CoalSwarm: How to Get Involved

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Background on the CoalSwarm wiki articles

• Why contribute to the CoalSwarm wiki pages?: The magnitude and complexity of the global coal industry requires a pooling of information across groups and countries. A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows to compilation of a detailed article to be spread amongst many authors. "Many hands make light work", as the old saying goes.

• Why use a wiki?: A wiki page is ideal for creating the best freely available synthesis of information on a mine, a company a coal plant proposal or any one of the myriad of other coal-related topics. Instead of trawling through dozens of pages, each of which have a little new information, CoalSwarm aims to condense key information down onto a page or a set of linked pages but also enable readers to follow the links back to the original sources. A wiki also allows people, irrespective of where they live, to collaborate on researching and writing on topics of common interest.

• Can the information be relied on?: The CoalSwarm wiki pages are hosted within the SourceWatch wiki. The policy of SourceWatch is to ensure that articles are fair, accurate and each key point is referenced. Our standard is, wherever possible, to have material referenced to an online source so that readers can go back to the original source and check material for themselves.

• Can CoalSwarm material be reproduced?: The information on the CoalSwarm article pages is licensed for free use for non-profit purposes as long as there is attribution. In this way, a range of non-profit groups can re-use the information free of charge.

• What impact will it have?: Over time wiki pages tend to float to the top of the results displayed by the main search engines. Commonly, CoalSwarm articles will be in the top five results. This ensures that the referenced information on the pages is readily available to citizens, activists and journalists. Journalists often incorporate material from CoalSwarm articles into their stories. Articles are often linked to by bloggers and media sites. Citizens can find out information about local plants, issues or companies. Many pages also include links to the website of groups actively working on an issue so that citizens can contact them if they want further information of get more actively involved.

• Why not just add material to WIkipedia?: While Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, it has some policies which limit its scope. For example, it now discourages articles on living people unless they are of great significance and very prominent. CoalSwarm on the other hand, includes profiles on people such as coal company directors and lobbyists precisely because they aren't all that visible to the public.

• Are articles words only?: The article pages can incorporate photos, tables, documents that are otherwise unavailable elsewhere on the web, include Google satellite images of remote mines and incorporate links to valuable resource materials.

• But can't pages be vandalised?: The SourceWatch registration system requires a valid email address to be submitted. This deters most would be vandals from registering. Even if a user registers and attempts to delete referenced material, this can be undone in a few seconds and the offender blocked from making further changes.

• What if I make a mistake? I'm worried about accidentally deleting material!: The wiki software stores every saved change in an archive for each page. So even if you accidentally delete material, this can be easily fixed up by yourself or one of the other editors, who are only too happy to help you learn the ropes.

How do I get started?

• Click on the Sign Up to Edit tab. (From other pages, this link is in the "Hot Topics" section over on the left hand side of each page. Then click the "Create an account" link which takes you here. Add your preferred username, password and email address. As a general rule, we encourage editors -- especially if working for a group -- to use their own name. However, anonymous user names are accepted as well. After you have created an account, you will be sent an email asking you to validate the user account. Click on the the link in the subsequent email.

• then, you will need to send an [newuser@sourcewatch.org email] so that your new account is activated by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which hosts the SourceWatch wiki. Include "NEW USER" in the subject line. In the body of the email include your preferred "Username" and "E-mail Address." Staff at CMD will activate your account as promptly as possible.

• Now that you have registered, it is worth reading the SourceWatch ground rules.

• Next, if you have never edited a wiki before, it is worth familiarising yourself with the basic features of the wiki software and how to edit pages. Follow the CoalSwarm tour for a brief overview of the most commonly used features.

• To learn how to add or correct information on CoalSwarm, see the following information page: Overview for new users.

• Starting with a stub: For most new users, the best place to start is by creating what is referred to in wiki jargon as a 'stub'. A stub can be as little as one or more coalSwarm badges, a one sentence description of the topic, the supporting reference and then the usual end sections. Why start with a stub? Firstly, most articles within the CoalSwarm wiki started out as stubs which have had little sections added to in numerous subsequent edits. Secondly, the skills required to successfully create a stub are pretty much the same as required for longer more detailed articles. Finally, a 'stub' will be indexed within a week or so by Google, so will start appearing in search results. The sooner a page is created, even if it is only a 'stub', the sooner it will be that it makes its way towards the tops of search engine results.

Help is at hand

If you are still unsure of how to proceed in adding to CoalSwarm articles or just need a hand fixing up some formatting, help is at hand.

• the fastest way to get help, if you are in the middle of editing something, is to have a look at the Recent changes page and see if anyone else is online.

Towards the bottom of the "Recent changes options" box at the top of the page is the line "Show new changes starting from". This will then display the time and date that you opened the page. (If the page has been open for a while in your browser, click refresh and it will update the time). Then look down the list of recently saved edits to see if someone else is currently online. If they are, go to the editor you want to ask for help, click on the "talk" link to the right of their name, click on the "edit this page" tab and post your query at the foot of the page. Once you have saved this, your edit will show up on the recent changes page and the individual user will have a note appear at the top of whatever SourceWatch page they are in notifying them that a note has been posted to their talk page.

• Alternatively, you can post a note to the talk page of one of the regular CoalSwarm editors Bob Burton (Australia), Brickburner (US), Ted Nace (US) or Cshearer19 (US). There may be a delay before they are next online, but usually they will get your message within a few hours (depending on your timezone) to a day or two at most).

• If this is your first time contributing to a wiki, you are encouraged to contact Ted Nace, CoalSwarm’s director, at 415-206-0906 or info@CoalSwarm.org. One-on-one assistance by phone is often the most efficient way to learn the basics of wiki editing.

Some special tips

• Avoiding edit conflicts: As the wiki is a live online database, two people edit the same page at the same time will cause an edit conflict. If this occurs, the editor who saves their changes second will have a message come up stating that there is an edit conflict. This means that all the changes you have made can be lost. There are two ways to avoiding losing changes in this way. Firstly, before you start editing a page, check the "recent changes" page and see if anyone else has very recently been working on the page you want to edit. (See the notes under the first bullet point in the "help is at hand" section above on how you see if other users are currently making changes to the wiki). As a rough rule of thumb, if no changes have been made in the last 30 minutes or more to the page you want to work on, then most likely you won't have a problem. Secondly, if you are adding a paragraph or more it is best to create the text in a word processor document or email message and then copy it across. This way, if there is an edit conflict, you still have the original text you can add to the page later.

• What to do if you spot unreferenced material: If you see material on an article page which you think needs a supporting reference, there are a couple of things you can do. Firstly, you can see if you can find a reference that supports the point and add it in yourself. (Sometimes it may simply be a case where another editor has added several paragraphs of text but added the reference only at the end of the first paragraph. We aim to ensure, where appropriate, each key point, sentence or paragraph has a supporting reference, even if it is repeating a reference used earlier in the article.) If you can't find a supporting reference, you can simply add the {{fact}} tag at the point where you think the reference should be. That way other users, possibly including the original author, can see where the reference is needed. Finally, if you think the point is so central to the material on the page that leaving it unreferenced is inappropriate, feel free to cut it from the article page and post it to the associated 'discussion' page with a brief explanatory note. Then other users can add it back if they find a supporting reference.

• Uploading files: The SourceWatch wiki can accommodate various files from pictures to original documents. Firstly, it is important to only upload images that are copyright free. Secondly, our general approach is to only upload documents which are not available elsewhere online. If the document is already available online, it is best to link to it rather than upload. However, one exception is where you think that material which is currently online is important and may be removed from its current website. See Uploading Images & PDFs for more details.

• Using the 'watch' function: One of the tabs at the top of all the article pages is the "watch" tab. This enables you to be notified when changes are made to an article that you are particularly interested in. If you click on the tab, a mall box at the head of the page will state that the page has been "added to your watchlist. Future changes to this page and its associated talk page will be listed there, and the page will appear bolded in the list of recent changes to make it easier to pick out." However, if you only login to the SourceWatch site occasionally, you will not see that a page has been changed until your next visit. An alternative is to be notified of changes to the page by email. To activate this go to the "my preferences" tab up in the top right hand corner. On the "Preferences" page scroll down to the "E-mail" section and check the "E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed". Once checked, you will be sent an email each time an edit is saved to the database other than those which are marked as "minor". (If you want to be emailed of changes which are marked "minor", check the box "E-mail me also for minor edits of pages"). If you want to remove your "watch" from a particular page, go to the article page when logged in and click "unwatch".

• Creating a Google Alert: If you want to add material on a specific topic, creating a Google Alert can be a handy way of keep track of news articles and blogs which have been included in the Google News Index. To create an alert go to Google News. So if you want to create an alert on "coal", add the term in the search bar, press enter and all the recent articles in the index with the term will appear. Then scroll down to the foot of the results page to the "Create an email alert for coal" link. Click on the link and you can select from a range of options including being emailed when a new article is published, once a day or once a week. Select from the other options, add your email address and then click "create alert".

Ongoing projects and organizational to-do list

A list of ongoing projects and organizational to-do items can be found here.