From Great Lakes Wiki
From The Kalamzoo Gazette
Online site seeks info from anyone on Great Lakes
The Grand Rapids Press had an article as well but I could not find it at mlive, it's more than 2 weeks old I think. I think it might be the same article as Muskegon Chronicle has the same text...
From The Bay City Times.
Item starts about half way down the column.
From The Great Lakes Wiki
Rethinking Great Lakes journalism.
From Absolute Michigan. Nice reference regarding World Water Day.
From
The Great Lakes Information Network Site of the Month
[edit] Discuss
Wiki technology may seem like a new and strange concept that doesn't relate to the environment and the Great Lakes, but the way I see it, the same concepts used to create a running, working wiki cite are the same ideas that should be used to maintaining and helping the Great Lakes.
The environment is not a seperate entity that one person can claim and manage alone. The Great Lakes are affected by everyone and everything they add, change or take away. This parallels the Great Lakes Wiki because the website creates a community of people who's individual presence changes the cite as a whole.
Wiki technology does not create perfect, flawless information, but it does resemble the way a community works. --Starship 15:23, 2 Mar 2007 (EST)
- Wow, that's an interesting perspective! Welcome to the Wiki, Starship... ++Lar: t/c 17:05, 2 Mar 2007 (EST)
- While it's correct, it's not a new observation. Many environmental groups have used wikis effectively. For instance the Green Party in Canada uses or used wiki to write its platform, the "living platform". They came from under 1 per cent of the vote in 2000 to something like 13 per cent in the polls today. The initial paper on the problem of writing and propagating effective policy is available for anyone to read. The Green Party of Michigan and Mark Dilley also did some good initial work in this area, as did some municipal green activists in Halifax, Nova Scotia who assembled a whole platform in wiki too. Probably environmental groups have used wiki more than any other kind. A few people who are very active politically are also very active in wiki technology and design circles, like Dilley or Craig Hubley, whose papers include green and technology topics. However most of these emphasize the peer review aspect, not the "community" - very often the social factors cause groupthink and failure to see or admit to problems. Read Paul Adler's paper "social capital: the good, the bad and the ugly", for more on that problem. âThe preceding unsigned comment was added by 142.177.72.113 (talk ⢠contribs) 23:18, 4 Mar 2007
- Your observations about the power of wikis for good are apt (and thanks for the new article on Citizen journalism), but I think Starship was actually saying something different... nothing about wikis as tools to help but rather that the process of helping out the Great Lakes (in the real world) can resemble the process for making a successful wiki (on any topic) in that it requires multiple people working together, and that the first try may not always work, and other parallels. I could be mistaken about what was meant though. PS, don't forget to sign your posts with ~~~~and please consider registering an account! ++Lar: t/c 00:34, 5 Mar 2007 (EST)
- Interesting points. Another parallel I see is between this effort and the environment it attempts to describe. Anyone who has spent even a minimal amount of time studying environmental issues is struck by their interrelatedness. You start pulling on one end of a food web (say with an invasive species) and all kinds of unanticipated consequences develop. And they lead to yet more consequences. A collaborative Web effort is a great way of describing this interconnectedness. A properly linked news story could lead citizens and perhaps even scientists and policymakers to better understand impacts of an action that echoes throughout an ecosystem. And because others can add their own knowledge and perspective, it may make clear consequences that the original citizen journalist did not or could not appreciate. Webbed tools may be the best way to describe a webbed system. --Dave 10:58, 5 Mar 2007 (EST)
