User:Singkong2005/Merging sustainability and development wikis

This is a DRAFT... some of it's out-of-date, as I never used it as originally intended (having resolved some of my concerns with Appropedia). However, I still would like to see mergers between related wikis in international development and sustainability. When I've finished my proposal I will post links at the relevant WikiProject and each of the relevant wikis to ask for responses. Please respond on the Talk page. Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 ^talk 19:42, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

New intro

I would like to see greater synergy, through people working on the wikis that best suit them - and WikiIndex is a fantastic tool for that. I have edited Appropedia's WikiNode so it starts with links to the relevant categories on WikiIndex.

I would also like to see wikis to merge where that's appropriate, to get a larger and more diverse community of editors in one place working on topics of common interest. I think international development and sustainability issues would be best dealt with on a single wiki.

Localized wikis (e.g. a "Sustainability in Brownsville" kind of topic) would be best as part of a larger wiki rather than separate, in my opinion, and I'd like to help make that an attractive and simple option for local groups.

Older notes:

Summary

Cheat notes version:

• It's extremely valuable to have a wiki on this topic aside from Wikipedia, for non-encyclopedic material (how-tos, project writeups, original research), and it's fantastic to see what's happening at the two appropriate technology wikis. However...
• A broader subject for the wiki means more people, more editors on one site, better collaboration.
• There are currently 2 wikis covering this topic, Appropedia and Village Earth's Appropriate Technology Wiki Project. I also started an experimental wiki on a broader topic - Development and Sustainability Wikia but have since merged it into Appropedia.
• I believe that an additional wiki should be complementary to Wikipedia, not in competition. Encyclopedic material should be placed on Wikipedia (or moved there, if something is developed on the wiki which becomes of encyclopedic standard).

Intro

It's exciting to see that there are at least 2 wikis underway related to appropriate technology:

• Appropedia, a wiki aiming to be "a living library of appropriate technology."
• wiki.villageearth.org Village Earth's Appropriate Technology Wiki Project

Both Village Earth's wiki and Appropedia have developed well since I first looked at them - they have some great resources and links. As mentioned above, the Development and Sustainability Wikia, a wiki for material not suitable for Wikipedia, such as original research, personal experience, and ideas, is currently being merged with Appropedia.

Curt Beckmann has a related mini wiki at WinWinWiki, but he is likely to join with Appropedia or a (hopefully) larger conglomerate. --Curtbeckmann 10:13, 8 September 2006 (EDT)

Please check out the new projects that have been added this week.

Note that these three wikis are all in early stages with few articles. Appropedia and the Village Earth project appear, in part, to attempt to duplicate Wikipedia's approach. The Development and Sustainability Wikia, however, aims to be a complement to Wikipedia. All three wikis allow material which would not be suitable for Wikipedia, such as information on original research, projects detailed how-tos, collaborations, and event notices.

Why we need something other than just Wikipedia

Appropedia does intend to differentiate in function from wikipedia in a few ways, encouraging, in addition to encyclopedic entries:

• original research
• personal/organizational pages for collaboration
• project writeups
• how-to's
• Common working pages for relevant grants, events, calls for assistance, offerings of assistance, etc.

The layers of appropedia are categories and subcategories functioning as textbook style writeups, with articles, functioning as project/how-to submissions, underneath them. Users can, for instance:

1. Look up greywater
2. Read about greywater concepts
3. View case-studies, how-to's and common errors to avoid for various greywater projects
4. Edit and add their own greywater experiences, projects, how-to's and common errors to avoid

or skip to any of these steps.

Other layers (hopefully namespaces) are personal/organizational pages, used for networking, and common working pages as described in the bulleted list above.

Duplicating Wikipedia is not a good goal - the role of other wikis

• Appropriate technology
• a category listing of technologies, and

My personal plea is:

• Don't try to recreate an encyclopedia
• If you must do this, then please find a way to keep encyclopedic material separate

Re: I understand your opinion on duplicating wikipedia's function, and I hope that you find appropedia to be a value-added and different wiki.

Certainly it's value-added and different - my concern is only that there can be a tendency for editors to put their energy into creating encyclopedic articles, if they aren't specifically excluded. As for "Textbook style topic entries", that's normally a Wikibooks function, though I'm undecided whether it's bad idea to do this on a different site.

Looking at Village Earth's wiki, e.g. here, I can see the advantage of not excluding encyclopedic information. Someone with much knowledge and experience can share that without worrying about the grunt work required in Wikipedia (e.g. finding sources, ensuring each point is verifiable).

Suggested policy: Encyclopedic material to be kept in separate sections (e.g. always under the "Description" or "Resources" headings);

The benefits of a single wiki (apart from Wikipedia)

• Much easier to find links to put in Wikipedia articles.

Be part of a larger community of editors

By far the biggest issue, in my opinion, is the size of the community of editors. I'm hoping that one of these wikis will become popular and the others will cease, so that collaboration is more effective. This is not a competitive streak on my part - I would be happy to merge and close the one I started (Development and Sustainability Wikia), although I do hope some of the advantages of this wikia are preserved in whatever remains.

The community of editors can be enlarged by: broadening the scope from Appropriate technology to (for example) Development and sustainability; and placing the wiki in a site with a large community of editors, such as Wikia

Where Wikipedia fits in

A great bonus of the main wikipedia site is that there's lots of wikipedians who clean up pages (rewriting, formatting, fixing links) even if they're not working on that specific subject. This is the value of as broad a wiki as possible.

Look at PaperTruths' contributions - she joined to edit the article on rolling pins(!) yet has fixed vandalism on pages such as Solar cooker and done other fixes, such as correcting links, on pages like Arsenic poisoning. And she's only been editing a few days!

Then there's bots which make minor fixes, and, importantly, anti-vandalism bots - see Tawkerbot2's contributions, which reverts vandalism with 97.7% accuracy, in an average of 10 seconds. Articles such as Technology, Wind power, Fossil fuel, & Solar cell have had serious vandalism fixed by Tawkerbot in a matter of seconds. See also the Recent changes patrol.

All this is great for engineers like me who don't enjoy final editing, and who may not have time for fighting vandalism. We can focus on development-related stuff instead, which is great.

On top of this, the more editors there are:

• more cooperative and we'll get much more done.
• less overlap between sites,
• the more links will point to the one wiki, increasing the Google search rank, and so the more visible the wiki will be on the net.

Broader topic means larger community

I support a broader topic for a wiki, so that there is a larger community of editors and collaboration is more effective. My suggestion is everything related to development and sustainability - allow articles on everything from renewable energy (in both developing and developed settings) to development issues, theory and practice of community participation, as well as appropriate technology.

(It was only after creating this that I noticed someone put a link to Appropedia.org on the Appropriate technology article - I just rearranged the links for clarity).

Being part of a large community such as Wikipedia and Wikia means we benefit from the contributions of editors who otherwise wouldn't know about the wiki, or wouldn't be registered/signed in, or wouldn't have the tools suitable to the specific site (such as bots and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser.

Now, I would strongly urge the Appropedia community to consider being part of a broader wiki. This does not necessarily mean joining the one I created.

Anonymous editors

Being part of a wiki with more effective anti-vandalism measures means that it's relatively safe to allow anonymous editors. This is good because anonymous editors often make valuable contributions, e.g. this one, and it lowers the hurdle for people to start contributing. Many serious editors, including me, started out editing anonymously.

However, it may be possible to copy and run antivandalism bots such as Tawkerbot2.

Name for a broader wiki

It may be preferred to simply wish to rename the wiki in order to accomodate a broader range of issues and draw in a much wider community of editors and readers.

• Village Earth Wiki
  • reduces difficulty of changeover from old names.
  • recognition due to connection with the NGO "Village Earth"
  • easy to remember
  • name suggests sustainability & community, cooperation - broad enough, I think.
  • reduced hosting costs as it piggybacks on villageearth.org

• DevWiki
  • Dev for development;
  • easy to remember.
  • drawback is that sustainability isn't mentioned in name; though we can justify this by saying that we consider sustainability an essential part of development.
  • Coincidentally, Dev also means god in Hindi, I believe (and deva/devi means god/goddess in Indonesian).

Perhaps "Appropedia" is too good a name to throw away though, so perhaps this could be used as the title of an appropriate technology portal on the broader, combined wiki. Then appropedia.org could redirect to this portal page (which might be, say, http://wiki.villageearth.org/Appropedia or http://dev.wikia.com/wiki/Appropedia), and pages that promote it could continue to use the name Appropedia. It's not really necessary, and perhaps its a little confusing... but as I said it's a cool name, so it's an option.

Cooperation in the merged wiki

• No one person or group owns the wiki (regardless of which domain we choose to go to). If there are differences, then they are discussed. (I expect this would be the case, but want to ensure we don't have problems down the track... better to avoid forking later, if possible.) This could be an issue if we use the domain name of an organization like Village Earth, and contributions made to the wiki are contrary to the organization's policies, philosophy, or practices. Presumably Village Earth is happy with an open editing policy, where the community of editors has the primary responsibility for developing the content, with no censorship. The content is not owned by Village Earth (GNU Free Documentation License 1.2)
• Admins from old wikis would all be admins on merged wiki.

Wikia

A larger wiki, with a single login.

Keep in mind that Permaculture people are very interested in appropriate technology, as are many who are into alternative technology and renewable energy; Thus sharing wikia.com with PermaWiki, Renewable Energy Design Wikia, RenewableEnergy:Talk:Main Page, Wikia:sca21: will bring a number of readers and editors from related areas.

btw, being on Wikia.com means the wiki will get a bit more publicity among people looking for wikis;

• if someone tries to replicate it, they will instead be referred to the existing wiki (though they might do that for a separate site anyway, if they know about it). --

Negative: has advertising (though it's not intrusive, so I'd consider this a small disadvantage).

Linking between Wikias and Wikipedia

*it's easier to link to and from other Wikia domains (e.g. renewableenergy.wikia.com) - e.g. use [[permaculture:]] from within a wikia, or. *it's dead easy to link to and from Wikipedia, e.g. [[wikia:, *PermaWiki or use wikipedia:Biogas to link a Wikipedia article.

We can add the wiki to the meta:Interwiki map, which makes interwiki linking easier. See also meta:Help:Interwiki linking

Wikia wikis can be linked using [[w:c:ecovillage:page name]] from Wikia.com and Wikia wikis, or using wikia:ecovillage:page name or wikiasite:ecovillage:page name from Wikimedia projects. (Replace ecovillage with the domain name of the wikia you are linking to.)

Options

If a stand-alone appropriate technology wiki is chosen, then there is still a need for one that deals with broader development issues, preferably incorporating sustainability issues. Thus the editing efforts are fragmented yet again.

An alternative, if this suggestion is not followed, and Appropedia takes off, is that I could continue with the Development and Sustainability Wikia and make the Appropriate technology page simply redirect people to Appropedia. However, I consider this a greatly inferior option.

Of course it's up to you, but I hope we're able to collaborate on this.

These comments draw on previous discussions with LRG, and Dave from Village Earth.

I look forward to your feedback. --

note at VE

Hi Dave,

Sorry for the slow response. I've been focused on Wikipedia, and haven't checked in here, but I've been giving this a lot more thought.

I've realized you're right - it's extremely valuable to have a wiki on this topic aside from Wikipedia, for the reasons you've mentioned. However, I would like to make some suggestions:

• The broader the subject, the more people might join the wiki. Something that covers all international development and sustainability would be attractive to more people, and there would be more synergy. For myself, appropriate technology is only one of my interests. I want to put my thesis (on water management in Indonesia) onto a wiki site, but it's not really about AT.
• I recently discovered Appropedia, another excellent site similar to this one. I also have experimented with the Development and Sustainability Wikia (in line with my first comment about a broader topic). It would be far better if there were just one wiki. I have discussed this with someone from Appropedia, and they were positive about the idea. I have no problem scrapping mine to join another, but the subject area would need to be broader than just appropriate technology (and this should be reflected in the name of the wiki).
• As you know, I'm very keen on Wikipedia. I believe that an additional wiki should be complementary. E.g. by having a principle that encyclopedic material should be placed on Wikipedia (or moved there, if something is developed on the wiki which becomes of encyclopedic standard). This will reduce the amount of editing work, improve synergy between the projects, and ensure that information is higher quality.

I've started writing a proposal to explain these ideas more fully, and when I finish will post the link on this wiki, and on Appropedia. It's exciting to see the way your site and Appropedia are developing - I'm just hopeful that we can improve the cooperation further.