LocalWiki has awesome potential but they're facing two large problems.
If you browse you're going to see that in the majority of the towns someone signed up, started and then abandoned the effort. They need to implement rules similar to Wikipedia and sweep the ghost towns away.
The other weakness is mobile, that's really where LocalWiki could really shine.
There's a genuinely hard problem in trying to define discrete but sufficiently meaningful localities. People really like clean dichotomies, but locality is fractal.
For inactive regions, I'd rather see LocalWiki put up a signpost in the form of "This region got a start with five articles and two contributors but hasn't been edited in six months - would you like to help renew this project? Here's some guidance about how to contact those existing editors, find new collaborators, and set up local editing meetups; here's where to share advice with fellow people also starting and reviving LocalWikis for their regions." (I think this is quite possible, and I should probably file a suggestion for doing this...)
Instead of sweeping the inactive wikis away, LocalWiki can use whatever is there to help motivate newcomers to contribute - to say "you don't have to start from scratch here." I find that LocalWiki's inclusive and neighborly attitude is one of its strengths, and I think it can build on that strength instead of needing to develop Wikipedia-style rules.
If you browse you're going to see that in the majority of the towns someone signed up, started and then abandoned the effort. They need to implement rules similar to Wikipedia and sweep the ghost towns away.
The other weakness is mobile, that's really where LocalWiki could really shine.