Appropedia Blog

Update: I want to apologize to everyone who's frustrated with our broken blog feed. We've been given pointers on how to fix it, but since we don't actually have a tech team (anyone like to help?)  I need to dig in and fix this myself, and... I haven't got it done yet. But it's there on the to-do list. Now onto more interesting things.

Permaculture: Plug "permaculture" and "wiki" into a search engine and you'll get a bunch of hits. Most of them will be pretty empty - inactive, spammed or dormant sites. So what about the dream of creating a freely accessible and usable permaculture manual for the world, for rich and poor alike? It lives.

This collaborative work on a permaculture resource is happening on Appropedia, these days. This is by far the most active site for permaculture topics, as far as I can tell, and I've spend some hours scouring the internet. So I've started a page to invite collaboration: Permaculture wiki. Check it out, and since it's a wiki your perspectives are welcomed.

Btw, tech people: if you're a WordPress wizard and want to help, let us know. And we're also looking for someone who can pretty up the skin on the wiki...

Greenlivingpedia is an active green wiki - one of the few. Covering the whole range of green issues, with a particular focus on sustainable buildings and the needs of the modern, green-minded urbanite, Greenlivingpedia is a nicely laid-out site with a good collection of information.

What's remarkable is that it's largely the work of one passionate person,* Peter Campbell, Melbournite and (when elections come around) a candidate for the Australian Greens party. I've met Peter in Sydney a couple of times, and found him to be an honest, direct, no-nonsense, with no patience for greenwashing and the dumbing down of the green message for the sake of profit. In contrast, Peter is building something solid, and it''s good to see what an impressive resource can be put together by one motivated individual.

It's surprising to see, though, that more contributors haven't joined up. We know what that's like - many praise wikis, but far fewer actually contribute - so the efforts of one person can really stand out.

From the time we first made contact, over two years ago, we've extended the offer to collaborate on one site, but Peter prefers to keep a different focus. I can appreciate the value of market segmentation, at the same time as we'd love to work more closely with Peter. So we collaborate where we can, and our conversations continue.

As wiki software improves, new kinds of collaboration will become possible. In the meantime Peter's persistence shows what can be achieved with patient work in green open knowledge.

*To see who has been contributing to a wiki recently, see the Recent changes page or equivalent, usually linked on the left. Each page also has its own history tab - available above the page title.

This is part of the green wiki series.

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.

The Green Powered Wiki at wiki.greenpowered.org, now defunct, was a wiki focused on renewable energy,  written up in Treehugger in 2005.

The shame is that we don't know what happened to the drivers and contributors in the project. If you know, please leave us a note in the comments, or contact us another way. A wiki needs a large community to really work, and we'd love to keep creating synergy.

This is part of the green wiki series.