How to Wiki

The Green Thing Wiki is a store of information about the CO2 impact of everyday actions. It's a scientific blueprint that helps decide the monthly Green Thing actions and calculate the amount of CO2 saved by doing them.

If you're looking for more detail to inform your personal green actions or you're a planning another climate change campaign or initiative, please use it and use it well.

1. Use the structure.

Developed with some of Green Thing's environmental advisors, the Wiki structure is nice and simple. There are six top-level categories of actions: the 'Big Three' - Energy, Transport and Food; and the 'Little Three' - Products, Waste and Water. Within this, actions are sorted by how they help us to Reduce, Reuse or Recycle.
The focus is always on analysing CO2-saving actions, estimating how quickly those savings happen and how easy or hard the action is to do.
Please stick to this structure and focus when contributing, although of course you're welcome to suggest improvements or alternatives.

2. Keep it factual.

This isn't a place for casual tips about filling kettles. This is the place for quantifying as rigorously as possible how much CO2 is actually saved by doing what, all based on a set of assumptions and calculations.
So Wiki articles need to be as evidence-based and balanced as possible. Often this will involve giving different points of view about the real impact of a particular action. It means citing verifiable, authoritative sources whenever possible, especially on controversial actions (like, say, carbon offsetting).
In time the facts will be localised for different territories (e.g. the CO2 impact of changing a light bulb in France is far less than the UK because 80% of the country's electricity comes from nuclear power), but for the time being, the information relates to the UK only.

3. Use the free content and keep it free.

All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and may be distributed or linked accordingly. Information will only work with the GFDL if it's not protected by copyright or other licenses which don't allow it to be freely shared - so please don't add that kind of content.

4. Do the right thing.

Whenever you use the Green Thing Wiki, do the right thing. Respect and defend your fellow Wiki contributors' right to say what they think even if you passionately disagree with them. Sweeping generalizations are lazy and unhelpful things, personal attacks are aggressive and unpleasant things. Being nice and polite and open-minded are always good things. Avoid edit wars (in fact avoid all kind of wars) and look for common ground. Act in good faith and assume good faith on the part of others. Never disrupt the Wiki with arrogant self-righteousness because there's a chance you may not be right.

5. There aren't any other things.

If you'd like to register to edit and update the wiki just let us know at wiki@dothegreenthing.com. Play fair, do the right thing and don't worry about messing up - you can't accidentally damage the Wiki or delete information forever because the system keeps a copy of all article versions and preserves them until the end of human history. Hopefully, thanks to things like the Wiki, that's a fair way off.

If you're a seasoned Wiki user and you think this How To is similar to Wikipedia's Five Pillars, you're right. That's because Five Pillars is brilliant. Don't think of this as a copy, more as an energy-saving piece of reuse.

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