Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community wikipedia

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

There has been conversation between three community networks about this
topic over the past year. The FIC (Fellowship for Intentional Community),
Coho/US (Cohousing Association of the United States), and NICA (Northwest
Intentional Community Association) have all built significant article and
content resources using conventional web publishing, but want to move toward
wikis to better support user-publisher.

Here's what's in the works, albeit slower than some would prefer...

1. The FIC has created a testbed Communities Wiki space using Wikimedia, the
same wiki engine used by Wikipedia
2. NICA has agreed to moving the Resources content, referenced previously,
into this new FIC Communities Wiki once it is ready - but it is understood
by NICA and the others involved that other things are higher priorities for
the FIC web weavers
3. The Coho/US publisher is in dialog with FIC about how best to collaborate
- whether this includes the FIC Communities Wiki is an open question. The
Cohousing directory at http://directory.cohousing.org is the result of
collaboration, as the Cohousing directory is a "view" of the broader
Communities directory at http://directory.ic.org

IMHO, the most appropriate use of Wikipedia for those of us in the special
interest topic of communities/cohousing is probably to make sure there are
good encyclopedic-level articles in Wikipedia with appropriate links to the
more in-depth community-specific content elsewhere on the web, including the
upcoming Communities Wiki. A couple of highly pertinent articles in
wikipedia are the ones on Intentional Communities and Cohousing - do you
agree with what is posted? Could you make them better? If so, change them!
Thats how this stuff works...

Craig Ragland
Songaia Cohousing
Coho/US Board

On 9/1/06, Anthea Guinness <aslvvc [at] yahoo.com> wrote:
> A warm thank you to everybody who joined in the WIKI discussion! The
> Austin wiki certainly makes an impressive model for in-community discussion
> and evolution, accessible to outsiders. And the NICA resource site
> www.ic.org/nica/resource.htm is great to know about.