Project:FAQ

Frequently asked questions about the CfF wiki

Below you'll find our answers to most common users' and editors' questions.

Why another wiki? Isn't Wikipedia enough? Why don't we just make new articles on Wikipedia?

Specialised wikis serve a purpose and that's evident from how many there are:

• List of wikis at MediaWiki
• List of wikis at Wikipedia

Notice that the CfF wiki is not listed there (yet!). Once the bulk of our articles are presentable, we'll suggest that our wiki be added.

The organisation of data at CfF wiki is similar to Wikipedia, but the scope of the CfF wiki is community-led action. The Wikipedia article on permaculture, for example, will give you general information, while the main CfF wiki article on permaculture describes the movement, people, strategies, organisation and their impacts, and links to more specialised pages on specific topics within permaculture.

An important difference between CfF wiki and Wikipedia is that we invite and encourage contributions from members of community-led initiatives, which might contradict the impartiality requirement in Wikipedia's editorial policy. We do require that articles be accurate, reliable, and fully referenced to ensure all claims are verifiable; opinions can be included, where relevant, but need to be clearly indicated as such (and might be better expressed in the Discussion Tab than on the page itself).

Can we add reuse text from Wikipedia articles?

In principle, yes, as long as the text is a short excerpt and appropriately marked and referenced to accommodate Creative Commons licenses. Reuse content in different places is useful feature of knowledge commons, and important to the CfF wiki.

In practice, it is best to avoid creating duplication b copying long passages of text from Wikipedia or other sources. In your article, please focus on community-led action, with brief summaries of wider content, such as might be found Wikipedia articles, as needed. If something is already covered well on Wikipedia, there's no need to duplicate it; you can always cross-reference using interwiki links.

It is good practice to check what's already on Wikipedia, and other relevant wikis like Appropedia to avoid duplication and ensure appropriate cross-linkage. Understanding what's already in other wikis, you can better shape your article within the boundaries of "community-led action".

How do you decide which movements, networks, organisation and theories are presented on the CfF wiki?

Their scope needs to include some form of community-led action relevant to sustainability and/or climate within its scope. Communities are not just geographical communities of place; they may be dispersed and based on online collaboration.

We also include articles on important theories, schools of thought and bodies of practice that influence and/or aid understanding of community-led action and/or scientific, economic and political context.

Does the CfF wiki include content in languages other than English?

This has not yet been possible due to capacity limitations, but is envisioned for the future. If content curators have interest, skills and capacity, they can translate pages into multiple languages and connect them using interlanguage links. It's also possible that pages of national or subnational interest will be created in the relevant national languages. If you wish to develop multi-lingual or non-English content, please communicate your intention to the CfF wiki curators so that we can find the best way to support this.

You are, of course, encouraged to link your articles to resources in any other languages, giving a short overview of the article in English.

Is there a way to make content searchable using keywords?

The wiki includes a search engine; as long as key phrases are explicitly used in a page's content, they will show up in the results whenever anyone searches for that phrase.

Another way to make content easier to find is to ensure a page is included in all relevant categories, by adding the relevant tags at the end of your article. Clicking on a category brings up a list of all the articles that are assigned to it. Please check the list of existing categories and add your article to one or more of them rather than creating new categories, which takes place only by agreement among the site curators.

Crosslinking among pages also helps users find what they are looking for: please integrate links to other wiki pages into your text wherever possible, and use the search function to check that relevant other pages link to your page.

How does CfF wiki connect to other resources (CfF website, Status Report, academic articles, other wikis etc.)?

We're relying on the strengths of each platform for presenting knowledge. In the CfF wiki, we make use of the non-linear structure of deeply interconnected articles managed in the spirit of knowledge commoning.

Wiki articles can be thorough and scientific, but at the same time, we'd like them to be accessible to the wider public while backing all the information with as many references as possible, which are often to be found in the CfF Zotero library. The CfF website may take a more journalistic approach, share personal views on events without necessarily rooting them in scientific evidence. We encourage linking articles to resources at CfF wiki.

Status Report on community-led action in Europe is a linear document with more specific target audiences, but it draws strongly on CfF wiki and links to it profusely.

There are other wikis with overlapping knowledge and CfF articles can and should be linked to them. In some ECOLISE projects, their knowledgebases were intentionally designed as wikis, for example Urban Arena, so they could better be integrated with the central CfF wiki.

To sum it up: CfF wiki is the central knowledgebase on community-led action on climate change and sustainability in Europe, connected with websites, wikies and e-libraries.