There are several efforts to create a crisis wiki or emergency response wiki. The key term may vary emergency management, natural disasters, or emergency response, but each effort covers a similar area.

There is no single leading wiki, and in fact none of the wikis is very complete or active. The "competition" between the wikis might arguably be working against a critical mass of activity.

The active wikis in this field are:

  • Crisis Commons Wiki by Crisis Commons. Especially active in January 2010 after the Haiti earthquake. In late 2011 it is being heavily spammed (but the spam is being rolled back) - otherwise not very active.
  • CrisisWiki. Little activity in late 2011.[1]
  • HurricaneWiki - originally the Tsunami wiki, then repurposed.
  • Emergency 2.0 Wiki - 2011 Australian joint initiative by community and government sectors.[2] As of 9 October 2011, small (87 pages) with few page views (less than 20,000). Uses a non-commercial license, so cannot share content with Appropedia or other sites using CC-by-sa.
  • Appropedia, which hosts emergency response projects such as Hexayurt, and information on relevant subjects such as Earthquake safety[3] Water supply and purification for emergencies and is intended to host designs for structures to withstand tsunamis and floods. It is not being widely used for emergency response coordination at this point. (These areas in Appropedia are planned for major expansion, to be a valuable resource for future emergencies and for preparation or contingency planning. If you want to help, leave a note on the talk page, check out Appropedia:Porting pages, or just start contributing.)
  • Ushahidi - wiki for Ushahidi, a widely used software tool for crowdsourcing information in disasters.

Related collaborative sites:

  • K4Health's Haiti Relief Toolkit. Contributions are invited. You can suggest or comment on resources in the Toolkit's discussion board. The focus is on lists of external resources, and unlike a wiki it has no editable categorization, and no cross-linking or direct editing.The toolkit covers all vital sectors related to disaster relief, including health, water and sanitation, food security, and shelter, as well as key field activities supporting the operations, such as logistics. Resources focus on meeting both immediate emergency needs and long-term recovery efforts.

Maps[edit | edit source]

Maps play an important role in emergency response. Collaborative map tools enable more effective responses, especially if they contain information about the impact of the disaster. These tools include:

  • OpenStreetMap. Immediately after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the coverage of Haiti improved radically, as a result of work done at a hastily called CrisisCamp.
  • Scipionus - Hurricane Information Maps

Longer term response[edit | edit source]

The pages humanitarian wiki and international development wiki give an overview of wiki projects and resources that relate more to the reconstruction and development work following the immediate response.

Notes[edit | edit source]

  1. Jwalling seems to be the tech lead, and the active anti-spammer.
  2. [emergency20wiki.org/about-us/history History] - Emergency 2.0 Wiki.
  3. A project we have had planned for a while is to collate information on earthquake safety, including building design, mitigation, and what to during and after an earthquake. We have open licensed resources we can use to start the project, but need volunteers, esp people who have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional (to help convert PDFs). --Chriswaterguy 11:06, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

See also[edit | edit source]

FA info icon.svg Angle down icon.svg Page data
Authors Chris Watkins
License CC-BY-SA-3.0
Language English (en)
Related 0 subpages, 0 pages link here
Aliases Emergency management wikis, Emergency management wiki, Crisis wiki
Impact 564 page views
Created January 18, 2010 by Chris Watkins
Modified June 8, 2023 by StandardWikitext bot
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