Iwa water wiki carolina latorre, iwa

1. IWA’s experience with the
Water Wiki
JANUARY 2017, CAROLINA LATORRE
Session - best practice database

2. 2
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
AIMS
 to provide a platform for the global water community to
interact and share knowledge online.
 A place to present grey literature and good quality free
content to the community. Content contributed by IWA and
the wider water community.
 reference for all areas of water, wastewater and
environmental science and management.
 Place for water professionals worldwide to interact, share
knowledge and increase understanding.

3. 3
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Contents
• 1 Articles – Free Content
• 2 Discussion
• 3 Forum
• 4 References

4. 4
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Story
 Started 2011 with many functionalities:
 Publications
 Forum
 Group work
 Special team of developers in charge of platform (high costs)
 UPDATE OF THE PLATFORM – also a problem for costs (has to be
every three years)
 Staff was allocated to sections but most time consuming was the
forum.
 2013 the forum was decommissioned and more focus on platform
 Working group was time consuming too

5. 5
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Main challenges:
 High maintenance costs
 Spam (increased costs)
 Time staff
Advantages:
 wiki format successful in terms of visits because of contents
 Great in google open search (with generic terms, no water wikis).
 public space and open - it could not be heavily branded (this is how wiki
works) -also a challenge!

6. 6
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Decommission the WaterWiki site at the end of June 2016
 key content and features transferred to main website,
www.iwapublishing.com.
 new “News” section, which will include blog posts from our authors as
well as updates from and publishing (General updates are happening on
the IWA Network website’s blog).
 home for “Classic Papers from the WaterWiki”: an archive of our most
popular articles from the site.
 collection of free ebooks

7. 7
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Reasons for change
 In comparison to other websites, analytics showed that the
types of people where different for example in the wiki they
had young people (students) whereas in the main website
most people visiting are early career to retirement age.
 Having both websites covers a larger public (branding).
 Wiki platform was too expensive and the main purpose of
presenting good quality, IWA Publishing content, for free
could be achieved by utilising the main website.

8. 8
ABOUT THE IWA WATER WIKI
Results
 Successful, cheaper, same functionalities wanted
 Interaction functionalities transferred to IWA Connect (where
there is a dedicated team to interact with the community)
 IWA Publishing transferred on the main website

9. 9
WWW.IWAPUBLISHING.COM

10. 10
HTTPS://IWA-CONNECT.ORG