CalSWIMWikiLaunch

Welcome to the CalSWIM wiki! We've been working really hard over the past 3 months to extend and customize XWiki so that it can support a community of people interested in sharing knowledge and data about water resources in California via an open but trustable information infrastructure.

Besides the standard XWiki features, we added a Google maps plugin, that allows you to include maps on your pages and plot your data on those maps, an Excel plugin that allows you to draw charts on your pages from Excel attachments, and a relational database plugin that allows anyone with a publicly accessible database to share that data with the CalSWIM community so that everyone else can create pages with data from those databases.

Water resources is a hot topic these days, with some suggesting that water is the oil of the 21st century. It certainly triggers a lot of debate and "wars of minds," since water is becoming scarce, data about it can have different interpretations, and policy decisions usually account not only for that data but also for lots of other non-scientific factors. We hope CalSWIM will become the medium of choice to discuss water-related issues, and we expect a lot of different points of view and controversy in the contributions!

Underlying all that, we want to ensure that the information in CalSWIM can be trusted as much as the authors themselves can be trusted. For that, we made, and will continue to improve, a few policy decisions about contributions to CalSWIM.

First of all, to avoid a potential large amount of random vandalism from web bots, all contributors must register, and only registered users can contribute content. This is, therefore, different from Wikipedia. However, registration is free, and anyone can register.

Second, some pages (for example, the ones under the Studies space) can only be changed by their authors. This is in par with the long-standing concept of attribution, which we value. If a study is wrong or dubious or prone to generate controversy, anyone can comment on it and create new pages counter-arguing that study, but only the author can change the study itself.

Finally, for those many pages that are collaborative, such as the Waterpedia space, we are developing a monitoring program that keeps an eye on users' actions and tries to detect abuses and biased information automatically -- without censoring anything. This part of the CalSWIM project is still under heavy development, and we expect it to evolve along with CalSWIM itself.

Ultimately, we want to encourage contributions, and only those contributions, made by real people with a real interest in the topic, and that's the best platform for building trust.

So, welcome to CalSWIM! And we look forward for the many volunteer contributions ahead!

Crista Lopes, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Associate Professor at UCI, Information and Computer Sciences