GLOSSARY!!!

This is a big day for the community at Local Motors. We have recently launched our community-edited Glossary. 

Roget's, Webster's, Brittanica, Larousse, Oxford English are the stuff of yesterday's word compendia and scholarly etymological works. Today, ready-access to user-generated definitions have given a direct challenge to these gold standards as Wikipedia has dominated the casual-research and immediate-answer information space. This is understandable because the wiki-definitions are as close to alive and ever-refreshed as possible. They provide the maximum exposure for interested readers and contributers to assist in "improving" the definitions over time at at their own convenience.

As the community of car enthusiasts, auto mavens, and knowledge wizards has gathered around Local Motors, the amount of information that has been deposited for review and sharing is staggering. Together, the collective intelligence is enough to put any established auto company in a peer-status, and the time has come to help share and to distribute this intelligence. As a first step along this way, the new LM Glossary is live and open for business. As a registered community user, you can contribute a definition yourself as a lead, add pictures and video to your definition, and most importantly, make comments and additions to any definitions that is in the Glossary. 

In the coming weeks, we will begin to relate the Glossary terms through automatic hyperlinking to each and every mention of those terms wherever they may appear in the site. Depending upon the community's wish we will also look to add more post-submission editing ability of the lead definition as a privilege to our more dedicated users.

Another key feature of the Glossary is the leveling aspect of its education ability. A common cry of many new-comers to the site, especially pure enthusiasts, is that the site is "above their level", "out of their league", "not made with them in mind", because a good amount of the terminology is so unfamiliar. Now people who come to the site will be able to self-educate in the privacy of their own space, and not feel like they are somehow less-worthy if they didn't happen to know how a turbo-charger works, or which part of the differential is a "ring" and which part is a "pinion". 

So from now on, ring-and-pinion, turbo-charge, CHMSL, DLO, and section-line yourself to your heart's content....your community of users is now armed with ready intelligence!