Coastal Wiki

The Coastal Wiki - short for “Coastal and Marine Wikipedia” - is an Internet encyclopaedia for coastal professionals providing up-to-date high quality information, which is continuously improved, complemented and updated by expert users registered as ENCORA Participants.

 Go to the COASTAL WIKI  

 

Introduction to the Coastal Wiki

The development of a European Wiki Coastal Directory, in short: Coastal Wiki, is among the major expected outcomes of the ENCORA project. It will provide a web-based survey of existing coastal knowledge and experience in Europe, with references to the most relevant sources published in the literature and on the Internet. It is intended to support professionals in coastal science, practice and policy in their daily work. It will be embedded in the very user-friendly WIKIMEDIA software, allowing expert users to update the directory at any time with new knowledge. The Coastal Wiki is expected to become a major tool for keeping coastal professionals informed of recent developments and new major knowledge sources in their field.
The ENCORA Theme Workshop from 29 November to 1 December 2006 brought together about 120 coastal professionals from across the European Union and kick-started the process of developing initial content in the Coastal Wiki. As a Coastal WIKI Author you need an account, so other users can see who produced or changed text. If you are a member of ENCORA´s national or thematic networks and have not yet voiced your interest in joining the Coastal Wiki production team, please contact your national ENCORA Coordinator. If you are a coastal expert or practitioners but not yet an ENCORA member and find this process exciting, it is high time to join one of our national networks. You can download Guidelines for writing a Coastal Wiki article and a quick reference guide for editing text in the WIKIMEDIA editor.

Why a Coastal Wiki?

The rationale of the Coastal Wiki is the fact that existing systems to search for coastal information are limited in several respects:

  • information generally focuses on particular (often monodisciplinary or regional) aspects of a topic, without providing a coherent picture of relevant related aspects
  • information is generally presented in the context of either science, practice or policy, without establishing relevant links between these three disciplines
  • information can be outdated.

This hampers the use of existing information for dealing with complex coastal issues and for producing integrated assessments. The strength of the Coastal Wiki is its capability to highlight relationships, to reveal context and to guide the user in a simple and natural way through related topics. The Coastal Wiki connects existing scattered information sources to provide coastal professionals with up-to-date, coherent, consistent and comprehensive information. Coastal Wiki provides a common understanding of concepts in coastal science, practice and policy to facilitate communication among coastal professionals in different fields. It also serves as an information base for performing integrated assessments The Coastal Wiki does not reproduce all existing knowledge and experience in detail. It describes major concepts and their interrelationships on headlines. For detailed knowledge the Coastal Wiki refers to existing sources, with internet links if available.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. A wiki does not require users to know HTML. It has a system to record changes so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states. A wiki enables documents to be written collectively in a simple markup language using a web browser. A single page in a wiki is referred to as a 'wiki page', while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected via hyperlinks, is 'the wiki'; in effect, a wiki is actually a very simple, easy-to-use user-maintained database for searching or creating information. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Sometimes session log-in is requested to acquire a 'wiki-signature' cookie for autosigning edits. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time, and appear almost instantaneously online. This can lead to abuse of the system. Private wiki servers require user authentication to edit, sometimes even to read pages. Please try out the WIKIPEDIA, an encyclopaedia in wiki-format and the most well-known example of a wiki on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Fill in on Main Page: Search: Coast Result: page indicating 56938 items found. The first item, coasts, fits 100%. Click on this item and view the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coasts. This article contains several sections. A content list of section headings is generated automatically. The article contains many links, indicated in blue. The section 'see also' contain additional internal and external links. For instance, clicking on the internal link Marine Biology leads you to another section of the WIKIPEDIA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_biology.

The end users of the Coastal Wiki

The primary end users of the Coastal Wiki are coastal professionals, usually with higher education, who are either generalists and need to update their knowledge about a broad range of subjects or specialists who need to gain an understanding of other sectors or disciplines in order to work in an integrated manner. End users can be Policy makers: e.g. a coastal mayor, an employee at high management level in regional or national administration, European Commission staff, or managers of influential NGOs Practitioners: e.g. a site manager, an expert working for administration, a planner or consultant at all administrative levels Scientists: e.g. a researcher (from any area of coast-relevant science) needing information from other than his/her own field of interest or as a start-up to enter a new research area.