Appropedia Blog

A very important task that the Appropedia community is taking on is converting valuable documents to wiki format, to make it part of the structured knowledge bank we're building.

An key tool for this is wikEd, which can be used (by those with a Firefox browser) to convert formatted text to wiki markup.  And now there's an even easier way to use it:  Just use the conversion box at Wikedbox. Paste in the formatted text, and press the "wikify" button above, which looks like this:  .  Voila - you now have wiki markup. Mostly it works very well, and saves a heap of time.

For more detail, see Using wikEd to convert formatted text to wiki markup.

Note that this isn't enough to handle PDFs - we're looking for people with access to Adobe Reader Pro who can help us with the first step (simple,  but you need the software) of converting PDF documents to HTML plus images.

I've been thinking about the way we use original content - content produced elsewhere, and copied to Appropedia. Organizations like Practical Action release their excellent content under an open license, and we use it while giving attribution, but how do we present it? We as a community (including me) haven't been really clear in our own minds, and that results in the confusing and not-always-inviting messages on the pages of original material:

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This is a project from Humboldt State University's Campus Center for Appropriate Technology. Please see other CCAT projects here on Appropedia or check out the CCAT homepage.

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and

and:

The original content of this page, Water diversion (original), was taken, with permission for publication under the GNU-FDL, from “Beyond Dams”, authored by Elizabeth Brink of International Rivers Network (IRN) and Serena McClain and Steve Rothert of American Rivers (AR), and published by IRN and AR)

Now, we really want to invite people to edit this material, and Neil Noble from Practical Action tells me they would love to see contributions to their material as well. So how we make things more inviting?

For one thing, these notices need to specify either that the page is not open to editing (and point to an editable page) or they need to clearly invite edits. Putting the note at the bottom rather than the top will also make it less daunting.

But do we keep the original content somewhere in an unchanged state? I was leaning away from this, personally, but I've changed my mind. I'd like to propose the idea of flagged revisions and/or approved pages, e.g. "This page is approved by XYZ" (where XYZ is Practical Action, or Akvo, or an academic body from a particular university...) These original pages might be a good starting point or forerunner of those approved articles.

One thing we would never want to do though, is hide away the open edit pages. I would imagine that the open pages would be the "landing pages" and they might have a link on the top right, say, to an "approved" article. This priority is important, as Appropedia relies on the power of open content.

"The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon in the address bar that indicates a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available."

I love this: the idea that you can edit this page should be a regular part of browsing the web, just like subscribing to a podcast or blog. Expect to see this on Appropedia soon.

At the moment you need a Firefox extension to be able to see the button in your url bar, but in time, enlightened browser developers will integrate it in their code.