The success of the Rochester Wiki (http://rocwiki.org), Rochester's independent online encyclopedia, is a classic chicken-or-the-egg scenario: does it take a village to build a wiki, or a wiki to build a village?

Is the website - which receives anywhere from 6,700 to 8,300 hits daily - popular because residents are so infatuated with Rochester that they've rallied together to create a definitive city guide? Or has harvesting this much information curried warmth and loyalty in a populace hungry for reasons to love its hometown?

With more than 3,400 pages and almost 2,000 visitors a day, the Rochester Wiki - affectionately known as RocWiki - is a broad anthology of information, statistics, and trivia on everything you never knew you needed to know about the Flower City. Many pages serve up useful, phonebook-style info including business addresses, restaurant menus, nightclub hours, and the like. But alongside these city listings, RocWiki includes hundreds of oddball threads: a profile for a beta fish named George Bliss; the history of the never-completed Cooley Airship; and a report on the Epileptic Gorilla, an enigmatic statue standing guard over the Rochester Psychiatric Center.

Like all wikis, RocWiki depends on its users for content. Anyone can register to edit pages, post comments, or start thread topics. RocWiki has already attracted more than 1,500 registered users. "Most contributors have this one thing or category they want to make sure is taken care of," says Jon McKamey, a site administrator. "What keeps people coming back is their own little corner of Rochester, and showing that corner to everyone else."

Often, the pages are littered with snarky asides, dirty jokes and, sometimes, even thoughtful questions. "I think that attitude gets people interested in the site," McKamey says. "You get a feel for the people who are contributing, instead of just the dry facts."

RocWiki's origins run parallel to those of the Ant Hill Cooperative, a local housing co-op based on Plymouth Avenue that encourages community activism from its members. In August 2004, Tobin Fricke, a new physics graduate student at the University of Rochester, moved in with long-time area resident Ryan Dahl. The two became involved in the initial planning and organization of Ant Hill, much of which was conducted via LiveJournal and email. The infant movement also attracted the notice of Robert Polyn, another long-time Rochester resident living in Florida at the time, and the three quickly became online friends. "I wasn't sure I was going to come back," says Polyn. "But I did, largely because of my involvement with RocWiki and Ant Hill. I felt like there was a lot of positive energy going around."

One day, the three friends decided to explore Rochester's abandoned subway system. Polyn had been photographing and exploring the tunnels for some time, but Fricke and Dahl had never seen them. It was their first in-person meeting. "We started talking about all this cool stuff in Rochester, and how there was no real central place to find it," says Polyn. "A little walk went a long way."

After their visit to the subway, Fricke showed Dahl and Polyn a proto-wiki he'd made with some friends during his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. That version mainly provided information for geocaching, a scavenger hunt-style sport involving maps and GPS units. But Polyn and Dahl loved the idea's potential, and together, the three decided to use the software to create a catch-all guide for Rochester. "We wanted a database to compile all these little gems we'd found," says Fricke. "Something where maybe other people could contribute their little gems, too."

Despite heavy promotional efforts, the site remained small for many months. Dahl, Polyn, and Fricke did much of the posting and editing themselves, and the number of pages topped only a few hundred. "We were running around, trying to convince our friends, our roommates, and everyone else, who were very skeptical," Fricke says. "Definitely a lot of people thought it would never work."

But in 2005, RocWiki won a City Newspaper Critic's Choice award for Best of Virtual Rochester. That's when, Polyn says, the site reached critical mass. "It no longer actively needed to be promoted," he says. "Content grew beyond the direction of the founders, and [the site] began to rise through search-engine rankings without any underhanded attempts to make the Googlebots love us." Page counts soared as more and more posters registered, including current site admin Jon McKamey, who found the site as he was searching for housing co-ops.

Eventually, however, both Fricke and Dahl had to leave Rochester, losing contact with the site they'd help to build. "I'm proud that it's so successful now and so many people are using it," says Fricke, who will be moving to Louisiana shortly to continue his graduate research. "It's a funny little project, but it's taken on a life of its own."

Polyn has stayed in the area, and continues his work on both Ant Hill and RocWiki. "Despite having lived in the area for over 10 years, I learned more about the city in my first year with RocWiki than I had in total, prior to that point," says Polyn. "Everything added [to the site] energized me to dig a little deeper into what I'd taken for granted."

Although the site's membership has evolved from that core group of friends, many RocWiki posters still feel like part of an intimate community. "I've met some cool people through the site," says Peter Boulay, one prolific poster. "We are the horse's mouth, the people who live here, go out to eat here, go around town. I take pride in that."

Once a month or so, members get together in real life to socialize and discuss the site. On March 9, posters congregated at Boulder Coffee to celebrate the 3000th page posting, and on May 12, they met at the Rochester BarCamp at RIT's campus (as of press time, no further meetings had been finalized).

As the site grows larger, naturally a few bad eggs will infiltrate the bunch, and McKamey says that already RocWiki has had to deal with spammers and trolls (people who dominate the site by constantly posting or who repeatedly post negative comments). "We ban about a person a month," he says. "But no one person controls the ban. Four or five of us are involved, and we e-mail everyone to say, ‘If anyone wants to reinstate him, just say so.' And occasionally someone does speak up."

Despite the occasional spam-bot or troll, a certain jovial, we're-all-friends-here attitude infuses RocWiki, an outlook best reflected in the pages' comment sections. Unlike the king of all wikis, Wikipedia, posters can comment on a topic directly in the thread itself, which results in a winding trail of contrasting opinions. A given restaurant page, for example, might sport four positive comments, three negative opinions, and even input from the proprietor himself.

As a result, RocWiki offers no unified voice or official stance on any of its topics, and admins wouldn't have it any other way. "When you look up something in a book or a newspaper, someone else created it. You don't have a sense of ownership about it," says McKamey. "With the comment system, and with the wiki in general, you're giving people a way to claim ownership of the information about Rochester."

Sometimes, however, community-created content can backfire. RocWiki suffers from a common wiki problem: gaping holes in its coverage. Ironically, the shortest, stubbiest articles are often for topics most residents already know much about, like the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Bausch & Lomb, or the Rochester Red Wings. Moreover, while RocWiki encourages posters to use sources and in-depth research, they aren't absolute requirements before posting. Sometimes, inaccuracies, rumors and outright lies filter through the peer-review process.

Also problematic is that, unlike Wikipedia, RocWiki lacks any systemized grievance or complaint procedure, which aggrieved parties could use to report offensive comments. That leaves posters little recourse but to edit out the offending statements themselves - which can lead to even more trouble. Just ask Jessica Stroud.

Stroud, a manager at Boulder Coffee, was a newcomer to all things wiki when she discovered the café's RocWiki page in late March. She found one negative comment in particular to be offensive, so, not knowing it was against "netiquette" rules to do so, she edited it out. That incurred the wrath of the RocWiki community. "I'm not for censorship or anything like that," she says. "It was an honest mistake on my part. Why is there a feature that allows you to edit comments, if you're not supposed to? But I definitely know better now."

She says that as RocWiki grows, posters should be more conscious of the impact their comments could have on local businesses. "People are using it as a tool, like a guide for the area," says Stroud. "I just think they should do a better job about managing the language and tone used."

The debate over whether RocWiki should check its attitude in favor of impartiality is a common discussion held behind the scenes, and McKamey believes more standardization is inevitable. "We've been moving slowly in that direction, of having more expectations," he says. "But we've only been doing it as we have to."

However, toning down RocWiki may be a lost cause. The site is a sprawling, schizophrenic Internet jungle, and people seem to like it that way. "Rochester offers countless rewards for a little effort, always something to explore tucked away behind the next corner," says Polyn. "I think that mindset is emblematic of RocWiki in many ways."

Indeed, on its surface, RocWiki seems like further evidence of the Great Internet Democratization, or even information assorted by mob rule. But at the same time, the website makes Rochester accessible again, defining the city not as a dot on a map or a collection of statistics, but as a chorus of raucous, opinionated citizens falling in love with their hometown all over again. Does it take a village to build a wiki, or a wiki to build a village? Maybe it's a little bit of both.

Can't-miss RocWiki pages

Looking for a good place on RocWiki to start your search? Be sure to check out some of our favorite threads on the site:

http://rocwiki.org/Optimism: A compendium of all things Rochester that make posters feel warm and fuzzy. You should also visit its sister thread, rocwiki.org/Pessimism, dedicated to everything posters hate about the city.

http://rocwiki.org/City_Wishlist: A list of things members would like to see happen in Rochester, everything from fenced dog parks to a summer bus service to Lake Ontario.

http://rocwiki.org/Pet_Life: A thorough compilation of pet-related pages on topics such as shelters, parks, veterinarians, kennels, and rescue organizations.

http://rocwiki.org/Fast_Ferry: A scathing chronicle of the Fast Ferry debacle.

http://rocwiki.org/Highland_Cemetery: Explores Highland Park's little-known history as a mass burial ground, used in the 1800s for residents of the Monroe County Almshouse, Insane asylum and Penitentiary that once occupied the site.

http://rocwiki.org/The_Rochester_Mirage: The history of an 1871 optical illusion that allowed thousands of Rochesterians to make out the opposite shore of Lake Ontario, more than 50 miles away.

http://rocwiki.org/Jim_%27The_Hammer%27_Shapiro: A love song to Rochester's favorite disgraced attorney, Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro. Includes video links.

http://rocwiki.org/Epileptic_Gorilla: The strange, slightly inaccurate story of a gorilla sculpture in the shape of the Statue of Liberty located on the abandoned Rochester Psychiatric Center grounds. An absolute must-see for all RocWiki visitors.