[PRCo] PRCo Photo Wiki?

[Bob Iannucci]

All,
I have appreciated the many photos and stories from this group, and I've
enjoyed the various
photo websites showcasing Pittsburgh's rich trolley history.  And, of
course, the PTM is a wonderful
resource for those who have the opportunity to visit.  For me out here on
the west coast, I am quite
reliant on the online resources - this group and the websites.

I have repeatedly felt that there is a need for something more, however.
The various photo websites,
or at least those that are still online, are fairly static, and only the
owners can contribute.  This group
is great, but email with attached (or semi-attached) photos makes
researching hard.  I have seen others
expressing the same thought ("I know it was discussed here a while ago...
I know there was a photo
that was posted a while back...").

I imagine something that is just a little more organized than this email
list, and something that is a little
more community-maintained than the photo websites.  I am thinking of a
photo wiki, not unlike Wikipedia,
but devoted specifically to PRCo.  Think of one page per photo, with
commentary from anyone who
wants to contribute a relevant story.  We have had LOTS of good stories in
this group.  But in addition
to the photo, the photo credit, and the stories, I am thinking that each
page should also have a way to
indicate the date of the photo and the location.

This structure offers several advantages.  The photo and the related
stories will live together on a web page
and can be easily found by search tools.  The date and location information
offer the hope that we could provide
the ability to search by date range and/or by location.  Picasa and some of
the other attach-photo-to-location
sites come close to this ideal.  A friend of mine in San Francisco is
thinking of something similar that
he calls Pastmapper.  So, perhaps there is a way to get this functionality
using some off-the-shelf technology.
Or perhaps someone is already at work doing this and I just have not heard
of it yet.

I'd be willing to host such a site and support the underlying machinery.
But that alone is not enough.
In order to be a success, it needs community commitment to generate and
maintain the content.  If the
more prolific contributors to this group were willing to upload their
photos and paste in the stories
that they have written, I feel we would be off to a great start.

So, my question is, what do you think?

Bob