Students have the choice of two general goals for their projects. You can pick one of these options:
- expand an existing case that has been started in AquaPedia; or
- start a new case that doesn’t yet exist in the AquaPedia Database.
The requirements for your project differ with each option, so either option should take approximately the same amount of time and effort. Your choice should be based upon your interest in exploring or developing a particular case.
Before you choose, you should review the Criteria for Case Study Inclusion, to make sure you know what types of water management or conflict case studies are appropriate for AquaPedia.
You should also take a look at the current cases in AquaPedia and read about the structure of a case study to get an idea of how they are organized and what type of information should be included. When you are looking at a case, make sure to select the “view form” or “edit” tab to see how the information is organized behind the scenes.
Requirements for Option 1: Expand an Existing Case
- Update existing information to bring the case up to date, fill in missing details, broaden coverage, and expand references
- Add or (appended existing) background articles to make sure that all relevant topics have coverage at the article “stub” level. Article stubs are short placeholders. These should be approximately 100-200 words and introduce the basic details of the topic that should be covered by the article.
- Of these background articles, select at least 2 for complete development.These articles should be 400-800 words, include relevant historical details, 5+ high quality references, and 2+ relevant external links.
- Include 1 Analysis, Synthesis & Insights article and well-developed answers for at least 2 Key Questions
Requirements for Option 2: Start and Develop a New Case
- Develop a basic case study that meets the criteria for an included case. All included information should be cited/referenced.
- Add short “stubs” – short placeholder articles — for all potentially relevant background articles for a case. These should be approximately 100-200 words and introduce the basic details of the topic that should be covered by the article.
- Of these background articles, select at least 2 for complete development. These articles should be 400-800 words, include relevant historical details, 5+ high quality references, and 2+ relevant external links.
- Include 1 Analysis, Synthesis & Insights article or well-developed answers for 2 Key Questions
How to get started
- Fill out this form to get your account. You’ll receive an account within 24-48 hours of submitting this.
- Familiarize yourself with AquaPedia. You can see the entire website without an account. You cannot edit until you have an account.
- Develop your work like you would any research project, but as you finish each section, incorporate it into AquaPedia.
Other advice
- No one expects you to become an expert in wikitext, the text formatting “language” used by wiki software. If you have trouble with formatting your text or adding images and other files, email Amanda Repella @ Tufts for assistance or maybe even some formatting on your behalf. Wikipedia has a great page with some basic advice on how wikitext interacts with the edit interface.
- However, you will need to include references inline with your text. We have some basic advice in AquaPedia’s help pages.
- One of the great benefits of a wiki format is that the history of a page is stored forever. If something seems to have gotten “screwed up” beyond all fixing, just roll the page back to a previous version.
- One of the great frustrations of a wiki format is that the history of a page is stored forever. You’ll want to make sure that every time you hit “save” that you are happy with the quality and accuracy of the new content you are adding. Use the “preview” option to see how your changes will look before saving.
- Because this project lives on the internet for the entire world to view for the foreseeable future, please do not include images or figures for which you do not have permission to reprint. Do not use long quotes from published sources. Avoid using materials that are not freely available to anyone or otherwise in the public domain or available via Creative Commons License. WikiMedia Commons has some great images that might be useful and are free for use. Navigating “fair use” is somewhat difficult, so try not to put AquaPedia in a questionable position regarding the inclusion of your new content.
- Most students are editing existing cases, but if you are starting a new case, this page will be useful to you: http://aquapedia.waterdiplomacy.org/wiki/index.php?title=AquaPedia:Contribute_Content