Collapsathon2024
This wiki belongs to its editors, together we will work to make it great.
Perfectly normal questions
What are our goals this Collapsathon?
To flesh out as many articles in the wiki as possible that may be of direct practical use to communities seeking resilience to environmental and other disasters.
What's the end goal of the Collapsible wiki?
The end goal of the wiki is to be useful to those in need offline, served from tiny computers over WiFi, as a PDF or even a printed book.
What languages are wiki articles written in?
We start with English, and will translate out into other languages in time. It will be a long process.
Who is this wiki for?
Everyone that cares about the people that comprise their community.
I don't feel comfortable writing whole articles
No problem! Find a topic that interests you that you think needs some work or help, and then research it. Put links in a Link dump section and ideally expand each link out with a summary. That way people that are up for writing whole articles can use your research to do the writing.
I'm not interested in researching but I am a good writer
Great! Take a topic that already has a Link Dump section, look at the links and synthesise into an article.
Some of these topics are too big. Where do I start?
The best place to start, is to write articles that themselves act as starting points for readers interested in the topic. For instance, an article on pickling food could start with introducing why pickling is useful for small scale food security, and then summarise popular strategies and methods for getting started with pickling at home, linking to external resources (as Citations) as needed.
What software does this wiki use?
We use MediaWiki, the exact same platform as Wikipedia. It is self-hosted on a server at the Hetzner datacenter in Germany.
Article structure, style and copyright
Article structure
Introduction
Articles should begin with an introduction explaining how the given topic is relevant to the themes of the Wiki, namely communitarian survivalism and resilience. This is really important - we owe it to our readers to not assume prior knowledge, nor sidetrack or misguide them. If the topic is about pickling food, explain why pickling has been used as a successful food preservation strategy for thousands of years. Outline why preserving food in advance of a blackout - or other disaster where food refrigeration is not available - is a good idea.
The intro should use the Level 2 heading.
Text body
After this sections directly relevant to the topic would be given Level 3 headings, with sub-sections Level 4, and so on.
Citations
This is a section at the bottom of the page. Actual citations in the article body should be placed at the end of the sentence. They can be added using the <ref>Citation here</ref> tag. A heading Citations should be added to the bottom of the page. Under this heading, all that's needed for the citations to automagically appear is adding the following tag: <references />.
An example of an article doing this is here.
Article style
Writing
Writing should be impersonal, a-temporal and non-geographically centered. For instance, an article shouldn't be written using 'I', 'me', 'mine' or 'ours', nor assume the reader is in the USA or Europe, nor that assume the present year for the reader is 2024. Writing should be in the style of a guidebook, where being useful and informative is the primary objective. Evidence should be given in the form of Citations (see above) and attributed quotations. Anecdotes are strongly discouraged, as are stories unless quoted to elucidate a point.
Remember to always ask (thanks Christina See):
- Will this be helpful during a systems collapse?
- Is this a topic that is accessible and applicable to more than a few?
- Is this practical or theoretical?
Images
Images should be placed in the page in a step-wise fashion left to right. An example of an article doing this is here. When you add an image (manually or using the visual editor) and provide a caption it looks like this in the wiki code:
[[File:Kimchi.jpg | thumb | A jar of Kimchi]]
To make that image appear smaller, just set a new width for it. Here we set it to 240 pixels wide. Aspect ratio will be maintained:
[[File:Kimchi.jpg|thumb | A jar of Kimchi | 240px ]]
Images will by default appear to the left. To set an image to the Right, define it like so:
[[File:Kimchi.jpg|thumb | A jar of Kimchi | 240px | right ]]
For everything else please see the Style Guide.
Article copyright
AI/ML
It would be great if we can avoid using Chat GPT etc to write articles for us. Rather if we can apply our brains in earnest and actually synthesise and check through the content of the site. If it is used, it needs to be cited.
Image copyright
Only public domain, or images released under appropriate Creative Commons licenses, or other licenses expressly stating they are clear to be used, should be used. To make it a little easier you can use a search engine like DuckDuckGo and define the license type in search settings. This is probably not completely reliable but is a good place to start.