Based on the Pillars of Wikipedia, Appropedia has used them to built its operations on the following pillars:
Appropedia Pillars
- Appropedia is not an encyclopedia, but a wiki that incorporates a minimum of encyclopedic content supported by original research, specialized volumes, and field studies. This content is relevant to the personal and collective experiences of people who are building rich, sustainable lives, and can be used to support human knowledge.
- Appropedia values not only factual knowledge (sometimes referred to as know-that), but also the knowledge that people have on how to do things. This knowledge is, in many cases, hard to document and prone to be subjective due to experiences, but we believe that it is valuable. We strive for valuable content not only in terms of scientific support, but also of experience, with articles that describe how to do things in ways that are relevant, honest and that depict multiple views from a neutral perspective, that accurate, verifyable, contextualized, and falsifiable (See: Wikipedia:Falsiability).
- Appropedia shares most of its content with open licenses, and anyone may copy, modify and distribute the results. Unless it is expressed otherwise, all of our text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA-3.0) license and may be reutilized elsewhere, as long as it is properly attributed and licensed. Any article can be modified by anyone. We generally hold no individual controls over any specific article; therefore, any writing you contribute can be mercilessly edited and redistributed at will by the community. Please do not submit copyright infringements or works licensed in a way incompatible with our licenses.
- Appropedia asks its community to follow our voluntary guidelines. Please respect your fellow Appropedians even when you may not agree with them. Please have open-mindedness toward different perspectives or approaches. Recognize that different people will have common goals and still disagree. Please be ready to forgive or ask for forgiveness when things get heated.
- Appropedia does not have firm rules besides the five general principles elucidated here.
Appropedia Values
In a values format, the pillars could be reflected in the following way:
Appropedia values information that is:
- Useful - describes something relevant to however we define the boundary of our operating space (like, do we cover medicine? do we cover nanotechnology? how's about space-based power stations? - it's all "sustainability")
- Honest - describes both sides of issues, rather than selectively shoving some data under the rug (for example, if people from biodiesel companies come to write it up, they'll have excellent data - but may be tempted to omit some issues, like food competition.)
- Accurate and verifiable - including numerical data about impact, and lists data sources, even if these come from experiential knowledge.
- Contextualized - measured against metrics such as "number of deaths from poverty annually" or "average environmental impact of one American"
In order to achieve this information we maintain a code of conduct, and request that users exhibit:
- Strong bias toward requiring verification / validation / quantification of information
- Open-mindedness toward different perspectives, new approaches
- Recognition that we can have common interests / mission and still disagree
- Readiness to forgive / ask for forgiveness when things get heated.
And, hopefully as a community with the data in front of us we can identify and share:
- What we know
- What we don't know - imponderables, "that's just too hard" research goals
- Key next steps - What's we don't know that it would be really good to know