Manclopedia rumbled! City’s own Wikipedia forced into the open

Exciting news reaches this blog – Manchester now has its very own version of the multi-edited online encyclopedia wikipedia!
Called Manclopedia it aims to: ” to collect and summarize every single aspect of Greater Manchester (including it’s history, culture, politics, people and places) with the aim of becoming the most comprehensive collection of information regarding Manchester and the surrounding areas.”
So what’s happened so far? Well the people behind the initiative have been forced to go public with the site rather earlier than expected due to naughty bloggers letting the cat out of the bag.
Kenan Bailey explains: “This has been pushed forward by four weeks due to us being rumbled by various online blogs and community websites who discovered the site without instruction. Our initial intention was to spend the first month filling the site with starter-content, but since we’ve been rumbled and people are already linking to the site we’d like to announce Manclopedias official release in to the public domain.”
The site will operate as a wiki with anyone able to publish content on Manclopedia under the 4-point precondition that the articles published are educational, substantial, credible, and likely to be of interest to the reader.
Sadly since its premature launch there have been about 50 of what the site’s organisers describe as “shameless” publicity attempts by various people and projects to publish articles about themselves containing little more than a brief description and links to their web pages.
I wish this project all the luck in the world – if they can pull it off it will be a fantastic digital resource for the city but, as with all such community projects, it remains to be seen whether Manchester’s digerati will be sufficiently protective of the fledgling site in order to ward off the inevitable vandal attacks.
I certainly hope so..
There’s also a Facebook group for the project you can see here.