Sustainapedia Pillars
Based on the PIllars of Wikipedia, Sustainapedia is built on the following pillars:
- Sustainapedia is an encyclopedia incorporating elements of general encyclopedias, original research, specialized volumes, and field studies.
- Sustainapedia strives for valuable content; which means we strive for articles that are: Useful and describe something relevant, Honest and depict multiple views on an issue, Accurate and verifyable, and contextualized and measured against a known metric.
- Sustainapedia is free content that anyone may edit. All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and may be distributed or linked accordingly. Recognize that articles can be changed by anyone and no individual controls any specific article; therefore, any writing you contribute can be mercilessly edited and redistributed at will by the community. Do not submit copyright infringements or works licensed in a way incompatible with the GFDL. (**this may need to get re-worded completely or dropped based on stable content policies)
- Sustainapedia has a code of conduct: Please respect your fellow Sustainapedians even when you may not agree with them. Please have Open-mindedness toward different perspectives, new approaches. Recognize that we can have common interests / mission and can still disagree, and please be Ready to forgive / ask for forgiveness when things get heated.
- Sustainapedia does not have firm rules besides the five general principles elucidated here.
Sustainapedia Values
In a values format, the pillars could be reflected in the following way:
Sustainapedia 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 wish to omit some issues, like food competition.)
- Accurate and Verifiable- including numerical data about impact
- 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