Appropedia uses "topics" to serve both as a navigational aid, and as way to promote awareness, discourse and content development (i.e. for articles and course textbooks) for important subjects in Appropriate Technology and Sustainable Development. From a navigation perspective, the Topic page is the top of a "subject matter tree", built out of topic category (and subcategory) pages, that helps to organize various project, how-to, thesis and other articles. The topic category pages also serve has overview pages providing context for articles within the categories. Some topic category pages are blank stubs in need of creation, others are being worked on by topic experts (thank you topic experts).
Unlike most topic category pages, this top-level topic page has been biased toward navigation with the creation of the table below, which includes categories that should cover most areas. If you are considering contributing an article, most new articles tend to fall within an existing category or subcategory, though new topic categories are needed from time to time. Please only create a new topic category if you have a fair amount of expertise in the topic area. If you do have a fair amount of expertise, please consider becoming a topic expert. (If you do create a new category, you are not obligated to maintain the table below, but feel free if you are comfortable with wiki table formatting.)
Topic pages on Appropedia usually have the same name as a category, and provide general information about the subject. These help to provide a structure to Appropedia, and help visitors to navigate and find the information that can help them. Please help to develop these pages by sharing your knowledge or finding useful information under an open license.
Information on specific pages may be mentioned in passing, but to explain a project or design in detail, a separate page should be used, with a name that indicates it is a specific project or design - see Help:Page naming. Similarly, "how to" information may be mentioned in brief, but should refer to a separate page.
Table
To take more deliberate approach we might make a manually maintained table, to include non-existent "wished-for" articles and categories (which you can help to develop!) and which will always be open to expansion.
To see pages currently available on Appropedia, you can:
- Start with Template:Tlc, or
- Use the search box at left, or
- Browse the category tree (i.e. starting at the broadest category), or
- Browse all categories.
Creating a topic page
Header
The header templates help with navigation.
Boilerplate
One way to start editing a new topic page is by copying in this code and saving, to create the initial structure:
{{topic header| default.png | {{subst:PAGENAME}} }}
INTRODUCTION
== Interwiki links ==
* [[Wikipedia:{{subst:PAGENAME}}]]
{{stub}}
[[Category:{{subst:PAGENAME}}
Next steps
An introduction may be paraphrased from the Wikipedia article or other useful resource.
If the category name is different from the topic name, {{subst:PAGENAME}} will create the wrong text - correct where needed.
Add the categories found on the equivalent category (edit the category, copy from the edit box, at bottom).
If there is a portal, change the header to:
{{topic with portal header
| image= default.png
| portal = {{subst:PAGENAME}}
| category = {{subst:PAGENAME}}
}}