Wikipages Blog

Wikipages has partnered with MetroBoxTV to  create a new web tv show. Featuring businesses throughout the city, this show combines the local knowledge of Wikipages with the digital video qualities of MetroBoxTV. This show will be hosted by Wikipages co-founder and Community Manager Tracey Donvito. She plans to use her keen knowledge of this city to highlight businesses throughout NYC.

Wikipages was first introduced to MetroBoxTV last year, when founders Tracey Donvito and Benjamin Horst were interviewed for the program Blogspot. During the interview, they discussed their respective blogs: nyc.metblogs.com and solidoffice.com. They also explored several businesses in their local neighborhood of Astoria. After the successful airing of this interview, these two complimentary websites began plans for future collaboration. With the content that Wikipages provides and the video capabilities of MetroBoxTV,  the project of this Web TV show was born.

Founder Benjamin Horst says, “This is an exciting project because it sits at the intersection of two of the major current web trends: video content, and intensely local content. Wikipages and MetroBoxTV are both innovative online communities, so it will be fun and interesting to see the results of their collaborative project.“

Entitled FiDi Revealed, the first features in the show focus on the Financial District, highlighting businesses on Stone Street and the surrounding areas. This show show is now live online, located here: MetroBoxTV.com

We’ve always intended Wikipages’ content to be distributed under a Free license, and spent some time looking at various options, including GFDL and the family of Creative Commons licenses. We wanted to make sure that information on Wikipages would be compatible with content from other similar sites (like Wikitravel and the Wikipedia), but unfortunately their licenses are slightly incompatible with each other.

Wikitravel’s copyright page made a strong case for the use of the CC-BY-SA license (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike), and that is what we have selected for Wikipages as well. (See their carefully thought-out argument here.)

So today, I’m simply formalizing what has been our intent all along. Wikipages content is licensed under the CC-BY-SA version 3.0. We’ll flesh this page out with more detail over time, but for now we are just very pleased to be a new member of the Creative Commons family!

CenterNetworks, the East Coast TechCrunch (but nicer) interviewed Wikipages’ founders Ben and Tracey yesterday.

Allen had this to say: “Tracey and Ben are very passionate about their idea and it seems like it could have some traction (will require a lot of work).” He also offered up a few suggestions on areas of improvement for the site (we share some of his feelings here and are planning changes to accommodate them).

It has been helpful in pointing more possible users our way, so I hope we can arrange more press attention in the future!