Wikipedia:WikiProject Disaster management

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WP:DISASTER

Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to Disaster Management (a.k.a. Emergency management) including the central phases: Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. Individual hazards (e.g. earthquakes and dirty bombs) and their resulting disasters (e.g. the Boxing Day tsunami and the World Trade center attack) are also covered. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

Contents

[edit] Aim

The main aim of this WikiProject is to develop consistently formatted articles relating to the disaster management and to improve the standard of these articles.

[edit] Participants

If you want to help out, just add your name and join in by adding your name on the participants page! If you want to you can use this code {{User_WikiProject_DM}} to add the below member template to your user page:

This user is a member of the Disaster Management WikiProject.

If you don't like userboxes, then just add [[Category:WikiProject Disaster management members]].

[edit] Standards

[edit] Definition, scope & structure

No classification of this project has been agreed upon. The subject is being discussed by project members on a dedicated talk page. The scope of this WikiProject is any article relating to policies as well as implementations of disaster management. This include emergency services operations (police, ambulance, and fire service) as well as the phenomenological description of natural and man-made hazards. It also include individual disastrous events, e.g. hurricane Katrina and the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s.

[edit] Naming convention

Main article: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disaster management/Naming

A naming convention for such articles is also definitely required. It has been decided that all articles concerning individual disasters should be <<year>> <<place>> <<event>>. To illustrate the point with an example, the article October 11, 2006 New York City plane crash was recently renamed to 2006 New York City plane crash

The convention in the aid business, which talks about disasters all the time is this

  • The South East Asia Earthquake 2005
  • The Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004

<<area affected>> <<event>> <<year>> In other words, exactly the inverse of what has already been decided here.

There exists a system of indexing disasters in a database called the [GLIDE number] This system uses a coded disaster type, the year, an id number corresponding the number of disasters recorded that year, and a country code. Hurricate Katrina was a tropical cyclone, the 144th official disaster of 2005 and was coded as TC-2005-000144-USA. A naming system might reflect the GLIDE way eg. <<type>> <<year>> <<country>> Of course without the id number, this would not make a unique descriptor. And the plane crash above would merely be described as a technological disaster in 2006, USA.

If the GLIDE number were used, perhaps with a link to the GLIDE site, then the actual naming of the disaster could be more flexible and potentially ambiguous.

[edit] Goals

  1. Create a categorisation of concepts and applied terminology
  2. Maintain one inventory page of disastrous events, see list of disasters
  3. Merge articles that describe similar concepts into one comprehensive article

[edit] To-Do

There is a lot of duplication of efforts and confusion of terminology surrounding disaster management on wiki now. Examples includes Disasters and Natural disasters. The current categorisation is also far from great, lacking in structure and logic. The task to clean up in this domain is immense, but it has to be done.

WikiProject: Disaster management

Here are some disasters related tasks you can do:
view • edit • discuss • history • watch

[edit] Similar WikiProjects

Hazards

Transport

[edit] Wikibooks

[edit] Assessments

The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team requests that more disaster articles be assessed as to their quality and importance. To help facilitate this, Template:Disaster management could to be modified to accept optional quality and importance arguments (and by default add articles to an "unassessed" category). See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot for how to do this and how to set things up so a bot will automatically keep track of statistics on assessed articles. After the setup is completed, volunteers will need to go through Category:Disasters and assess all the articles there and in appropriate subcategories. (See below for ideas.) Some articles have already been assessed for Version 0.5. See Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/WPHumanities#Wikipedia:WikiProject_Disaster_management. See also:

[edit] Article checklist

This is a quick checklist of things to look for when systematically assessing articles, especially those for disaster events. If you find deficiencies you don't have time to fix yourself, create a todo list at the top of the article's talk page by adding {{todo}} there. Then you can edit the todo list and add items to it.

  • Assign quality and importance according to the definitions at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. See the top of the talk page of the article of interest to see if this has already been done.
  • Is the article in the correct categories?
  • Does the title comply with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (most common English name) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (events)?
  • Does the first paragraph give a concise explanation of the subject, including alternate names in bold, location, major causes, and major outcomes?
  • Does the article use the correct infobox? Is everything in the infobox filled in?
  • Is there a concise assessment of the loss to human life?
  • Is there a concise assessment of the financial losses? Are figures clearly labelled as to whether they are in (for instance) 1900 dollars or 2007 dollars? Is a modern inflation-adjusted estimate available?
  • Does the article cite its sources using footnotes, especially for statistics?
  • Does the article have a map showing the area affected?
  • Does the article have a photograph illustrating the event?
  • Is the article in need of wikification, copyediting, or other cleanup?
  • Major articles should be linked from lists such as List of wars and disasters by death toll, and the statistics presented in lists need to be consistent with those found in articles (which hopefully have references).

[edit] Templates

This template is to be placed on the talk page of any article relating to the Disaster Management:

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Disaster management, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Disaster management articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
  • {{disaster-stub}} for stubs relating to disaster management or disasters
  • {{disaster}} for starting new articles on disasters, similarly to {{biography}}

[edit] Infoboxes

[edit] Categories

[edit] Central articles

[edit] Bibliography

  • Alexander, D., 2002, Natural Disasters, London: Routledge, ISBN 1-85728-094-6
  • Alexander, D., 2002, Principles of Emergency planning and Management, Harpended: Terra publishing, ISBN 1-903544-10-6
  • Haddow, George D. and Jane A. Bullock, 2003, Introduction to Emergency Management, Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN 0-7506-7689-2
  • Quarantelli, E.L., 1998, What is a disaster - Perspectives on the question, New York: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-17899-1
  • Wisner, B., P. Blaikie, T. Cannon, and I. Davis, 2004, At Risk - Natural hazards, people's vulnerability and disasters, Wiltshire: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-25216-4