The Farm Knowledge Wiki's purpose is to provide a complete and up to date searchable resource of practical farm knowledge to provide the practical resources for a resilient and adaptive agriculture. that is developed by the community that is fed by it. A definition of "wiki" can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki. This project was inspired by the comprehensive equivalent written nearly 100 years ago Titled "Farm Knowledge: Encyclopedia of Practical Farming" first published in 1918 and edited by E.L.D. Seymour, BSA. The text is now in the public domain and not subject to copyright. In 2012, the two bound copied of the four volume set was sent to a digitizing service. The text and pictured were then returned in a word document format. The text recognition is not perfect, and the formatting is also often not accurate, but for the most part the text and images are readable, and editable.
Just as Wikipedia started by creating copied from general encyclopedias, the next stage of this project is to transfer this farm knowledge encyclopedia text to wiki articles. This will enable to the material to be updated by the community with our best current knowledge, while not loosing any of our accumulated knowledge from the past. The new version of this encyclopedia will adapt and change as users contribute to it. New articles, topics and links to accommodate topics never conceived of in 1922 can also be added. All the historic and updated articles can also be searched and and discussed by using the forums at the bottom of each articles page.
This is a participatory project by and for the community that creates it. If an article needs to be cleaned up and scanned typos fixed - that is up to the community to take on. All articles can be found on Archive.org https://archive.org/details/Farm1 for downloading - the documents can then be opened to find the articles of interest. The text from those articles can then be copied into a new article and then linked back to the table of contents. The files are large, but once open are easy to navigate through.
If the community identifies other text resources to digitize and add to this resource - then those too can be added within this structure.
As the project progresses, there will be a decision about how to recognize original text, and how to display updated information and materials that relate to the original text. There are many ways to do this.
Please post to the forums, ask questions, make suggestions, make edits, download articles and participate in what ever way you can.
The following forum topic has been started to discuss how to go about copying and editing the text http://www.farmhack.org/forums/uploading-encyclopedia-articles-and-editingupdating-text