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Akvopedia FAQ

1. Is Akvopedia a social forum or media?

No, Akvopedia hosts water and sanitation (WASH) information and related field experience, but we are not set up to be a forum where questions and answers are discussed within threads or a place where users have profiles. Although for the future, we would like to create user profiles for editors that can share information about their expertise or experience in the water and sanitation sector. To learn more about what Akvopedia is, read our About page.

2. What type of content do you provide on Akvopedia?

We center our focus around sustainable, affordable, and low-tech technologies that enable our users to learn about, build, finance or implement water and sanitation projects around the world. We work in urban areas less, while helping rural or urban fringe “slum” areas more. The process our users face of undertaking a WASH project takes a lot of planning and follow up, so we try to provide organizational methods or approaches, as well as more simple construction i.e. how-to pages for things like pumps and rainwater capture systems. We are not a knowledge institute or directly connected with academia… therefore we seek information that we can repackage in a generally easy to read, user-friendly way.

However, links to more academic articles are okay, if they are not too jargon heavy. We would love for the water-scarce community members themselves (who are often infrequently educated) to be able to read documents on Akvopedia and not feel that the information is inaccessible or difficult to apply to their situation. In this manner, we try to keep our pages are mere simplified introductions to the technologies or methods we support, not a full-length database of information. This is best achieved by keeping articles relatively short, then providing links if users want to know more. Although academics may find Akvopedia useful as well!

3. How much editorial support do you offer?

We are continually uploading new material to Akvopedia each week, and we extend a warm welcome to adding content for free that you may have that takes less than a half day to upload. For larger projects or merging of WASH information between partners, we would need to secure funding and arrange a plan to proceed. Our project manager, Hans Merton, would help you set up a partner exchange. We have had the good fortune to work with many WASH partners like UNICEF, Care, IRC, WASTE, SuSanA and Practica. We also welcome appropriate commercial water and sanitation product promotions from sellers, if their product is a good fit for Akvopedia. For more questions about the free editorial services contact Winona Azure.

4. What if I disagree with the content on Akvopedia?

If you feel the material posted on Akvopedia is outdated or conflicting with information you have, you can always post your opinions in the “Discussion” tab of each Akvopedia page. Although our discussion tabs are not used often, that is a good place to start and make your information seen by the public without having to know anything about editing an Akvopedia page. You may also contact Winona Azure, the editor, to offer new content or updated materials to any page, if it takes less than a half day to post. We get this request sometimes, and appreciate the efforts people take to keep information accurate and current! We find that costs for WASH projects or services, especially, change over time, and welcome new updates for this.

Editing Akvopedia

Photo: spectrum.ieee.org

Here at Akvopedia, we use the MediaWiki programming language to edit and develop our pages. However, this is the same language that WIkipedia uses, a wiki used by millions and edited by thousands of people. The language itself was meant to be very simple, so that anyone can learn in a very short time. Sometimes just copying what you see on other pages, is a good way to use the code for similar results on your page. Below are some guidelines to editing Akvopedia.

• How to edit an existing Akvopedia page
• How to create a new Akvopedia page
• How to put a picture on an Akvopedia page
• What are the page formatting options?
• Guidelines on editing and on using material from other sources
• What about copyrights?
• For more help with editing, learn what MediaWiki can do.