Developing Information for a Local Website

There is an old hotel called Hotel Morck in downtown Aberdeen, Washington. Because it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, it has its own Wikipedia page which currently looks like this screenshot.

Notice the blank back wall in the bottom photo. I moved to Aberdeen in September 2017 and it already had a mural in that space.

That's a screenshot of the official Our Aberdeen website. It shows no record of when the mural was painted.

The photos on Wikipedia are over eight years old. I moved away over a year ago, but the last time I saw it, the ground floor windows were boarded over, an arts group had painted the boards to pretty it up, there was visible mold on the outside of the building and, of course, there's a large mural on the building that's been there for a minimum of eight years and which locals would like people to know about.

I have no idea if I can ever turn Eclogiselle into a business in part because the Wikipedia page for Hotel Morck tells me that public information on small communities is shockingly scarce and woefully inadequate even for places that are deemed significant nationally and documented on a generally reliable source like Wikipedia.

So if my intended customer base is small towns, to a large degree I need to rely on locals to provide me information because odds are high I can't really find what I need online. I also know that from doing freelance writing through a service and writing descriptions for places and sometimes it was challenging to find adequate information to fulfill the order.

If locals need to supply me that information and I'm going to publish it and in some fashion attach my name to it, I want to trust that information. If I can't physically go there because it's too expensive to do that, I may have no means to verify the information.

This problem is probably inherent to the intended problem space. 

If it's in New York City, probably millions of people have seen the building in question, there are countless photos online and anything inaccurate can be readily corrected and probably will be shortly. If it's Podunk Nowhere, few people have seen it, few people know or care what's there, etc. and there's much less reason to believe that "If it's online, it's probably true or someone would SAY something."

The Wikipedia page has probably had the same two photos for over eight years and either no one has complained or they complained and no one fixed it because they don't know who you are etc.

I know of someone who tried to correct information on Wikipedia and couldn't get it corrected though I believe they were a primary source. They couldn't find a means to prove what they were saying.

If YOU need to provide me photos and other critical information, I kind of have trouble imagining you would want to pay me. It looks to me like I can try to attract customers to pay me to do their website and have a questionnaire I send out privately or I can write a blog post and tell everyone what you should do and be done.

It potentially has more reach for less effort but doesn't pay my bills. Maybe if I created a Blogspot style service, I could do some kind of guided process for helping people set up their place-based website and have them pay me for hosting the website but I have no idea if that's something I could pull off or would want to bother with.

Anyway, whether I try to monetize this somehow or not, whether I get paid to do a website or not, there's several problems that need to be addressed.

1. Deciding what information you want to post given that posting it online is potentially a problem for the community.

Aberdeen, Washington has a historic homes project with information online and signage on the ground directing people to the historic homes. This potentially amounts to telling people outside of Aberdeen Rob these homes first.

And I see ZERO upside for the town in terms of economic development.

Similarly, most homeless services don't really want to tell people online what they offer for services. They typically use their website to talk to donors and they use paper handouts and word of mouth locally to reach clients.

It's generally a bad idea for a community to publish substantial information online about how wonderfully they treat homeless people because it's highly likely to attract more homeless people to the area.

An article I read many years ago in a print magazine talked about someone publishing an article about the place and saying how wonderful and safe it was and stating that locals didn't bother to lock their doors. Well, now locals NEED to lock their doors thanks to some idiot announcing that to the world.

2. Sourcing reliable information.

If you live in a small community, odds are high that looking up information online will give you very little information and, as with the Wikipedia page above, if you actually live there, it may be blatantly obvious the information you can find online is inaccurate, out of date or otherwise woefully inadequate.

So first you need to FIND or DEVELOP information. You may need to talk to locals, take your own photos and do your own writing.

I did a LOT of that while in Aberdeen and long-time locals were often openly hostile even if it was accurate and positive. They also were quick to interpret neutral information in the most negative terms possible, making it challenging to paint any kind of useful portrait of the community for development purposes.

Outsiders considering investing money in your community want and need information locals will view as "dirt" that they don't want to share.

Small town locals hoping to "promote" or develop the community will tend to want to say nothing negative and their idea of negative may have no basis in reality to the point where they essentially expect you to outright lie in the interest of not offending anyone local.

If the information is not accurate, you are WASTING the time of potential outside investors and they are likely to talk to other people about how they spent time and money traveling to the town etc. and shouldn't have bothered.

Wil Russoul liked playing big man on campus and liked bragging about deals he was working on. In the time I was there, all the deals he was working on fell through.

One deal he worked on was an annual classic car show. The town had a documented shortage of hotel rooms for existing need. It absolutely wasn't positioned to provide adequate space for an annual event.

That deal fell through and odds are high whomever tried to put it together has talked to many people about how the town had no reasonable ability to host them and didn't do their due diligence and they should have NEVER bothered.

3. Establishing credibility.

People trust Wikipedia because it has a long-standing reputation and if it's about a big city, like New York, it's probably correct. No one has ever heard of Billy Joe Bob Local Clown and has no reason to take his word for anything.

And Billy Joe Bob Local Clown is probably your primary source for some kinds of information because he was born there, his parents were born there, his grandparents were born there and he knows stuff no one ever wrote down. And yet you may have to question the credibility of some of his claims which may not be particularly accurate or in some way attempt to verify his statements.

I liked taking my own photos and writing my own descriptions based on firsthand observation. I was new in town, locals didn't like me, weren't trustworthy sources of information and had weird ideas about a great many things.

I did my best to state online if I spoke with a local and what they told me and why I thought that was credible information or why I thought that was bad information. Sometimes I was able to look up other kinds of information to fact check, such as in the parking minimums piece:

This section is here because a local whose job duties boil down to economic development of downtown Aberdeen once stated in front of me that the high cost of flood insurance was what was killing the downtown. I looked into that assertion and concluded it is wrong and that's not what is killing the downtown area.

If someone says something crazy sounding, like water runs uphill here locally, you can probably find general information about how reality works that suggests this is probably not true and you may be able to document what is really going on and make your case using reliable general information plus things like photos and talking to a few other people.

I have no idea if Eclogiselle has any hope of becoming a viable business. Whether it becomes a business or not, the best I can reasonably do is establish processes for how locals can develop local information and reasonably support their public claims online.

Because I cannot reasonably vouch for it myself if I'm just taking their word for it and not going there in person to investigate it in person myself. And the entire premise of this site is that small communities aren't getting what they need because they can't afford that kind of custom work. It's simply not in the budget.

Footnote 

I took the above screenshots (recently converted to links rather than embedded images) because my past experience is that if I say something on the Internet, sometimes it promptly changes. I have reason to believe sometimes it's directly because I said something.