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?

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Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on July 30, 2009 at 11:34am: Tony Carroll said:
Which wiki packages are you all using and preferring?

MediaWiki - the biggest wiki projects use it, there are developers supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a big user community, and lots of extensions. If something else takes over from it as the most suitable wiki, they're likely to cater to migrants from such a major platform.

There are other clever ones, such as Wagn - I can't comment too much, but I'm still happy with the way MediaWiki is developing.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kevin Morris on July 30, 2009 at 6:37pm: You should look into SocialText, a great introductory wiki tool (hosted), with other collaborative features as well. I've used it with several projects and organizations and it works great across varying levels of technical expertise.

http://www.socialtext.com/

Martin Brown said:
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 Chris Watkins on August 1, 2009 at 6:52pm: Martin - sorry, just noticed this bit:

Martin Brown said:
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)

AFAIK, any wiki platform should allow you to decide who gets to edit. Appropedia is fully open, like Wikipedia, but others are for registered users and let anyone register, still others are by invitation, or list a link where you can request a login.

Ease of contributing - WYSIWYG is the most obvious tool, and this is getting better now, including on MediaWiki. You might want to test different WYSIWYG wiki platforms (e.g. Appropedia, wik.is i.e. Mindtouch, and a Wetpaint.com site) and see which one does the best job of handling the kind of information that your users will be adding. Complex formatting (like tables) might be more of a challenge.; ▶ Reply to This