Wikis for the built environment

I've spent a lot of time looking at what wikis are running, and I've been particularly involved with one of them (Appropedia). I'd like to share a summary, relevant to web 2.0 and the built environment.

Appropedia could be called a wiki for the built environment. This is a platform, a site you can use for any purpose related to sustainability and development. It has a lot of pages of housing projects and designs, but is open for you to add any other construction, or urban design topic. (I'm very interested in urban planning, but haven't got around to starting pages on these topics).

Greenlivingpedia is also worth a look - not as big or active as Appropedia, but some very good pages on sustainable building.

Then of course there's Wikipedia, which has lots of useful information, but is very limited in the type of information you can add - no personal projects or designs, and nothing that can't be backed up by a "secondary source."

These three are the only active wikis I'm aware of with substantial content related to the built environment. There are lots of other wikis around, (e.g. the Green Infrastructure Wiki, which is not very active). However it takes a lot for a wiki to reach a critical mass of contributors and content.

As an active Appropedian, I'd like to ask: what are your thoughts, and how can Appropedia serve a livable and sustainable built environment? What would it take for you to contribute to Appropedia?

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Paul Wilkinson on July 13, 2009 at 12:33pm: Ineresting, Chris. As a Wikipedian of almost six years standing (and having started internal wiki projects when I was at BIW), I am an enthusiast for Wikis.

One other wiki that was started recently was one recently instigated by UK magazine "Building Sustainable Design" (see my blog post). It aims to help users create project-related case studies of good practice, but is, I believe, struggling to reach the necessary critical mass.

I am interested in this approach, not least because I have written numerous project-related case studies over the past 20 years or so (both in-house and for organisations such as the Building Centre Trust and what is today Constructing Excellence). Most were traditional paper-based descriptions of design and construction, and so suffered from being out-of-date almost as soon as they were published. It would be much better if these were maintained in a live wiki-type environment where, for instance, owners/occupiers/users of those buildings could update/expand the description. The description could also be augmented by real-time data from sensors within and around the building of the kind developed by Pachube.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 15, 2009 at 11:47am: Thanks Paul - I didn't know about the BSD wiki. Unfortunately it's being hit hard by spam. One thing I've noticed in my own look at green wikis is that wikis need some obsessively committed people to take off, and to address issues like spam. (We've had spammers at the gates of Appropedia from early days, but we've set things up so almost none gets through, even though we allow anonymous editing.)

Re the idea of integrating Pachube-style data streams into a wiki, that would be awesome, togive users ways to analyse and manipulate the information. Are you interested in working with us to get something happening on this?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Paul Wilkinson on July 15, 2009 at 12:06pm: If nothing else, I can help make the introductions. Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, is coming to the Be2camp Brum event in Birmingham on 12 August, and there will also be others interested in the 'internet of things' that might be able to help. I will see what I can do to drum up some interest.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Martin Brown on July 15, 2009 at 1:35pm: Timely discussion - I am looking to set up a best practice / technical guide wiki for a SME construction company. The idea is to capture lessons learnt for use in setting up future quality plans, swmp's etc Has to be very very easy to use - any suggestions? Would be nice to have an email to wiki input; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 15, 2009 at 7:36pm: I've asked some people about the email to wiki thing - no response so far. I'm just a little wary of that idea - the user doesn't have to interact with content already on the wiki, which is unfortunate. But the main thing is getting the content onto the wiki to begin with (so it can then be searched and adapted), and it certainly might help with that - so on balance I think it's a good idea.

It's possible that WYSIWYG will make it more likely that people will want to contribute - note our new rich text editor on Appropedia.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 18, 2009 at 12:12pm: About types of wiki software to use:

Martin Brown said:
Has to be very very easy to use - any suggestions? Would be nice to have an email to wiki input

Do you mean easy to use just for the end users, or also for the people managing it? If the latter, look at doing it on a "wiki farm" (e.g. wik.is or wetpaint.com) or making it a sub-project on an actively maintained wiki, such as Appropedia. That last option would give you a lot more connections and exposure.

If you want to have your own site, then I'm a fan of MediaWiki personally - it has the most development and support. It's also the only one I've used extensively, so I'm biased. I've heard a lot about Wagn, which looks cool and flexible, but was still at version 0.1 last I looked.

PmWiki has some fans but it never grabbed me. It allows "subwikis" - note though that you can draw the lines between topics in many different ways, which might be why Wikipedia eventually opted for a flat structure. The flat structure makes more sense to me.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Martin Brown on July 21, 2009 at 2:31pm: Chris - thanks for your comments and links. Will look at the ones you have suggested and let you know how I get one. Ideally I am looking for a 'private' wiki (but still open access) rather than a public one. And the ease of access has to be by the person submitting detail (in this case technical lessons learnt)

Rgds; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tony Carroll on July 28, 2009 at 5:28pm: I'd ask a question first. Does a wiki give you anything more than a Google search would?

If not then the information is obviously inadequate, inaccurate or incomprehensible. Many wiki's are confusing for the casual user, and I include myself among that crowd. The more experienced and familiar will be able to root down through masses of badly formed links, undescriptive titles and content that is not very interesting to anyone other than the person that contributed it.

I was recently asked to develop a content site for a building contractor. Bear in mind that I'm a property developer, designer, promoter and manager,and the last time I coded was in Basic on an Oric 1 when I was 13. I took a sideways look at what it was being used for and why. The answer that we came up with was a quick and easy to create Google Site that was managed by a small number of people but that made the information available to absolutely anyone at all. We shoved a Google search box right at the top of the page. The feedback has been fabulous and it's actually being used.

Obviously different strokes work for different folks, and I'm not being disparaging about wiki's because they are great sources of unexpected information. However if it doesn't pass my Google test I tend to get a bit bored before I find anything interesting and to add to that I really don't like the common layout that wiki's use.

So in short I guess that the realities are that only a few people will have any interest in contributing content. For the rest they want to find and get at information quickly. They might not even know of your wiki but if it has relevant and useful data created by a few 'experts' it is probably more use to the wider world and they will find it.

TC.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 28, 2009 at 6:27pm: Tony Carroll said:
I'd ask a question first. Does a wiki give you anything more than a Google search would?
If not then the information is obviously inadequate, inaccurate or incomprehensible. Many wiki's are confusing for the casual user, and I include myself among that crowd.

Absolutely. Wikis are easily set up, but creating a good wiki is entirely a different scale of effort. We're getting somewhere on Appropedia, and it's a good site to bookmark and use (and contribute to) but by no means is it an exhaustive resource - but it's getting there.

A Google site is a good option, especially for a small project. Once you have hundreds or thousands of pages, a wiki has big advantages in how easily you can link and organize pages. I would have said that Google allows rich text editing, but we now have that on our wiki as well (a very important step in usability).; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Martin Brown on July 28, 2009 at 7:15pm: Tony, agree with your comments and will probably end up using google sites, however the projects I have in mind, I think, are more suitable to a wiki type format at least to start with.

I have a technical manual I put together 10 years ago, I would love to up date it through a crowd source approach so it becomes usable once again

and secondly

an easy way to capture best / worst practice, lessons learnt etc for a contractor to develop their own technical or starter guide. Now if we could get an email to wiki or email to blog approach that really worked then that would be the great.. ..

a holy grail ?

Tony Carroll said:
I'd ask a question first. Does a wiki give you anything more than a Google search would?

If not then the information is obviously inadequate, inaccurate or incomprehensible. Many wiki's are confusing for the casual user, and I include myself among that crowd. The more experienced and familiar will be able to root down through masses of badly formed links, undescriptive titles and content that is not very interesting to anyone other than the person that contributed it.

I was recently asked to develop a content site for a building contractor. Bear in mind that I'm a property developer, designer, promoter and manager,and the last time I coded was in Basic on an Oric 1 when I was 13. I took a sideways look at what it was being used for and why. The answer that we came up with was a quick and easy to create Google Site that was managed by a small number of people but that made the information available to absolutely anyone at all. We shoved a Google search box right at the top of the page. The feedback has been fabulous and it's actually being used.

Obviously different strokes work for different folks, and I'm not being disparaging about wiki's because they are great sources of unexpected information. However if it doesn't pass my Google test I tend to get a bit bored before I find anything interesting and to add to that I really don't like the common layout that wiki's use.

So in short I guess that the realities are that only a few people will have any interest in contributing content. For the rest they want to find and get at information quickly. They might not even know of your wiki but if it has relevant and useful data created by a few 'experts' it is probably more use to the wider world and they will find it.

TC.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 28, 2009 at 8:22pm: Martin Brown said:
Now if we could get an email to wiki or email to blog approach that really worked then that would be the great.. ..
a holy grail ?

WordPress has an plugin that allows email to blog, I think - but only for users with posting rights.

Email to wiki - technically possible, I'm sure, at least for starting new pages (where the page title is set by the email's subject). You really want people collaborating to edit existing pages, and it wouldn't help that, as far as I can see. Still, it might be useful, as long as the people posting emails to the wiki have an understanding of what's "in" and what's "out" for the particular wiki. You'd need a coder (say a PHP coder to write an extension for MediaWiki).

Are you talking about a project that could pay someone to do the "gardening" in the wiki and help populate it to start with?

I think the option of using an existing wiki is hugely underrated - there is a lot that goes into creating an vibrant wiki and supporting an active community.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tony Carroll on July 30, 2009 at 8:53am: Email to blog is indeed already in place with Wordpress and Blogger. I use it all the time.

Email to wiki, I'm not so sure. It seems like an easy ask but there are issues about where the post would actually go to bearing in mind that there are really only 3 fields... Name, Subject, Content. Drilling down into a specific place might be more difficult. That said I'll have a word with our coder for the www.decex.net project, he might have some thoughts and he's into AI.

I do like the idea of creating and updating documents using a wiki. There is some mileage there for specifications etc.

Which wiki packages are you all using and preferring?; ▶ Reply to This