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Sustainable Washington Wiki

Welcome to the Sustainable Washington Wiki

This is intended to be an expanding resource which is managed and sustained by its contributors – you! We invite you to share your own stories and experiences with others, and to add resources and information you’ve found useful as you pursue sustainable goals in your communities.

In general, you should feel free to add to or modify material posted on the wiki. If you’re uncertain of a fact or something you want to add, you can try posting a suggestion at the bottom of the topic. We only ask that you follow a few simple guidelines…

Simple guidelines to consider:

?  Please operate according to the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated;
?  Be courteous;
?  Be respectful;
?  No inappropriate language or comments;
?  APA-Washington reserves the right to edit or delete material that doesn’t follow these guidelines.

Getting started.

You can enter the wiki as a guest or login as a user. If this is your first time on the wiki, check out the “Wiki Help” information, located via a link from the “Navigation” section of the wiki screen.
You can browse the wiki to see what’s there, if you wish. However, in order to add or modify material on the wiki, you will need to become a registered user (or “member”) and login. To become a member, first-time users will need to “Register” – this is very simple, but will involve creating a Username and password. Make sure you keep track of these for future reference. The “Register” link is at the top of the Wiki Homepage.

Once you have logged in, you can edit material already on the wiki, or create new categories or articles.

You can search for material using the [Search] box at the left of the Wiki Homepage. This will bring up a list of articles that relate to your search.

You can also create articles on-the-fly by typing a subject in the [Create or Find Page] box at the lower left of the Navigation section of the Wiki Homepage, just below the [Search] box.

In general, you will find that the [Search] box provides more flexibility in searching, while the [Create or Find Page] box is very specific – for example, typing “Seattle” in the [Search] box will bring up a list of a number of articles with references to Seattle, while typing the same “Seattle” in the [Create or Find Page] box brings up nothing, since no articles are specifically named “Seattle.”  We suggest you only use the [Create or Find Page] box if you have a specific article you want to add and already know the name you want to use.

To get started, we suggest you login and take a look at several of the existing articles that already exist. The easiest way to do this is to click on “Categories” under the Navigation section, click on a category and article, and then choose “Edit” from the upper right-hand corner of the wiki screen.

When you view an article in ‘edit’ mode, you’ll see some text enclosed in brackets:  [...]text text text [/...]. The ‘instructions’ are within the brackets, such as ‘b’ for bold, ‘i’ for italics, ‘url’ for a web address, etc. Notice also that there is a beginning code as well as an ending code signified by a ‘/’ mark; the coding applies to all the text lying in between the code marks. If you’re familiar with how HTML works, this will be immediately recognizable to you.

The Wiki Help material gives some help on formatting and creating categories and articles, so it’s worth your time to check it out.

Wiki Organization

You’ll see a fairly simple organization of the articles in the wiki, according to categories such as “Case Studies” and “Location.” There are also some sub-categories, such as ‘Sustainability Plans’ under “Stories.”  This is a starting point that you may find useful, but you should also feel free to create new categories if you see fit. We encourage you to add multiple categories to your article, so that the article will appear in multiple places, as appropriate. For example, some articles appear as a listing under Location and also under Stories. When you’re creating or editing an article, you can specify the categories you want to use by adding this type of code to the beginning or end of the article:

    “((Category:Stories::Sustainability Plans::Edmonds WA))”
    “((Category:Location::Edmonds WA))”

        (NOTE: in this example, so you can see the code, we’ve replaced the brackets with
        parentheses; when you type in a category in your article, make sure you replace
        the double-parentheses with double-brackets!)

For the above, this article would appear as “Edmonds WA” under the category of Location, and also under the sub-category of Sustainability Plans under a second category called Stories.

So our general advice is go ahead, have at it. You can’t really ‘break’ the wiki. Look around. At the start, we suggest keeping it simple. As you become more comfortable, be more adventurous with formatting and categorizing. But don’t be afraid to plunge in.