Call me a nerd, but I can waste an entire evening clicking through Wikipedia articles. Napoleon, photosynthesis, that dastardly Don Denkinger; slap an entry on Wikipedia’s front page, and I’ll probably skim through it.
The wiki method of collecting and connecting information is quite popular these days, so it’s no surprise that all sorts of fields and areas of interest are creating their own little wiki databases. (My fave? Wookiepedia.)
The real-estate world is no exception – the Real Estate Wiki encyclopedia has been up since January, and in its first six weeks has expanded to more than 10,000 entries, according to a media release.
The encyclopedia currently features more than 3,000 definitions of real-estate terms, articles on buying, selling and financing and 400 biographies of people in the real-estate profession. And yes, users get to add and edit content, so some of those entries could get verrry interesting. (Like Wikipedia, Real Estate Wiki allows readers to comment on specific entries in on a “discussion” page, a notion that should have some of you salivating like Pavlov’s dog.)
Of course, the Wall Street Journal reported today that home buyers seem to be a lot more tech-savvy than their agents, so can we expect much participation from the real-estate community in this endeavor? And more importantly, who’s going to have the first stab at penning a YoChicago entry?