WikiCU:About

WikiCU is an insider's guide to Columbia. More info about the WikiCU project is coming soon.

History

Screenshot of the note in which WikiCU was first conceived.

Perhaps it's too early to record any history of WikiCU, but whatever. WikiCU is a wiki with articles related to Columbia University and its neighborhood. The site was first conceived on April 12th, 2006, in a note on Yahoo Notepad, as pictured on the right. It was originally intended to be at "cuwiki.com". However, the domain was no longer available by February 2007, so "wikicu.com" was registered instead on February 28th, 2007. Other options included "cuwiki.net" and "cuwiki.org", but these were judged inferior to a ".com" domain name. Since then, "cuwiki.org" has been registered and is the location of a wiki about Cornell University.

The first edits by the wider Columbia community started to be made on Tuesday 6th March in the late afternoon / early evening.

Project Athena

For some unknown length of time, the student councils intended to create a Columbia wiki. This never really happened, so when WikiCU emerged, the content from about 50 articles written for Project Athena was moved to corresponding articles in WikiCU.

Statistics

WikiCU is powered by MediaWiki software, which records several statistics. The wiki has 4,240 useful articles, or 12,043 if you count all the shorter articles, redirect pages, talk pages, and so on. The wiki also has 2,074 images and other uploaded files. So far, 1,686 users have registered, and 7 have additional administrative powers including the ability to fly. Further statistics are available at Special:Statistics.

According to the latest site backup:

• the MySQL database takes up 36 megabytes
• other files take up 102 megabytes

More detailed site usage statistics are recorded using Google Analytics. The latest Google Analytics report has lots of detailed and interesting information.

Extensions/modifications

• Calendar
• GoogleMaps
• Cite
• Short URLs
• Timezone is America/New_York
• Interwiki links: use w:Page to link to a Wikipedia page
• Snap Shots

Legal issues

Federal law protects WikiCU from libel lawsuits. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, specifically states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker." Thus, unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others.