Making sense of water, sanitation and hygiene wikis

A wiki is a website, which allows visitors to consume and produce information equally well, such as Wikipedia.

There are several efforts ongoing with wikis about water, sanitation, technology, approaches and solutions. Juerg Staudenmann, UNDP, and Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, Akvo.org, and Nick Dickinson, IRC, talk about water wikis and how we can avoid duplicate work and instead support each other. Watch the video below and try the search at the end of this article.

The Stockholm World Water Cube is a partnership between SIWI, Akvo.org and IRC

Diverse wikis

The UNDP currently runs the UN Water Wiki. It "tries to capture knowledge, portray projects as well as organisations that are active in the UN sphere in water issues. We wanted to map who does what...", according to Juerg Staudenmann. Thomas Bjelkemann-Pettersson described Akvopedia, as "part of what Akvo.org does. Primarily about solutions, low cost, locally maintable, sustainable solutions in water and sanitation and also the approaches part... we've had organisations come and share with us." IRC, in particular, is a knowledge partner and collaborates with Akvo on the Akvopedia. Besides these wikis, there are many others in use within projects in the water and sanitation sector with materials waiting to become public.

Different audiences

Each water wiki is tailored to different audiences. They are complementary when they make use each other. Regarding the different wikis, Staudenmann says, "The Akvopedia is about solutions on the ground... the IWA wiki, as far as I know, I haven't seen it, I only have heard about, is more about technical articles in water supply and sanitation... What this tells me is that at the WaterWiki.net we don't necessarily need to focus on articles about solutions, pipes and pumps and these sorts of things."

Bridging across wikis: just cross-reference and search

Yet, there is still a challenge. Users may sometimes want to find a body of information that spans across several wikis. Thomas explains that, "The easy way to do is by hand, cross-referencing and linking or you could go a slightly more technical route with automatic inclusions... But I am very much in favor of the simpler solutions because they are so much easier to maintain."

There is also the possibility to create a tailored search that would combine the information from all water wikis. At the moment, it is already possible to create a custom search with Google and other search engine providers such as Microsoft.

Nick Dickinson, IRC, initiated a water, sanitation and hygiene search following this interview in order to test this concept. Please give it a try. Do you find what you need?