PortlandWiki:Barnraising/PR

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:

Sylvia Orduño -

Mark Dilley -

Kotra DeNies -

Dave Myers -

PortlandWiki In Box -

PORTLANDWIKI BARNRAISING EVENT!

Public Invited To Help Build Portland's Knowledge Commons

February 28, 2011 | Portland, OR -- PortlandWiki is a City Wiki for Portland, Oregon. So what's a city wiki? A city (or civic) wiki is a collaborative website where citizen a particular town, city or region can share their local knowledge. The wiki serves as a knowledge base or information hub for that community, where citizens contribute news and information about their town or neighborhood. A city wiki is a local "Wikipedia" for a particular town or community, and PortlandWiki is the "Wikipedia for Portland".

PortlandWiki welcomes participation from all Portlandians, and anyone else interested in building an outstanding community resource for the Rose City. To help kick off broader community participation, PortlandWiki volunteers are organizing the...

PortlandWiki Barnraising Event! PortlandWiki's Barnraising event is where you help decide which improvements to PortlandWiki are most important, and then help make them. An afternoon of vibrant, real-time collaboration will be shared by all who attend. Share your Portland knowledge and help make PortlandWiki a world-class city wiki, like the world birthplace of wikis deserves! This event is FREE and open to the entire Portland community. Refreshments and "unique" swag will be happily provided at no cost. Where: Portland Central Library at 801 S.W. 10th Avenue, downtown Portland. When: Saturday March 5, 2pm - 5pm. Room: Central's U.S. Bank Room, near main entrance on right as you enter the building. Helpful Links: Barnraising Event Page | Come tweet with us. | RSVP | Calagator! | Contact PortlandWiki Further background PortlandWiki was launched in October 2009 by a group of local volunteers, and has grown steadily since then to include Portland, Oregon is the world birthplace of "wiki" websites. In 1994, Portland resident Ward Cunningham created the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb. A wiki is a type of website that is edited and built by visitors through the browser. WikiLeaks is not a wiki.

A Little Bit About PortlandWiki

People contribute to PortlandWiki because it's fun and lets folks in our community share their knowledge, interests and passions. PortlandWiki is not just another outlet for some public relations flack to post the public relations profile on behalf of some faceless company or organization. That said, neighborhood businesses and local organizations are strongly encouraged to share information about what you do.

PortlandWiki hopes to evolve into the "Swiss army knife" of news, information, community resources and historical archives for Portland and the greater Portland community. The information-rich resource hub PortlandWiki contributors bring to life can serve as a constantly updating, organic, people-powered knowledge base that is open, accessible, useful and available to everyone.

PortlandWiki is not meant to take the place of the rich tapestry of community based information resources already available to Portlandians, but to act as a robust, fluid and evolving community powered directory to those resources. Within that framework PortlandWiki hopes to spawn collaborative communities of contributors who find value in reaching beyond the information silos they may normally operate within. It's exciting to watch vibrant and new collaborative communities spring up as a result!

This coming Fall, PortlandWiki will celebrate its second birthday. In less than a year and a half, volunteers have made 25,406 editorial contributions, creating 6,071 pages, of which 1,686 are content articles (the other pages are tutorial, administrative or other internal pages). 491 people have obtained their own PortlandWiki account, of which 1 have made recent content contributions.

Folks in our community have a wonderful opportunity to significantly add their voices and insights to this unique community resource. We look forward to building PortlandWiki with you!

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