Because Bostonopedia would have been too hard to say
By adamg - Mon, 03/24/2008 - 1:49pm.
Boston Povo, which aims to be the user-generated, Wiki-based guide to our fair Hub, has gone live.
And, hey, I made my first edit: The site's Boston Neighborhoods page listed roughly half Boston's neighborhoods as "towns" rather than "neighborhoods." Rather than just complain about it here (and you know how much I love to complain about things here), I fixed that.
Compare Povo to Open Guide to Boston.
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Town vs. city
Leaving aside the fact that Cambridge and Somerville are legally "cities" rather than "towns"...
Use the force, Luke!
Edit that page.
Boston Geography
Boston is definitely a unique (oh Dear God we hope unique) challenge geographically. We figured most people wouldn't want to bother with the distinction between towns/cities/neighborhoods so we lumped em all, but happy to see people take their own views on it.
We've been big fans of UH for a while, so really happy to see you deem us worth a post! We'd love to collaborate in some way. Since the whole site is Creative Commons we've tried to make it really easy to pull stuff into other sites via RSS/XML/JSON and a handful of widgets. Let me know if we can help.
I used the force to disperse
I used the force to disperse the clones of civic ignorance.
This one cracked me up
"West Roxbury is known for being a safe neighborhood
with a large Irish population."
Was under the apparently mistaken impression that in
addition to being part of Boston, West Roxbury is
also part of the United States of America.
Or outdated
Time was, West Roxbury had a fair number of actual Irish residents. But I guess they realized there were better jobs at home than waitressing at Auntie Bee's or the West Roxbury Pub.
Or got confused by the neighborhood's nickname...
From the entry on the West End:
"Called 'Westie' by its residents, the West End..."
Fixed that for you
Shifted it from here to here.
Where I promptly noticed they've used one of my photos without permission or attribution (see the original here).
'West End' photo
is really a photo of Beacon Hill, the Esplanade and Hatch Shell, and the first block or two of Back Bay.
I believe the term "sucked in" was invented for this
Gah. So I gave myself attribution and then set about fixing some of the other issues on the Westie page (West Roxbury doesn't border the Arboretum; Hyde Park isn't a town and the page didn't make a single mention of the fact that West Roxbury has several dozen Jewish cemeteries, can you imagine?). Stop me before I read the Roslindale page :-).
I think that my mother ised to call it
Kicking the bee's nest.
I think that the important
I think that the important thing for you to recognize about a site like this is that it is made for people with the knowledge of those particular areas (which sounds like you do) to go in and add your voice and correct something that you feel needs correcting.
Indeed
This is the best of both worlds: I can go in and fix things (which I've done, on the Westie page) AND kvetch!
To be fair, though, it's not like I've never made mistakes that a true local would never make (starting with the whole on line/in line thing that I can NEVER get right). And in general, people have been very kind in pointing out my Not-from-around-here-are-you-ishness. So let's be kind to an interesting collaborative effort that's only just started up.
Not from around here?
Doesn't matter. I've found that people who are not from the area often have much a much better idea of the history and geography of their local area than many local residents.
Maybe its because we have to to get around? Maybe because we shopped for communities?
attribution
added attribution, if that's ok.
I feel like I'm now going to
I feel like I'm now going to have to search through every picture to see if any of mine are there w/o attribution...
Attribution
I really think it's a rare occurrence, and certainly not something we (Povo) want happening.
But this is actually a decent idea, we'll make a page that just lists the images for people to sift through if they want.
I can't speak for all of
I can't speak for all of those who have contributed to Povo.com, but I can speak for my work.
As one of the several Povo.com field coordinators, I literally spent months in freezing weather hitting the streets of Boston to get original photos for my neighborhoods which include Somerville, Allston/Brighton, Chinatown, Theatre District and Financial District.
Here's my list of contributions: http://boston.povo.com/Member:Loaded%20Gun?edits
At last count, I added more than 3,000 photos.
Some of them rock. Some of them don't. But, they're my photos.
The site has been accessible via search engines and I'm sure other folks have added photos without attribution. That's the beauty of wiki, you can track the source and remove it.
Sears catalog houses in Somerville??
I serious question the accuracy of the first paragraph under History. Where did this information come from?
Data
I'll try to find a source on that, and yeah, it should've been referenced in the article. AdamG, if you tell me which photo was used improperly, I'll remove it immediately (or give attribution, if that works). People are warned when uploading that they must have rights, but I suppose nobody is perfect.
The meta-point here, though, is that Povo is not at all about the text you see on the site now. If that's the "endpoint," we lose and we know it. It's about people reworking it over and over and over again until a consensus is reached. So Adam's edit about who says "Westie" and who doesn't is exactly the kind of thing that has to happen 10,000 times for Povo to be useful. And our job is just to make an environment for that to occur productively rather than edit wars or bad tools, etc.
The power of a Wiki
Is indeed collective.
Editing stuff on the site isn't hard, once you get used to the Wiki-ish formatting, so sure, folks should go edit!
As for my photo, it's the lobster-kite photo on the West Roxbury page. I don't mind it there, but attribution would be nice (and so self applied).
And yeah, we should get together and talk about collaboration.
The problem is...
I have no idea if the statement about Sears is true or false, so I have no basis to edit it. I've lived in Somerville for 24 years and have never heard of Sears houses here, but that doesn't mean we don't have them. Without more information, I'm stuck.
Lower Mills
I changed "Dorchester STREET" to "Dorchester AVENUE" and added the Central Avenue trolley stop to the mention of the Milton stop. Other than that, not bad.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Sears kit homes in Somerville
Hey guys, I'm the one who added the Somerville history reference to Somerville page regarding the Sears kit homes. I added A LOT of content to the site over the past few months so I'm sure I'll have a few misfires here and there.
I got the info from a Somerville old-timer back when I near Ball Square. I assumed it as fact since most of the houses in Somerville have a similar flooplan.
It was one of those stories that I found interesting so I added it to the page. If we can't find proof, then I'll pull it.
Thanks,
Sam B.
Examples of Sears Kit homes
The following is a site with photos from the Sears kit catalogue. Here's the link http://visitor.downers.us/searshomes/4706highland.htm
I really don't see a specific example that matches the typical Somerville model (the two floor, two-family duplex).
Since the info is not verifiable, I will edit it from the Somerville history page.
Thanks,
Sam B.
I'll ask my friends in Somerville Historic Preservation
if they know of any local Sears-kit houses. Meanwhile, yeah, it's better to remove that from the wiki.
Here's an official Sears site about their homes, which they sold from 1908 to 1940. I think all of their models were single-family.
If you're interested in this subject, you should see the Buster Keaton silent short One Week.
Instant Subdivisions
Many of the houses in Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, Medford, Belmont, etc. have similar floor plans. This does not make them Sears kit homes.
Sears was but one player in the kit-home and house plan sales market in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were merely one of the most prominent.
The houses that are all alike came from sets of plans that were all alike, there is little doubt of that. The reason so many are alike is that the demand for housing led to standardization.
Here's how it worked: a builder would get a piece of land and then decide how to parcel it out and what to build on it. He would then select from a limited set of plans and have the lumberyard cut and deliver the supplies. The builder would then hire crews to put the mess together. This provided serious economies of scale (and the patchwork development lead to seriously unplanned neighborhood mazes and mismatched grids ...)
The lumber yards worked from standard plans and manifests. It was similar to how the Sears Kit Houses came about, but not exactly the same houses. Some of the plans were from similar sources and catalogs and ended up being standard across the country - my dad and aunt live in a house of very similar style and floor plan as my old boss. Dad lives in Portland, OR and old boss in Lexington, MA.
In any case, these appear to be single family homes - the mass-produced triple deckers are the result of developers realizing the benefits of standardization.
More information from Sears: http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/
Sears kit houses
My dad lives in a Sears house in Oregon. I think the big deal about the Sears houses was they were bundled up to ship by train. The wood was numbered so an amateur could put it together.
So how do I get paid for my
So how do I get paid for my writing? Someone's supposed to be getting income out of that site.
Payment
I have two answers, one snarky.
Snarky - Just like you get paid for your writing on Wikipedia.
Not so Snarky - Any user-generated content on Povo is Creative Commons licensed, assuming you give attribution in a manner consistent with the license. So if you (let's say) ran a "cheapest gas prices" web site, or "cheapest parking" or whatever, you can use Povo as the platform for that and monetize it however you feel like doing. Note that this is VERY different from Yelp or the like (as far as I know).
HUNH??!!
If you picture Hyde Park as a donut, Readville would be the hole.
Keep your eye on the hole?
I dunno, I always thought of it as the extra glaze that drips off the donut ...
But, hey, you have the power to change it. In fact, I just did, to the more accurate, if less filling:
It's addictive, isn't it?
So, I added more than 3,000 original photos and restaurant/business write-ups to Povo since November. The Field Coordinators working on Povo.com, myself included, really wanted the site to be chock full of content before we launched today.
Click hereto get an idea of the type of content I added since Nov.
We had a handful of folks assigned to the project who literally hit the streets of Boston for the past six months to get the essence of each neighborhood. I specifically handled Somerville, Theatre District, Chinatown, Allston/Brighton and the Financial District.
However, I've been all over the city taking original photos for the site and interacting with business owners, etc.
Some of the content had already been added before I assumed responsibility for my neighborhoods (specifically the photos/text on the "Welcome to Somerville!" neighborhood pages.
The site has been LIVE for months now and many people have added content and changed things to the site (like, I'm sure, the "donut" reference).
Since it's a wiki, I really recommend making changes if you see any mistakes.
I REALLY enjoyed working on this site. In fact, it gave me an excuse to explore neighborhoods I never had the chance to check out before(like "the other Harvard Square. I feel like I've become a walking Bostonpedia.
In fact, when my friend asked me where to buy Hello Kitty! stuff, I knew exactly where to send him in Allston and Chinatown.
While I had a deep passion for Boston before Povo.com, this project has made me FALL IN LOVE with this city all over again.
Ack
I read the introductory paragraph about Allston, shuddered violently and left. It doesn't need to be edited, it needs to be printed out so it can be burned to ashes in the nearest wastebasket.
Agreed
Yeah, I cringed when I just read that as well. It lost me at "homey-cum-hip." I believe an intern handled the "neighborhood" pages or "Welcome to Allston!" pages or whatever they're calling it... and they need to be reworked.
When you see pages (for
When you see pages (for example the Allston neighborhood page) that make you shudder and leave, that is when you rewrite it. That is why Povo is a wiki- the power is in the hands of the people that have something (or something else) to say.