We are about to change the name of the Solar Cooking Wiki to the “Solar Cooking Archive Wiki”. This may seem like a strange change to make, but let us give you a little background.
In 1995, Tom Sponheim, a volunteer for Solar Cookers International (SCI) created the Solar Cooking Archive (http://solarcooking.org). Tom maintained the site for the next 10 years on a volunteer basis. While he worked closely with Solar Cookers International, Tom funded and provided most of the editorial direction of the Archive himself.
In the meantime, SCI created a site that covered its organizational structure and solar cooking activities. This site is at http://solarcookers.org.
During the early years of the Solar Cooking Archive, Tom would seek out information on solar cooking and worked bring this information together in one place (hence the name Solar Cooking Archive). Over the years however, more and more solar cooking enthusiasts have submitted plans and other materials to have posted in the Archive. A number of other volunteers around the world have also volunteered to translate our documents into other languages.
At the Granada solar cooking conference in July 2006, it became apparent that there was a great need for conference participants (and others) to stay in close communication after the conference. Tom gave a short presentation at the conference on ways that the Solar Cooking Archive could be enhanced to allow for more two-way communication. One of the possible additions to the Archive that he mentioned in his presentation was to have some pages be wiki-based. Tom had done some work on the Wikipedia encyclopedia project, but he had never thought about how wiki technology could be used to enhance the Archive until the idea was first brought up to him by volunteer Beth Ogilvie (who is now an administrator on this wiki). The Solar Cooking Archive had never had pages dedicated to each country where solar cooking was taking place. Nor did it have pages for each NGO or individual. If we were going to add such pages, it made sense to make them wiki-based so that Solar Cookers International didn’t act as an information bottleneck and so that others could add their own information.
The first thing Tom did on his return from Spain was to add a web-based discussion forum to the Archive. Then he and Beth set to work figuring whether to host the wiki pages in the Archive or whether to use one of the free services for this. They decided against hosting the wiki themselves and selected Wikia as a host. They convinced Wikia that there was enough demand for a new wiki there. Wikia takes care of server maintenance, backup, vandalism protection, etc. Solar Cookers International was then free to concentrate on the content.
The Solar Cooking [Archive] Wiki grew quickly to almost 600 topics. We have had fairly good participation from around the world, though not everyone grasps how easy it is to edit a wiki-based page. Vandalism has been minimal.
So why the name change? Well, in 2005, when Tom became a contractor and eventually an on employee of Solar Cookers International, he transferred ownership of The Solar Cooking Archive over to Solar Cookers International. Now that the Wiki had been created, Solar Cookers International now found itself with three websites (or four if you count the discussion forums). Solar Cookers International realized that there was good reason for having the separate sites, but their separate existence might be confusing for visitors. In an attempt to avoid this confusion Solar Cookers International is working to make clear the relation between the sites and to give them a more similar look and feel. Adding the word “Archive” back into the name of the Solar Cooking Wiki made sense.
Another decision recently made to avoid confusion is to continue to use the current discussion forums and not migrate over to using the forum capabilities of the Solar Cooking Wiki. The latter are convenient for active Wiki participants, but they are primitive in comparison to the current PHPBBS system.