Civitology Blog

Here it is — precisely the thing you were expecting: local info from every Subway station.

Little log-book as to how far we’re into the whole thing… We start off from every station inside Line 2 (including Line 2 itself as well as two outside-the-loop stations on Line 1 in the Beijing CBD), and here’s the list so far:

• Yonganli: done throughout

• Andingmen: done for both exits, north side of bridge only
• Chaoyangmen: done for exit A, north side of Chaoyangmen Outer Street as well as east side of 2nd Ring Road
• Chegongzhuang: done for exit B, north side of Ping’an Boulevard
• Jishuitan: done for all exits
• Xizhimen: done for exits B in full and exit C, south side of Xizhimen Inner Street only

• None yet (we’re sorry)

Thanks to your support, Civitology now has three wikis open — Beijingology, Tianjinology and Shanghaiology — and we’ve a test wiki in the works for Hebei. There is demand for us to expand to Hong Kong — we’ll only get that in the works once we’re sure other wikis are coming along well!

In the meantime, we’d like to start of thinking how we can do Local Groups. Local Groups would be informal but have folks (around 5 as a “suggested maximum” for the moment) acting as a group and having a fair bit of their own say (at the local city level) on content and things like that. We do have Civitology-wide standards which we’d like to keep the same across all wikis, but we do realize that — let’s say Beijing’s quite different from Shanghai (to start with).

Folks in these Local Groups might also want to think of managing content on the wiki. It’s sad that Beijingology is, at times, taken hostage by wiki spam, but thankfully they’re often gone within a few hours (plus they never link to main pages, so visitors see “relatively pristine” content).

Those in Local Groups would simply be those more active folks who would like to take on a greater role in their city and in Civitology in all. At the moment this is a recognized, but not salaried, job (you earn recognition, but unfortunately it’s without the cash); but we’re hoping to give those taking active roles the recognition they deserve.

So if you think you’re active kind of person who wants to take part in co-building city wikis in Beijing, Tianjin and/or Shanghai, let us know on the Twitter feeds by @replying. We’ll get this going soon. Thanks for your interest!

Quite a lot of folks love what we’re doing, but a number still like to be clued in as to what exactly we’re up to. Here’s the deal: We chart and discover cities and provinces through the city’s Metro / Subway networks and freeway system.

We’ve decided to do this as both systems offer you the fastest way to get from A to B. In city centers, we first dig through whole Metro / Subway lines and then spread out at every station, touching on every street in the region, as well as buildings nearby. The spreading out is viral: streets linked to avenues on Metro / Subway stops are charted, as are even the tiniest alleyways. Buildings all along the whole route are charted and given an article.

Here’s how the thing works inside cities:

Outside cities, the same arrangement is in place with freeways. We explore whole freeways and then spread out at individual exits. At exits, we chart local highway networks, starting from big National Highways, and then trickling down to Municipal / Provincial Highways and finally local roads.

We don’t exactly think ourselves as a “transport wiki”. Rather, our “dual backbones” are in the city’s Metro / Subway and freeway systems.

This will be how we do every Civitology wiki — existing ones for Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai as well as new ones.

See, we couldn’t pull off the trick of calling our project “Beijingology + Tianjinology + Shanghaiology” any longer. We needed an umbrella organization. We needed something that could hold on to in terms of a “general” name.

And now we have not just a name, but also a logo.

The logo is supposed to show a letter C against a backdrop of what is supposed to be two buildings, one small, one tall. It’s supposed to show a little city skyline. The C is designed to stand out in both the bit of grey and white.

The font we’ve chosen is familiar to you if you’re in the US — it’s the Interstate freeway font! We thought we’d put in the “urban” / “on the move” factor and make that stand out a bit more.

It’s actually the work of yours truly — @DavidFeng — but we’ll roll along with this logo and see how you like it. Actually, we like it quite a bit. How about you?

Hi there everyone. We’re the Civitology Blog, and we’re pretty much what’s now Beijingology — just a tad bigger.

If you’ve visited Beijingology, you know what we’re about — City 2.0 sites. Not just wikis, but also topic-specific websites. Like, for example, Beijing A to B, as well as few other topic-specific sites to come.

We’re something like the Wikipedia, but we’re much more focused on one city or Chinese province. You’ll get to hear a lot about the “big things”, like the Forbidden City, but there’ll also be a fair lot of “smaller things”, like the tiny alleyways, a bit about city culture, a bit into the city’s mass transit ecosystem, and quite a bit more.

We’re starting the blog today as we hope to turn it into an interactive system where, as we continue to expand outside the Jing (as it’s also known), we’d also like to keep in touch with the local community. Because we fully recognize that only by doing so can we build a project that’s self-sustaining, beneficial to all, and is a site that folks use, day in, day out.

(At the moment, folks actively involved in Beijingology as our main Civitology project number only a few — @beatlesapple, @DavidFeng, @jackcao001 and @winserzhao make up the team — but we’ll be reaching out a fair bit more and see what’s next for us!)

By the way — we’re calling this project Civitology after amalgamating the Latin word for settlement, civitas, with the omnipresent (in our projects at least) suffix -ology. We hope you like this.

Welcome aboard and thank you!