Reticulating Splines...Kikipedia If it's queer, we've got it here!
About Us
What We Do
Here at Kikipedia, our goal is to help keep LGBTQ+ nightlife, safe spaces, and local drag alive and well. We have done this by creating a platform that lists local gay bars, clubs, and events in a way that is intended to be convenient, intuitive, accessible, and with minimal ads. Seriously, we can't stand how unusable so many websites and apps are these days- all because of ads.
Are you traveling and want to find a local gay bar for a drink? Visit our Nearby Bar Grid and enable your device's GPS. We do not store or share your location.
Are you home on a Saturday night and want to know what events are happening? Visit our Local Event List!
Do you want to watch RuPaul's Drag Race, but don't have cable? Check out our community-supported list of Viewing Parties!
If you don't see your favorite local gay bar or event listed, please let us know so that we can add it to our website. By doing so, you'll help create a more inclusive and informative resource that benefits everyone.
We encourage you to spread the word about Kikipedia to your local event organizers and bar staff. The more people know about us, the more comprehensive our resource can become. Together, we can build a more vibrant and inclusive LGBTQ+ community. Thank you for your support!
About the Team
We are currently a team of 2 that is based in the Boston, MA area. Mike is our developer, and Abbi (the artist behind Abject Objects) is our content manager. Although the New England area is our primary focus, we are happy to expand our coverage to other cities if locals are willing to contribute. Contributions can be made using the options under the menu option.
The Panini
When the COVID pandemic started, we created a new section of the site to list Digital Drag shows (DragStreams.com),
we worked with Majenta With a J to create a directory of Drag Artists and LGBTQ+ Community Members in need of assistance (SupportDrag.com),
we worked with Just JP to create a simple Digital Drag Casting Call job board,
and we served as tech support for The Serve Network (Now Serve Thursdays at Legacy).
These features have since been sunset.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this an App?
To keep our site accessible across most digital platforms, and to keep development easier, Kikipedia is a progressive web app. This means you can visit our site on a mobile browser and add it to your home screen where it will behave like a native app. You will not find it in any app store.
How does Kikipedia gather its content?
The content of Kikipedia is submitted by our users, or researched by our content manager and developer. Venues that were not submitted by users are typically gathered by searching the internet and social media platforms, and are only added once we are able to verify that they are still open and LGBTQ-centric. We continuously check the status of the venues listed on our site through automation to ensure that we our records are accurate. However, we are not omniscient, so things can slip through the cracks. In the past, content managers would gather events from our social media following, however due to scalability issues, we stopped doing that. We now encourage our users to submit their own events that that they may be organizing or participating in to ensure accuracy. Our content manager and developer now only add select events local to us (New England).
My bar/event is on your site, but I want its listing changed.
Feel free to Contact Us about it! We are also vetting the idea of providing bar owner and event organizers with [free] tools that allow them to manage their venues and events on our site. If there is any interest in that, please let us know. We realize having yet another login can be a pain, but we want to make sure we are transparent with the content on our site.
My city is not listed on Kikipedia! Can you add it?
Of course! Just send us a message via our Contact Us form. Note that we are currently reconsidering how our coverage areas work, so there may be a bit of a delay (especially for smaller, scattered areas).
I was adding a venue/event and I got an error message saying the venue was not in range. What does this mean?
When it was first designed, Kikipedia was meant to list gay bars in major cities. Once the event system was implemented and the site grew in popularity, it became evident that there were LGBTQ+ spaces and events in smaller areas. This created some problems (and tech debt) in terms of proximity detection and content display order as we moved away from always using a user's GPS location (still never storing it server-side, always requesting and using the client cache) to using a user's GPS location to direct them to a coverage area. This becomes an issue, especially for one-off events in smaller areas between big cities, as having a landing page and all the associated data for the area create empty content and actually ends up hurting SEO. We are working to find a good solution to rectify this. If it does not make sense for us to add your event/venue, we will at least try to promote it on our social media channels until we can rework our coverage area system.
Will this site eventually be internationalized?
Not in the foreseeable future. Even just doing content research for areas outside of the Americas has been difficult. Collectively, our team only knows about 3 languages other than English, so unless significant funding pulls through in the future, it will not be feasible.
Can I help with this?
Everyone is welcome to submit their local venues and events using our entry forms. Unfortunately since hiring is not in our budget, we cannot currently employ anyone, and any assistance would be on a volunteer basis.
Will you promote my bar/club/event on your site and social media?
Although we would like to move away from the big social media platforms, we do still use them for promotional purposes. If you'd like us to re-post your events, you can tag us in them. We only ask that you in turn promote our site, as free promotion works both ways. Please keep in mind that managing social media takes time and effort, and we do not continuously post on those platforms as one may expect a typical local event aggregation account to, since our goal is to get people to use our site over social media platforms.
What is your policy on AI-generated content?
We don't want it on our platform. It's garbage, it's inaccurate, it isn't helpful to our users, and it reduces our search performance.
Does Kikipedia offer sponsorships?
No- unfortunately we are a no-profit, not a nonprofit. There are a few local events and orgs (ie: friends of Kikipedia) that our team does help support, however that is typically out of pocket.