Appropedia has been about appropriate technology from the beginning, in the sense of sustainable, context-sensitive development, technology and living. This is also what permaculture is about, and we've had permaculture-oriented pages from the beginning, too.

Now, put Permaculture Wiki into a search engine and you'll find that a lot of people have talked about this, agreed to do something, and sometimes started an actual wiki. But... the hard part is going from "your wiki is now installed" to having a site bursting with accessible and usable permaculture knowledge. The motives are great... but this isn't going anywhere, folks!
I've started a page to invite collaboration: Permaculture wiki. Check it out, and since it's a wiki you can even edit the page. Please share the link with all your green, hippie, leftie, eco-geek, compassionate-conservative and otherwise forward-thinking friends.

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.

Google has been returning a lot of useless results in recent months. It's particularly bad if looking up hotels or hostels in a certain location - the commercial sites that promise hotels in every location appear to have Google fooled into showing their sites, rather than actual useful sites. They clog the top results to the extent that it's hard to find a genuine page.

Other sites have pages for all kinds of terms, but without any useful content - yet they appear high up in Google search results. One example is a search for a latin phrase (used by a friend in an email: Googling for "De gustibus non est disputandum" yields a lot of pages which promise definitions but in fact offer nothing. But, scrolling down, I come to Wikipedia's entry. Clicking on it, I learn:


There is much to be said for human-managed collaborative resources, like Wikipedia and Appropedia. Google's a great tool, but it's hard to compete with that many human eyeballs and brains checking and improving a structured collection of articles.

And on that note - I'm doing a study on the many attempts to make a green wiki or development wiki - I can't help but notice that some of the sites with the least content and activity make it onto the first page of results for "green wiki", halfway down or so, but Appropedia doesn't appear till page 3. Okay, I'm guilty of a little competitive spirit, but in some cases there is a clear, objective difference in quality, and Google's not picking it up.

But we'll get there. We're getting increasing traffic from search engines these days, and it's generally from much more specific searches than these. It will increase further as our content expands - and we certainly have plans for that.