June 12, 2025: Some thoughts on the past, present, and future of cvillepedia
A deviation from the newsletter and a reflection of why I am its most prolific editor
Hello and welcome to an extra edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement that I’m doing as a public response to a recent report about the website cvillepedia. If you’ve never been, cvillepedia is a wiki about this community that anyone can add to. I’ve been involved with it since the beginning.
Created originally by Charlottesville Tomorrow, the website was handed over to the Jefferson Madison Regional Library in 2021 with the idea that the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society would provide stewardship.
To that end, the ACHS commissioned FCG Consulting at the Darden Graduate School of Business to review the site. Their first report was published in May 2021.
“To craft a strategic vision for the future of the site and to help identify the best role for Cvillepedia in the Albemarle community, the report bases recommendations on an audit of Cvillepedia’s current information, research into governing guidelines, and exploration of potential partnerships for the website,” reads the executive summary.
I’ll get more into that report in a minute but I believe I need to establish some background. I also have to explain I’m going to make this available to paid subscribers only because this is a “behind the scenes” post. I don’t believe I’ve ever done of those, but I would like to start. There’s also a link to an attempt at a video I did as a way to try to make cvillepedia entertaining.
Before I go behind the paywall, however, I want to explain a little about my relationship to cvillepedia. I was hired as Charlottesville Tomorrow’s first employee in April 2007. My assignment was to write stories to help explain what was happening in local government.
About two years after I started, we created a website using the same software as Wikipedia to keep track of all of the materials we used when putting stories together. We kept it internal, but at some point in 2009 we decided to release it to the public. For the next nine years, part of my job as an employee was to keep it up to date.
I left in 2018 shortly after the person who hired me left. The new director wanted to start fresh and I did as well. The organization quickly decided that cvillepedia was not part of its strategic mission anymore.
For the first few months after I left, I didn’t update the site. I was not being paid, and I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to do so. I spent two years at a job that did not suit me, but I was involved in some of those discussions about what would happen. My biggest fear was that it would be erased and I am very glad that has not happened.
I launched this newsletter 59 months ago and soon after launched Information Charlottesville. My main interest every day is writing stories about what’s happening and putting them into context. As with the early days at Charlottesville Tomorrow, cvillepedia served as a way for me to remember what happened. I’ve assisted the ACHS with some initiatives and Town Crier Productions even got a small stipend in the early days. As this newsletter grew, I pulled back from anything official.
Sixteen years since cvillepedia was unveiled to the world, I still find myself enormously dedicated to its future. A second study from the Formative Change Group (FCG) has recently been published and I want to draw your attention to this passage.
“Over the month of March, there were 86 instances of edits,” reads page 15. ‘“[Seventy-three] of those edits were made by Sean Tubbs.”
What follows behind now is my response to the second report which builds on the first one. The intent is to try to offer some suggestions to anyone interested in getting involved. I want more people to learn to do basic research and cvillepedia offers a training ground for anyone willing to put the time in.
If you are not a paid subscriber and really want to read this, I’ll send it to you. But this newsletter depends on paid subscriptions and other revenue sources to keep going.