Join us for a Coworking Wiki Spruce-up Session!

If you’ve ever visited the Coworking Wiki before, you probably know two things:

  1. It’s a tremendous resource, offering unparalleled access to information about coworking happening everywhere.
  2. It’s messy as hell.

We’re going to start working to address that. Our plan is as follows:

  1. Develop Editorial Guidelines
  2. Develop easy-to-copy templates
  3. Rally people to help update the wiki pages for their cities

We’re already well on our way to having the first two items ready (see our draft Editorial Guidelines here and draft template wiki page here; what do you think?)

This direction takes the wiki away from being an open-ended directory where anyone can add anything, and more towards a Wikipedia-like approach, where each page is an article about a topic.

Our first main area of focus is on cities, where most of the activity on the wiki is taking place. On the new City Pages, the primary focus of the content will be to tell the story of coworking in that city and to share information about all of the different ways people can connect. That includes not just spaces but Meetup groups, directories, local alliances, and so on.

Our new approach also introduces a sidebar, where photos can be tastefully posted without overwhelming the main content area.

Basing everything off a new set of Editorial Guidelines gives us a way of being able to communicate and act in a coordinated way, so we have a unified idea of the correct approach to a given page. Without that, a person may not know how best to update a page with the content they want to share, and hence messiness!

These are small but potentially very important steps toward a more effective wiki. Considering the enormous number of people who use the wiki to learn more about coworking every single day, making it better will be to the benefit of everyone.

To participate:

  1. RSVP to our event on Facebook for reminders and to help us spread the word!
  2. Join the Coworking Leadership Slack Channel, where we’ll be coordinating our activities, here: http://coworking-leadership-slackin.herokuapp.com/ 
  3. Request access to the wiki and mention that you’re participating in this event: http://wiki.coworking.org/w/request-access

We’ll see you there!