Appropedia Blog

We recently looked at the Green Powered Wiki - and we'd still like to make contact with the team behind that effort, and know if they're still interested in co-creating a knowledge base for renewable energy.

But let's look at a green wiki which is still online - Playgreen, a wiki on green living.

Some observations:

• Topics covered are similar to the Appropedia wiki - both have howtos and organizational profiles but Playgreen is more focused on green living, without the emphasis on sharing designs and project write-ups.
• It hasn't been active recently - just 2 or 3 edits per month. Spam is an issue.
• Playgreen uses a true open license, without noncommercial restrictions - specifically the Creative Commons Share Alike  CC-BY-SA license, which Appropedia also uses. It's good to know that we can share content with complete ease.
• Okay, not quite complete ease - the wiki uses a different markup (way of representing formatting) which I've never seen before. I get a bit impatient with having to several different kinds of markup on all the sites I post to. On the plus side, it's relatively easy to figure out.
• The skin is quite slick - better than our MediaWiki skin (development of which is on the backburner until we can get help from a CSS wizard).
• I can't find history page for each wiki page, so I can't revert the spam I found tonight. I also can't find a statistics page.
• There seems to be no site map or category structure.
• I've sent a message via the contact form at least twice in the past couple of years, suggesting we explore collaboration. Either they're not interested, the form is broken, or (maybe the most likely) it's one of hundreds of messages they haven't answered yet because they have day jobs. We know all about that.

So, it's an interesting effort, but it's stalled. There are clearly still people who visit the site and contribute, but there's a lack of critical mass to fill the need for quality green living info.

But the great thing about Playgreen is the use of a proper open license. That means that even if the site doesn't take off, these contributions of green wisdom can live on and grow in different forms - the "no such thing as waste" principle applied to the labors of green wiki contributors.

By the way - check out our green living info. It's a very different layout to Playgreen, and perhaps not as well packaged, but there's a growing collection, and I hope it's usable - please give feedback!

This is part of the green wiki series.