Marspedia:About

About MarsPedia

MarsPedia is an official project of both The Mars Society and the Mars Foundation(tm)[1][2].

The Mars Society was founded in 1998 and the purpose of the Mars Society is to explore and settle the planet Mars.

The Mars Foundation was founded in 2004 to promote the permanent settlement of the planet Mars. MarsPedia's hosting and domain expenses are covered by donations from the Mars Foundation and individuals with shared interests in the goals of the Mars Foundation.

MarsPedia is currently in an early phase of development, and has been somewhat stalled for the past few years. The Mars Foundation is aware of this and working to raise funding and promote volunteerism for the MarsPedia project. If you are interested in helping with the development of MarsPedia, please Contact Us[3].

Differences versus Wikipedia

There are several differences between Marspedia and Wikipedia in both policy and Wiki software capability.

Marspedia Policies

Languages

Currently, Marspedia is composed entirely of English-language articles. In time, and when established as a leading source in Mars-based information, Marspedia may be translated into a selection of modern languages to improve accessibility for international users. For now, we ask all users to create articles in English.

Original Work is Allowed

We are more open to material types than Wikipedia, and less interested in deleting material. Specifically, Wikipedia enforces a rule that all entries must NOT be "original work". That rule does not apply for Marspedia, we are very happy for you to post original work, provided it is not copyright. Therefore there is not so much duplication between Marspedia and Wikipedia as you might expect. For example, the Marspedia page on Insert Appropriate Link Here contains interesting material which under Wikipedia rules would be deleted because it is "original work".

Note: Once "original work" has been published on Marspedia, then anybody could put on Wikipedia a link to the Marspedia article, and that might be OK for Wikipedia as it would no longer be original work, and references are usually accepted over there. For those cases where you want to reference it elsewhere, we could arrange for it to become read-only protected.

No Need to be Notable

Wikipedia enforces a requirement that all articles about people or organizations must demonstrate why the subject is "notable". There is no such requirement on Marspedia, although there is a general expectation that it should somehow be related to Mars development.

No Need to be Neutral

You can advocate positions, but expect to be challenged. Conversely, do not just delete material you do not agree with, but feel free to add a rebuttal.

If you do advocate positions, please do so in a manner that makes it obvious that it is your personal position and not that of Marspedia as a whole. You can do this using the tags '''''{{PersPosArticle}} ~~~''''' or '''''{{PersPosSection}} ~~~''''' which would display something like so:

This article reflects the personal position of MikeD
This section reflects the personal position of MikeD

Commercial Links are OK

It is perfectly fine to highlight products or services, including both your own and those of other persons or companies. Just make sure it is relevant.

Software Capabilities

Marspedia uses the latest stable version of Mediawiki, so in many respects it is very similar to Wikipedia. At the time of writing this, we were running version 1.11.1 while 1.13alpha was the unreleased development version.

Interwiki

Interwiki is now supported between Marspedia and it's sister sites Lunarpedia and ExoDictionary. To use interwiki you just use tags like:

[[exd:Sandbox]], [[lunarp:Sandbox]], [[marsp:Sandbox]] and [[spacep:Sandbox]].

These would take you to:

exd:Sandbox, lunarp:Sandbox, marsp:Sandbox and spacep:Sandbox respectively.

Other examples would be:

[[exd:Azimuth]], [[lunarp:Carbon economy]], [[marsp:Mars Express]] and [[spacep:ISDC_2007]].

These would take you to:

exd:Azimuth, lunarp:Carbon economy, marsp:Mars Express and spacep:ISDC_2007 respectively.

The interwiki prefixes on the other sites are identical.

Installed Extensions we admit to

• CategoryTree
• Cite
• ImageMap
• MathStatFunctions
• ParserFunctions
• SpamBlacklist - Should we admit to having this or will that only encourage the idots to waste their time and sometimes ours
• Spellcheck
• articletocategory
• create
• inputbox

We recently added the footnote capability to Marspedia, so that is now the same.

Other differences:

• Wikipedia has some cool citation templates which we might add
• Wikipedia reflist template is not available i.e.

• the Wikipedia [citation needed] template is not available: Template:Fact.

• free web mp3 player is another officially admitted Wiki extension. It will help you to add music files to your web site and allow your visitors to listen to them. It's very easy to install and absolutely free.

Extensions in the pipeline (maybe):

• Graphviz
• TeX Editor (This is really nice but we had to disable it as there seemed to be a security issue with it)
• WikiTeX (Will take quite some time to install, has a plethora of dependencies)