I discovered an article about Laurel in Wikipedia, the very popular and free web encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a collaborative information tool. Anyone can add or change information to a wiki. So added a little bit of information I had about our local city elections, and uploaded the results of all city elections back to 1974. I thought it might be interesting for Laurel old timers to see all the names and voting results.
I also added the weather for each polling day. A few years ago I thought the weather might be the cause of our typically poor turnout. Unfortunately the weather does not correlate. The only factor that seems to impact turnout is the number of candidates running for office.
Speaking of city elections, the next one will be on Monday, March 20th 2006 at the Phelps Center.
Now is the time for all you city experts out there to dig in and add your own encyclopedic knowledge and make changes to the Wikipedia pages.
------------------------------------------------------
More about Wikipedia from their FAQ - Neilson/NetRatings reports that Wikipedia's unique audience for September 2005 was 12.8 million visitors, up from 3.3 million last September. It is not only the largest but also the fastest-growing educational reference Web site. As of January 2006, the English Wikipedia alone had over 930,000 articles of any length, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeded the English Wikipedia in size, giving a combined total of more than 856 million words in 3.1 million articles in over 200 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 340 million words, more than six times the largest English-language encyclopedia.
No comments:
Post a Comment