Salvaging the old "permaculture.info" wiki

Hey permies.

In brief: We tried to merge permaculture.info into Appropedia.org, but it was impossible. However, we can recover some of the pages from archive.org. If you want to help, please let me know.

You may remember a few years back there was a permaculture wiki at permaculture.info. It lived, it died, it lived again, it died again. Eventually we managed to get agreement to import the old permaculture.info wiki into Appropedia.org (the sustainability wiki). . But the database was corrupted. And after spending a lot of time & effort, including having two developers examine it, and all the time that takes when you're a tiny nonprofit with little, it was unrecoverable, and there were apparently no backups.

But there is good news – some pages are preserved on archive.org. With a small coordinated effort we can import all of those to Appropedia. I'm a bit stretched at the moment, but if someone's keen to help, we could divide up the work and get it done. (When we do the moves, I suggest using an edit summary of "from permaculture.info" to acknowledge the good work that went before.) Please let me know.


Oh, and an important message about Appropedia: We're all about the wiki, and we have regular backups made, so we should be pretty safe. (We're also supposed to have a publicly available weekly backup of all text, for extra resilience – right now we're working on getting that happening again.)

I have never helped at a wiki before, and this sounds interesting. Are newbies welcome? I am interested in helping and eager to learn.

Dave, newbies are very welcome! I'm happy to lend a hand.

One thing to note: When adding one of these old pages, make a note in the "Summary" field. (That's under the big edit box.) Something like:
from the old permaculture.info wiki

On this document, we can list pages that have been moved to Appropedia, to keep track. Is that clear, or should I add the instructions here?

Please may you add the instructions here, thank you! I will try to help, but back when I first asked the question, it was still Christmas break. I might be able to try and salvage stuff on the weekends.

Okay, instructions:

1. Start at https://web.archive.org/web/20090623085843/http://www.permaculture.info/index.php/Main_Page (most recent non-spam homepage)
2. Navigate through the site to find pages that haven't been transferred yet.
3. Use the blue arrows at the top to go foward and back and find the latest non-spammy version of each page.
4. Copy the text to Appropedia http://appropedia.org
5. If you want to convert formatted text to "wiki markup", copy first to our "Wikedbox" then press the [w] button around the middle of the toolbar.
6. Need to know how to make a new page? See http://www.appropedia.org/Help:Creating_a_page
7. When you're done, add the title to the bottom of our PiratePad. (No login required.)

Thanks!

I just want to report that this has gone pretty well... not sure if there is still work to be done on this, or if all is salvaged, but a bunch of pages have been rescued and are now among Appropedia's permaculture pages. (Though whether they've all had that category tag added is another matter.)

Hat tip to our new(ish) admin Ethan who has done much of this. And anyone else who has contributed that I'm overlooking (sorry!). (I've been working on other things to help the site motor along, so I haven't been involved with this rescue.)

I think Ethan might have come to the project through the Permies form, so much love and appreciation for that.