A green wiki?
I sometimes come across the idea "Hey, let's start a green wiki!" I sometimes see an alternative thought - one with a lot more promise of making an impact: "Let's see if someone's doing a green wiki already."

Many people have started green wikis - and like wikis on all subjects, most of them wither before they can take off. There are a bunch of reasons, which I'll blog on some time, but the main one is: you need a critical mass.

A major part of our reason for starting Appropedia was to cover green topics, so when we encountered WikiGreen in 2006, we saw value in joining forces - which we very quickly did, giving a huge boost to the profile and energy of the joint project. Now we're looking at doing the same thing with Ekopedia, a very impressive multilingual wiki with a focus on ecological sustainability. In between we created the Green living portal.

Are we there yet? No, but I like the approach we're taking at Appropedia, creating a very broad wiki, and engaging academia, individuals, NGOs and businesses.

There are other approaches, that you'll find listed and compared at that first link (actually it's Green wikis and development wikis). Among the many other wikis is Greenlivingpedia, which I really like. We've been trying to get Peter Campbell (co-founder, who I met in Sydney), to come on board with us, but he has his reasons for trying a different angle. Yet another angle is Wikia's... I'm not at all convinced of their approach, but they do have a boost from Jimbo Wales' profile, and it aims to appeal more to regular folks (rather than the hardcore green and tech people that tend to love Appropedia) ... we'll see how that works.