar in the future.