HousingWiki:About

YIMBYwiki is a wiki / knowledgebase for YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) & housing issues. That is, to gather ideas and strategies for creating more inclusive, affordable, equitable housing and communities. 
 

Mission [proposed, 29 Oct 2016! -ed]
Build the most usable, complete, and open online resource for understanding housing and land-use issues, and for working to create more inclusive and affordable communities. 
 

Background
This project grew out of a October 2016 discussion on the YIMBY Town mailing list (US national Yimby email list/forum): "The Opposition in Portland has Arrived" (subsequently moved to "YIMBY knowledgebase/wiki (was The Opposition in Portland..). in October 2016. However, as noted in thread, there have been various previous discussions about idea, and prior related efforts such as the YIMBY Sweden's YIMBY Wiki (see also English version via Google Translate), and the SFBARF FAQ created by San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation) on Reddit

Mike Schiraldi (San Francisco) wrote: 
"I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but one of the reasons it's so exciting to see nationwide YIMBY collaboration is that we can jointly build up a body of answers to frequent objections (both good-faith and bad-faith)....Any suggestions as to what sort of storage system might work for such a knowledgebase?"

Conversation and building ensued. 
 

Lead admin/editor:  
Tim McCormick, San Francisco - Houslets, SFYIMBY. 
email:  editor.yimby.wiki (at) tjm.org.
web:  tjm.org.  Twitter: @tmccormick, @houslets. 

 

Editing/Creating pages:
open to anyone, requires account with email confirmation. 
New content/edits go live immediately, though may be reviewed and changed by editors later.  Change logs are reviewed regularly. 

 

Thanks for early input & help from: 
Laura Clark - President of GrowSF (member org of SFYIMBY). 
Mike Schiraldi
Diego Aguilar-Canabal - SFYIMBY, & SFBA Metro Observer. 
Jesse Kanson-Benanav - Chairman, A Better Cambridge.
Laura Loe Bernstein - Founder, YIMBY Seattle. 
Ken Hotard - SVP at Boulder Area Realtor Association.
Zane A. Selvans - YIMBY Town, Better Boulder, Boulder Housing Coalition, etc. 

 

Installation details: 
MediaWiki 1.26.31
+ WYSIWYG extension (WYSIWYG-CKeditor 1.27) for visual editor. 
+ ShortURL url rewriting set up. 
+ MobileFrontend extension to improve reading/editing on mobile 
   (note, this means some pages like site Main page have an alternate mobile version, for example to show logo which would otherwise not appear on Main in mobile view; so changes to that page need to be edited in both the normal place and a second section below, enclosed in tags. See note on how. 
+ InputBox extension to make it easier / more obvious how ot create a new page.