Working WASH outline

Note. Please use this area only for the working WASH outline. Discussions of the outline and other topics can take place below the double lines. A related outline can be found at User:RichardF/Outline of water, which is based on Wikipedia:Outline of water.



Structuring WASH area of Appropedia[edit source]

OK, my suggestion is that there should be a WASH page, a WASH category and possibly also a portal.

I think category:water_and_sanitation_for_developing_countries can be merged. The subcategories would then most logically be Water, Sanitation and Hygiene with all the current pages in the category moved to a relevant subcategory.

Within category:sanitation, I would have a pages outlining each of the main systems in use, their construction and criticism/drawbacks. I would merge together all the pages talkiing about sludge composting (including humanure and others) as I do not think these add anything and they are mostly saying the same things. I would focus on tidying these pages so that what they say can actually be supported by the science. I think category:hygiene might be merged with any pages we have on handwashing and the category:water might be best to direct to the water portal.

I would then have the portal:water concentrate only on the provision of fresh water with links to category:sanitation, category:hygiene and this page/category, rather than linking to the fairly random sanitation pages as at present.

Thoughts? Joeturner 08:26, 27 January 2013 (PST)

Ok, that category structure makes sense. Now, where do you see subcategories fitting when they don't exactly relate to drinking water? E.g.:
Also agreed re having portal:water focus on fresh water rather than sanitation & hygiene. At some point we'll also develop info on waterways - and within fresh water, there's water supply as well as water treatment - but we can apply similar thinking to those as they arise.
Re category:water_and_sanitation_for_developing_countries - I can move the text to mainspace (needs to be done a special way to preserve history, as category pages can't be moved). The category members can each be categorized appropriately once we've got a clearer structure.
Re merging topic pages on sludge composting, I think we look at these on a case by case basis. I need to have another look - and I have some notes on pages related to sewage, that I made offline as I had some tech problems (and as there's a complex cleanup to do on some of the sewage-related articles).
Making sure the pages are consistent with the science is important - I'll definitely support that. We can work out what exactly we mean as we put it into practice.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Once we're clear and in agreement on the category changes to be made, I can fire up my bot to change category tags (when merging entire categories) - that will reduce the work a bit. --Chriswaterguy 15:56, 4 February 2013 (PST)
I have slightly edited what I wrote above, I meant to say that handwashing should be in the hygiene category. Sorry about that, I must have had a slight brain freeze.
My feeling is that anything to do with clean water should be in portal:water and anything to do with wastewater should be in Category:Sanitation. Water conservation might depend on what the page included - storage in the home might be in Category:Hygiene whereas sand-dams (for example) would better fit into portal:water or a sub-category of it.
I agree that there is no easy merge of the sludge composting pages, but still think we should be able to reduce the number of pages which essentially say the same things. I still think that some information on some of the pages is not really correct.
I suppose my view is that the pages should easily flow from each other and should make sense to a user who is browsing for information. I suspect the majority of people who are looking for information on latrines would find it either by going to Category:WASH (which incidentally is unnecessarily case-sensitive, in my opinion) or Category:Sanitation.
I have collated a lot of information on various aspects of sanitation, I believe we could usefully provide many more links to interesting academic papers, photos, tables and videos. Of course, we need to be careful not to blind people with too much information, on the other hand, I believe that many sanitation resources on the internet suffer from a lack of criticism and rigour. I think if we did this, the sanitation pages would be a really good resource. Joeturner 00:38, 5 February 2013 (PST)
What about water conservation (as in reducing water losses) in your garden? Not a big issue in England I imagine, but certainly is in Australia & the western states of the US :-).
Note that portals and categories are independent - so if something is displayed or linked in a portal, that doesn't change the need to categorize it.
"my view is that the pages should easily flow from each other and should make sense to a user who is browsing for information." Agreed. Navigation bars will help. We haven't done that a lot here, yet - usually for projects rather than topics, so far.
"Category:WASH (which incidentally is unnecessarily case-sensitive, in my opinion)" - That's how MediaWiki works. There are cases where it does matter, and we can deal with such things in mainspace using redirect - e.g. from wash to WASH. In fact, I've just made that one. (Look for the #R on the edit bar. See https://www.appropedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wash&redirect=no.)
"I have collated a lot of information on various aspects of sanitation, I believe we could usefully provide many more links to interesting academic papers, photos, tables and videos. Of course, we need to be careful not to blind people with too much information..." All good. Being able to easily move from introductory to in-depth material and vice-versa is important. --Chriswaterguy 04:25, 5 February 2013 (PST)

Working WASH outline[edit source]

Hi Joe & Chris. Based on the complexity of this emerging project, I have a suggestion. Before we get too far into reorganizing categories and portals, how about building a solid outline here first? You experts can hash out the conceptual details as you see fit with minimal editing work at the top of this page. Then, when things stabilize, Chris' bot can mess with categories and I can mess with portals as needed. How's that for a plan that makes you guys do more stuff before I have to pick a portal palette?! ;-) RichardF 18:38, 9 February 2013 (PST)

:-) I'm fine with that. --Chriswaterguy 18:49, 9 February 2013 (PST)
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