There's a tension between the creativity of people doing their own thing,
and the effectiveness of collaboration. If you think of a wiki encyclopedia,
you'll think of Wikipedia - not because they're the only ones who tried, but
because they worked hard on it from the beginning (started as a commercial
effort, got a mass of people) and because there are a lot of people watching
any one subject.
There's a misconception that wikis will magically create a useful resource,
but it's not true. The vast majority of wikis out there are near empty or
full of spam. I did a project looking at this: Green wikis and development
wikis <http://www.appropedia.org/Green_wikis_and_development_wikis> - you
can click on the table columns and compare the size and activities of the
wikis.
I tiny site isn't very visible, either in terms of search rankings, or in
popular consciousness.
Besides that, having 10 people interested in topic X all with that page on
their watchlist and getting email alerts, on one wiki, is much more
effective at building an article than 5 on one site, 2 on another, and 3 on
other wikis. Then there's the tech side - by working in the same "wiki
space", we divide the effort to manage the server, software etc. It's
outsourcing that tech effort, so we can put more effort into documenting the
permaculture.
None of this is to negate what you've said, but just to show why I believe a
single domain is far, far more effective. And for all that we've done good
work and are pouring our hearts into our work, we all know that there's a
desperate need for us to be more effective.
There are important issues that can be raised of course - e.g. how do we
respect people's autonomy if most of us are on one site? That's largely
about the culture of the specific community, but it's something we can
discuss.
The idea of just linking between the sites is certainly an option - to my
mind, seeking the greatest collaboration, this is not the preferred option.
But if that's the path we take, the very least we must do is to add each
other to our interwiki maps, which allows "interwiki linking" without the
nofollow tag - this will give the sites a modest boost in search rankings.
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Bob Waldrop <bwaldrop@cox.net> wrote:
I think that cyberspace can be fairly compared to an eco-system.only one site, since links back and forth effectively make the whole
Mono-cultures are an issue. I think it is better for the movement to let
many flowers bloom in cyberspace. All of the permaculture sites can be
linked and their articles and such should show up in search engines, so I
don't know that there is any inherent advantage in everybody working on
cyber-ecosystem for permaculture potentially available from every
permaculture site linked to the others . Sort of like rhizomes
underground and runners above ground. There is an article about and a
link to the Appropedia wiki at www.permaculture.info , but it is rather
rudimentary. Perhaps when you get back online you could expand it a bit
so it is more useful. I also don't see any particular utility on concentrating on one domain name.
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