Here you find some FAQs on the usage of energypedia. In case that you will not find an answer to your question, feel free to browse further through energypedia's help portal or ask for personal assistance.
Why should I use energypedia?
The intention is to replace long monolithic documents by small -linked- information units. This makes it easier to navigate through large documents and find wanted information and further information.
Editing an article within a wiki is easy. This allows the wiki-users to keep information up to date, to correct articles published by other users or to add more relevant information to it by adding text or linking an other relevant article, or explanation.
E.g.: It is not necessary to explain in detail what options and strategies there are in solar cooking in different documents if it has been defined once and is now linked to the text. This prevents redundancy and allows users to concentrate on the topic ore to gain more surrounding information - as he or she likes.
If a page with specific content is linked to several pages, and the specific content is one that changes over time, the information must only be updated in one single document instead of all documents where it occurs. So if there were new technologies in solar cooking they could just be added to the document that already exists and the information would be available from all the documents that it is linked to.
More reasons for using wikis arise from the needs of knowledge- and project- management.
Besides storing and providing information a Wiki can be used as a tool for knowledge generation and allocation as well as a project planning tool. It also makes it possible for external personnel to access this information and see how the project proceeds. See also the short article project Wiki.
Working space vs. knowledge platform: How are the two parts of energypedia separted and structured?
www.energypedia.info is a knowledge platform with portals on various topics, which can be elaborated on and discussed while the "subdomain" Wiki workspaces (www.your_organization.energypedia.info) are client Wikis. The workspaces are not public and can be used for internal communication purposes. However, every client is encouraged to share his/her ideas and knowledge on the public part of the platform.
What is the relation between different platforms/networks (such as GIZ Environmental Management, UNIDO network) and the "general" energypedia?
There is none. If organizations, projects, universities and so on want to have their own Wiki-workspace, we create it. In this respect, we are "only" IT-provider. However, once a project for example and thus the respective Wiki-workspace ends, we make sure to save contents and put them on energypedia.
Does it make sense to create a workspace for my project in which we are organizing our meetings?
Of course you can have your own workspace for your project, into which you can invite everybody you want to (including consultants and partners, which cannot log in the GIZ systems). However, these Wiki workspaces are only available against the payment of a fee since EnDev does not have the resources to offer free Wiki services. Wiki workspaces will cost approx. 100 to 200€ per month. In case you only need a GIZ internal Wiki workspace (which excludes consultants and partners), you can create one here: http://giz.energypedia.info/index.php/06.2167.2. Entries for your project are already existent. Feel free to use the respective "main page" as of now.
How can I create a sub-network such as the IKI-MSP-Network?
There are no sub-networks. There are only protected workspaces which can be created on demand and against the payment of a fee. However, the idea is good and there might be an option to combine two Wiki-workspaces in a way to overlap the latter. That way, users would be allowed to share and work on the respective mutual topics.
May I edit articles published by other users?
The idea behind Wikis is, that users are enabled to work on documents collaboratively .
So: Yes of course you may do so! In turn others are allowed to edit your articles too. Please don't mind and see it as input into your own and our community's knowledge.
Can others edit my articles? What if I don’t want that?
Yes, anyone can edit your articles, just like you can edit any other article. This is the central idea of a Wiki - shared knowledge and collaborative work! As you can always check the article´s history and see who has changed or edited your article, there is no need to worry about vandalism. Wikipedia, the very first and most famous wiki, has already proved it works!
What if someone destroys my article?
As you can always check an article´s history, this is very unlikely to happen.
How do I edit articles?
Check out our edit-help page here .
How can I undo changes on articles?
The "history" button on top of the Wiki page allows you to see, who edited an article. You can then compare the article to older versions of it (in Wikitext), contact the person who changed it and/or undo changes if necessary.
Can I change the font size?
You can only change the fontsize via "Format". Further changes are not possible due to reasons of standardisation. However, you can choose between bold/italics/underline and colours to emphasise certain words.
How can I publish a study on energypedia?
It is recommended to write a Wiki-article summarizing the study, in case there is no article existent yet. Otherwise you might elaborate on the already existent Wiki-article in energypedia and refer to the study (e.g. in a footnote). Energypedia is NO DMS and we have no interest in such. Energypedia is a Wiki and the content is supposed to be publicly accessible and changable in order to have up to date articles and not a compilation of PDFs, which can not be further worked on. Energypedia is a working platform and NOT a platform to store files.
Why are there strange symbols appearing in my document?
Probably you have simply copied and pasted a text from somewhere elso into the editor. If you did not read the explanations for word and excel imports, please do that now. If You are trying to insert the document from somewhere else, (PDF or Webpages for example), it might be easier to copy the document into Wikitext and format it afterwards.
