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This is prompted by email conversations with Curt (who is [http://wannaresolution.blogspot.com/2006/09/another-wiki-on-right-track.html very keen on Appropedia]). I think we (i.e. Appropedia) need to make it clear that we accept and encourage contributions on this wide range of topics. Especially as some of us are thinking about promoting Appropedia more widely - it's important that when people follow a link to this site, they feel immediately that this site welcomes them and their interests. --[[User:Singkong2005|Singkong2005]] <sup><small>[[User talk:Singkong2005|talk]]</small></sup> 20:10, 8 September 2006 (PDT)
This is prompted by email conversations with Curt (who is [http://wannaresolution.blogspot.com/2006/09/another-wiki-on-right-track.html very keen on Appropedia]). I think we (i.e. Appropedia) need to make it clear that we accept and encourage contributions on this wide range of topics. Especially as some of us are thinking about promoting Appropedia more widely - it's important that when people follow a link to this site, they feel immediately that this site welcomes them and their interests. --[[User:Singkong2005|Singkong2005]] <sup><small>[[User talk:Singkong2005|talk]]</small></sup> 20:10, 8 September 2006 (PDT)
::Awesome work.  Thank you for helping to explicitly include the very welcomed "international development and sustainability" community.  As always... thank you for being [[A:BOLD|bold]].  We should make that opening sentence even better by changing what it states Appropedia is <tt>replete with</tt> to something closer to true, e.g. remove the <tt>textbook style topics</tt> and place in something about collaborative pages, networking, curriculum and theses. --[[User:Lonny|Lonny]] 01:41, 12 September 2006 (PDT)
::Awesome work.  Thank you for helping to explicitly include the very welcomed "international development and sustainability" community.  As always... thank you for being [[A:BOLD|bold]].  We should make that opening sentence even better by changing what it states Appropedia is <tt>replete with</tt> to something closer to true, e.g. remove the <tt>textbook style topics</tt> and place in something about collaborative pages, networking, curriculum and theses. --[[User:Lonny|Lonny]] 01:41, 12 September 2006 (PDT)
:::I have a clarifying question regarding the distinction between "encyclopedic content" (which should be done at Wikipedia) and "textbook style content", which presumably belongs at Wikibooks.  If Wikibooks is indeed part of the picture, I think it would be great to support a wikibook or three, but am also concerned that, in the short term, such a project would dilute the resources going toward Appropedia.  Is there a short term option to capture (and somehow tag for identification) textbook (but not encyclopedic) content within Appropedia?  This content would subsequently be moved to the appropriate textbook at Wikibooks when there is some critical mass of content?  My opinion would flip if the appropriate target textbook already exists at Wikibooks...and I haven't looked yet. [[User:Curtbeckmann|Curtbeckmann]] 06:30, 12 September 2006 (PDT)


== Solar hot water ==
== Solar hot water ==

Revision as of 13:30, 12 September 2006

Template:CPheader

Feel free to ask a general question or make a comment about Appropedia or its policies. For questions and comments on more specific issues, it may be best to find the relevant article (if it exists) and ask on the talk page.


Change subtitle

Rather than "The Free Encyclopedia" on the top left of every page, how about something like:

  • A living library of appropriate technology
  • A living library of appropriate technology and development issues
  • Appropriate technology, development and sustainability

While I always like to be comprehensive, something short and snappy would be best for a subtitle... --Singkong2005 t - c 23:19, 28 June 2006 (PDT)

Some people are working on a logo. We should include the subtitle on the logo, yes? Anybody have any other ideas for a subtitle? --Lonny 00:37, 29 June 2006 (PDT)

Organisations

I haven't worked out if these organisations are notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. If not, they might at least deserve a mention here. E.g. we could have a table of organizations, with category, place of origin & operation, brief comments/description, & links to Wikipedia where appropriate. (Have link to the Wikipedia article in name - but only if there is actually a Wikipedia article, as a dead link doesn't show as a redlink for interwiki link).

--Singkong2005 t - c 05:44, 30 June 2006 (PDT)

I think a table of organizations is necessary. In addition the the items you mention, we should include a link to the organizations webpage and the organization name should be a link to their appropedia page (if they have one). Inappropriate additions to wikipedia such as Wikipedia:Appropriate Technology Africa are a great example of a purpose that appropedia should serve. Maybe would should have a template on wikipedia along the lines of "This page is not in accordance with (some link to what wikipedia is not in reference to promoting your organization), please consider moving this page to another wikimedia project such as Appropedia where it is more appropriate." --Lonny 13:00, 30 June 2006 (PDT)


License

I want to add material from another site[3] which is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. Before I copy, though, I'd like to see a clearer licence notice put on Appropedia pages. I notice that Project:Copyrights is currently a redlink.

This may seem anal retentive, and I'm sure they wouldn't mind us using it, but I want to do the right thing by that site's contributors, especially since I'm hoping that they'll come over here to be part of an active wiki. --Singkong2005 t - c 01:21, 17 July 2006 (PDT)

This does not seem anal rententive. Sorry for the slow, inconclusive response, and thank you for putting pressure on this needed component. I have been reticent on this part because I have questions/concerns. The vast majority of the media on appropedia is user created. I do not think that the majority of this content is appropriate for commercial use. What do you think about something like Creative Commons (example license link). As for the text content of appropedia, I am still researching the GNU-FDL. Currently, I am a little put off by some parts, and very excited about other parts, and either way I have benefited much from other GNU works. I think that, for appropedia, encouraging users to submit and assuring free access are paramount. Anybody have any swaying comments or brilliant suggestions? --Lonny 19:05, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
Some quick thoughts...
Re the GNU-FDL:
  • It does allow commercial use, but I'm not sure if that's a problem. Commercial use isn't necessarily a bad thing - the sort of commercial use that this material might be put to probably isn't going to be a "bad" kind of commercialism.
  • I think the licence does prohibit the material being used with a more restrictive licence (e.g. a book with a conventional copyright applying to material taken from Appropedia), so I would think that's the most important thing.
Re the Creative Commons license:
  • It's very simple and elegant. Don't know if it's too simple, though - all that text in the other licenses might be excess verbage, or then again it might actually serve a purpose.
  • The example given specifies non-commercial. Using this particular form of CC licence might mean that we're not entitled to incorporate material that's licensed under GNU-FDL (as Creative Commons is a more restrictive licence). We could still use information from elsewhere, but would have to rewrite it... which we'd probably do anyway. I might be wrong about all that, though.
GNU-FDL seems the simplest route to me - I'm happy to use something which has been decided upon by other communities such as Wikipedia. (Though I'm not sure if the community decided on it, or the foundation, or if it's a historical thing from the people who first started it.)
Those are my thoughts - I'm probably not going to think much more deeply than that about these issues (my eyes glaze over when I see pages of licence-related text) and at this point I don't see a major problem with either option.
--Singkong2005 t - c 02:22, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
Gosh, why wouldn't we (um, hi, I'm Curt) choose the Creative Commons Developing Nations license? Seems like appropriate technology for this wiki.--Curtbeckmann 07:40, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
What an excellent solution (hi Curt). The CCDN license is the best fit that I have seen so far. Do you know if this license allows for material from Appropedia (under the CCDN license) to be used in other wikis? This is something that I think we want. --Lonny 01:53, 12 September 2006 (PDT)

Openness and anti-vandalism measures

I've assumed that the reason anonymous editing isn't allowed on Appropedia is to prevent vandalism. Wikipedia does allow anonymous editing, but has a much larger community, including lots of technically minded and Wikipedia-obsessed people, running bots and watching recent changes via IRC channel... so vandalism generally gets reverted very quickly (e.g. Tawkerbot2 typically reverts vandalism in something like 15 seconds).

Now, obviously we can't compare with that, yet... but are we in agreement that it's desirable to allow anonymous editing if we can minimise the effect of vandalism and spam? I would like to see this allowed, as my experience & observations on Wikipedia suggest that:

  • the lower barrier to entry means more contributions
  • anonymous editors can end up getting more involved, registering and contributing regularly
  • most anonymous contributions are actually valuable - I had assumed that most of the "bad edits" would be from anonymous editors, but when I've checked, that hasn't been the case at all.

If we did want to go down this path, we'd have to think about how we do it in a smaller community of editors like this one. Even if we grow by a factor of 10 or 100, we won't have Wikipedia-like abilities for fighting vandalism. So how could we do it - is there a way we could safely allow anonymous users?

Some suggested steps:

  • Perhaps someone (Lonny?) knows where to ask for advice on this, e.g. on a MediaWiki.org technical discussion page/list.
  • Wikipedia has a feature, where if an anonymous editor adds a link in their edit, they are required to do one of those anti-automation things where you read the funny-looking letters and type them in.
  • Perhaps we should follow Wikipedia's example in not allowing anon editors to create pages.
  • Do some more Promotion of Appropedia, mentioning it on permaculture, eco-village and sustainability lists, sites with a similar kind of focus, and to organisations like the various Engineers Without Borders organisations.
  • Make sure we have a robust Recent changes patrol. (I'm not sure if this requires people to be admins, in order to be able to "Mark as patrolled"). If we have a large enough "RC patrol" (like Recent changes patrol on Wikipedia) with members in a range of time zones, and with differing sleeping habits, we can come close to a 24 hour patrol. Note that the RC patrol is not just for vandalism - it's to check recent edits more generally, doing touch-ups, fixing links, making sure new pages are in the right categories, etc.
  • Learn about using the anti-vandalism tools and bots used on Wikipedia. Starting at Vandalism should lead to some relevant links. See also these tools developed by Wikipedians: Vandalfighter, Lupin's anti-vandal tool and VandalProof. Also, see the upcoming (4 August 2006) Wikimania talk on anti-vandalism tools here.

Thoughts? --Singkong2005 t - c 21:18, 30 July 2006 (PDT)

What do you think about temporarily opening up Appropedia to watch the effects? Then maybe we can look at appropriate measures for securing against vandalism. I have been researching the topic, and it seems quite difficult to patrol without antivandal software. (un)Fortunately we are quite far below the radar, and maybe that will afford us some time to grow without much vandalism. I will try to make it to some of the online wikimania talks, but I am currently on a boat in Mexico, with very limited internet access. Some vandalism will be caught and fixed quickly, because I am (un)fortunately addicted to Special:Recentchanges. --Lonny 14:06, 3 August 2006 (PDT)
I agree - let's open it up and see how it goes.
I see anti-vandalism measures as essential, and deserving of ongoing attention, but we don't have to wait for them to be rock-solid before we try opening up.
The next thing to look at, IMO, is the feature that prevents the addition of web addresses by anonymous editors without verifying they're a human editor (by reading the wavy letters). Wikipedia has it, and the Wikimania 2006 site, each with different settings (Wikipedia only requires it of anon editors, which is a better idea for this site, I think).
Perhaps the most useful tool is the recent changes page. Even better would be if we could choose to show only anonymous edits. Lupin's anti-vandal tool has something like this, and doesn't require software - it just uses changes to a ".js" page... however, I didn't work for me, when I tried it (in Wikipedia), possibly due to the fact that I'm on Linux at the moment. --Singkong2005 t - c 18:45, 3 August 2006 (PDT)
Alright, Appropedia is now open for a test run. Here are a few of my concerns:
  1. Vandalism
  2. Less accountability
  3. Less establishment of a social network
  4. Users forgetting to login (quite a few small ramifications, especially for Programs and Organization directors)
I have asked Ajay to work on the antivandalism measures, anybody else interested in helping? --Lonny 17:10, 5 August 2006 (PDT)

Wikimania online, August 4-6

Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia conference (that's Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and a few other related projects) is happening in Boston, August 4-6. But if you can't go, don't worry... There's also an online conference, Wikimania_online, and I've signed on. I was hoping to catch up with other Wiki people in my area, but that's probably not going to happen. (But if you're thinking of doing that, try Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Meetup and see if you can find your city/region.)

You'll be interested to know that one of the themes relates to the developing world, and projects such as Appropedia:

  • There will be also sessions focused on non-Wikimedia projects, such as... related projects in the developing world.[4]
  • Offline content: getting content to and from those without fast internet connections.[5]

See Schedule for the list of main talks... (Proceedings may be more complete.) Some look very interesting, and I've put them on my watchlist.

--Singkong2005 t - c 03:57, 31 July 2006 (PDT)

Moving technical questions

Note I have moved some material from here to a separate page for Technical questions - to stop this page getting cluttered, and making it more suitable for general discussion. (Feel free to choose a better name if desired.)

I was thinking of Wikipedia's Community portal, with different pages for different purposes, but copying that is too ambitious at this stage. --Singkong2005 t - c 06:11, 31 July 2006 (PDT)

Split this into 1. questions and 2. policy discussion?

How about Village pump for questions, and a separate Policy discussion page (also linked from the Community portal)? Thought I'd see if there was a better idea - if no objections or suggestions, I'll do it (some time...) --Singkong2005 talk 22:56, 5 August 2006 (PDT)

Sounds like a good idea that will help people find what they are looking for faster. We should definitely link it from the community portal as well.--Lonny 02:48, 12 September 2006 (PDT)

Developing course notes - Wikibooks and Appropedia

I'd like us to work out a demarcation between Wikibooks and Appropedia, to ensure efficient collaboration (and maximum cooperation with people from outside Appropedia.

I'm referring to Curricula, mentioned at the Community portal - I think that just as the best place for encyclopedic material is Wikipedia, the best place for developing course notes is in Wikibooks, the Wikimedia project for developing textbooks, and Wikiversity, for developing university curricula (which I think will be getting its own domain name soon).

However, there are some additional comments:

  • If something doesn't fit at Wikibooks for some reason of course we can accept it here, e.g.
    • information about a specific course
    • notes taken by someone in a course
  • Any relevant material at Wikibooks can be linked from the relevant page here.
  • We should have a page here listing relevant Wikibooks and Wikiversity courses (which will fit in Category:Internet resources).

Those are my initial thoughts... --Singkong2005 talk 23:07, 5 August 2006 (PDT)

Update:
  1. Wikiversity is now launched, with its own domain name.
  2. OpenCourseWare is an exciting development, with institutions such as MIT releasing their course notes under an open licence. See [6]. If HSU goes the same way, it should get added to the OCW Finder (instructions near the bottom of that page).
--Singkong2005 talk 01:03, 20 August 2006 (PDT)

Encyclopedia content

I only just realised that {{Encyclopedic content}} and {{Wikipedia}}, ...were created by different people. So perhaps we still need to discuss how we deal with encyclopedia content. I like the idea of having something like {{Wikipedia}} on topic articles, with its message of "Look up X in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." ...but we could perhaps change the wording to say Wikipedia has information on X. (I considered For encyclopedic information, see Wikipedia's article on X. - however, I suspect many people will misunderstand what is meant by "Encyclopedic" as that word can have a broader meaning.) --Singkong2005 talk 08:11, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

Broadened description on main page

I decided to be bold, and added "international development and sustainability" to the first line fo the main page, so it now reads:

Appropedia is a living library of appropriate technology, international development and sustainability, replete with textbook style topics and how-to style projects.

This is prompted by email conversations with Curt (who is very keen on Appropedia). I think we (i.e. Appropedia) need to make it clear that we accept and encourage contributions on this wide range of topics. Especially as some of us are thinking about promoting Appropedia more widely - it's important that when people follow a link to this site, they feel immediately that this site welcomes them and their interests. --Singkong2005 talk 20:10, 8 September 2006 (PDT)

Awesome work. Thank you for helping to explicitly include the very welcomed "international development and sustainability" community. As always... thank you for being bold. We should make that opening sentence even better by changing what it states Appropedia is replete with to something closer to true, e.g. remove the textbook style topics and place in something about collaborative pages, networking, curriculum and theses. --Lonny 01:41, 12 September 2006 (PDT)
I have a clarifying question regarding the distinction between "encyclopedic content" (which should be done at Wikipedia) and "textbook style content", which presumably belongs at Wikibooks. If Wikibooks is indeed part of the picture, I think it would be great to support a wikibook or three, but am also concerned that, in the short term, such a project would dilute the resources going toward Appropedia. Is there a short term option to capture (and somehow tag for identification) textbook (but not encyclopedic) content within Appropedia? This content would subsequently be moved to the appropriate textbook at Wikibooks when there is some critical mass of content? My opinion would flip if the appropriate target textbook already exists at Wikibooks...and I haven't looked yet. Curtbeckmann 06:30, 12 September 2006 (PDT)

Solar hot water

I added this to Solar hot water on Wikipedia:

Simpler designs suitable for hot climates can be much simpler and cheaper, and can be considered an appropriate technology; however they will not work very well in temperate climates.[verification needed]

If anyone knows a good source for this, please add it. Our own Solar hot water page could be used as an additional reference, if it is expanded to include an explanation of how to make a very simple solar hot water system. (For someone with very few resources, it shouldn't take much more than a black hose in the sun, I'd imagine.) --Singkong2005 talk 21:45, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Sustainable Energy booklet

An Australian group is developing a booklet, so I invited them to do it here. It's at Sustainable Energy booklet, and any input would of course be appreciated.

I think this is a good thing for Appropedia to do, and also a way to help people find out about Appropedia. --Singkong2005 talk 19:18, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

How to monitor changes

I've started a page, Help:Monitoring changes, which might be useful to people here. I've set my preferences so I'm notified by email when pages on my watchlist are edited.

H:MC will work as a redirect, (though I'm still figuring out {{shortcut}} template, for displaying the shortcut on help/project pages - something went funny when I copied from Wikipedia). --Singkong2005 talk 20:22, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

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