Contributing to the CCAI Wiki

This page provides information and resources needed to comprehend, comment on, and edit the Climate Change AI (CCAI) Wiki.

The purpose of the CCAI Wiki

The Climate Change AI Wiki is a community-driven platform summarizing state-of-the-art knowledge and resources on various topics related to machine learning applications for tackling climate change. The Wiki is a place to learn about, share, and distill ideas related to climate change and AI, and we hope to grow it into an accessible and comprehensive resource for the community.

This can entail many different things -- currently, most importantly, an overview of application areas for machine learning, background readings, online courses and course materials, lists of conferences, libraries and tools, datasets, and relevant groups and organizations. However, this list is not necessarily exclusive!

Please remember that the CCAI Wiki is not intended to be one of the following:

• NOT: A general online encyclopedia on content related to machine learning or to climate change. There is already great free and other community content on machine learning/artificial intelligence and climate change via, for instance Wikipedia and other resources. We aim to explicitly address the intersection of machine learning/artificial intelligence and climate change-related areas.
• NOT: An advertising platform. The CCAI Wiki aims to provide useful resources for people who want to do research or work at the intersection of machine learning and climate change. In this role, we want to provide links to relevant working groups, research institutes, and companies. However, this is not a platform for blatant self-promotion. We welcome contributions such as links to relevant projects, survey papers, or institutions and companies, and it is fine if you are personally involved. However, these contributions must be provided within the appropriate context and are subject to discussion and review by the Wiki community.
• NOT: A soapbox: The Wiki further is not meant to be a platform for advocacy, propaganda, or recruitment of any kind, or meant to host opinion pieces, position papers, or comments. The Wiki is intended to be written from a neutral point of view. Topics around both climate change and machine learning may be controversial. The CCAI Wiki aims to only briefly note or summarize such discussions and point to more readings on the topics.
• NOT: A news board. Compared to other CCAI activities, the Wiki aims to provide more long-term content. For short-lived resources, like events, job opportunities, see our Newsletter or Forum.
• NOT: A plain link collection: Each listed item should be provided in the appropriate context and should have a sentence or two describing its context.

Community Guidelines

Code of Conduct

The Wiki is maintained by CCAI core team members and aims at building a community of moderators and editors. CCAI values an open exchange of ideas, freedom of thought and expression, and respectful science-based debate. As for other CCAI activities, this requires an environment that recognizes and respects every person's inherent dignity and worth. The CCAI community guidelines (or Code of Conduct) outline operational standards and expected behavior throughout all CCAI activities, and therefore also apply for the CCAI Wiki.

Please read the rules regarding responsibilities & expected behavior. Most importantly, CCAI is dedicated to fostering an environment free from harassment, bullying, discrimination, and retaliation. Volunteers and community members alike should help cultivate an atmosphere for productive, creative exchange by following these guidelines. Note the possibility to "'report any concerns related to your interaction at CCAI activities to reporting@climatechange.ai.'"

If a participant engages in behavior that violates these community guidelines, CCAI retains the right to take any action deemed appropriate. In the context of this Wiki, this may lead to actions including but not limited to formal or informal private warnings, blocking of the user account, barring from future CCAI activities, or exclusion from future CCAI opportunities and affiliated roles.

Guiding Principles

Generally, the Wiki is a place that cultivates the following guiding principles:

• Intellectual Diversity and Humility: The Wiki facilitates exchange between people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Please keep contributions focused on ideas and content relevant to the CCAI mission and treat others with respect in all interactions. When editing pages, remember that others might not share your jargon, may be unfamiliar with what you think is common knowledge, or may not speak English as a first language. Be professional: don't make brash claims, do your homework, and avoid making unnecessary demands on others' time.
• Constructive Discussion: Contribute content that can support learning, solutions, and progress that could have real-world impact. Strive to develop pages that advance the discourse on climate change and AI. To that end, please don't use this Wiki as a political soapbox, for example, but do try to identify actionable ideas or great work and make them visible to the community.
• Scientific Integrity: The Wiki is designed to support an open exchange of ideas, and everything will be publicly visible on the web. Don't misrepresent your or others' work, do provide evidence to support all claims, and be sure to attribute ideas if sharing them elsewhere properly.

Contributing

Overview of the structure of the Wiki

Unlike Wikipedia, which has no hierarchical structure or no specific entry point, the CCAI Wiki is structured as follows:

• CCAI Wiki Welcome Page: This is the entry point to the CCAI Wiki. It gives an overview of the general structure of the Wiki.
• Application Areas and other top-level pages: The top-level pages are on the one hand (a) the Application Areas, i.e., areas where machine learning can address climate change, and also (b) the cross-cutting schemes, i.e., recurring topics that are part of several applications areas, and (c) the general resources page.
• Subpages: Each of these top-level pages may have several subpages. Note that this need not be strictly hierarchical, as subpages may be cross-cutting schemes (e.g., Surrogate modeling is a subpage of Buildings and Cities) or may occur on several pages (e.g., several pages are subpages of both Transportation and Buildings and Cities).

How you can contribute

There are many different ways in that you can contribute:

• Share resources: Know a great resource that is missing? You expand a page by adding resources or references, or enhance the quality of existing resources. For example, do add relevant journals or conferences that you notice are not currently listed. When adding a resource, make sure to add a link and a brief description. This will ensure that readers will get an overview of many resources at a glance but can easily seek out further details if they find the description interesting. When adding a resource, make sure to maintain consistency in formatting. For example, if you notice that all previously added resources were in boldface font, make sure to stick to that.
• Improve content and clarity: Community wikis become more refined through many small changes contributed by many people. Do not hesitate to add a new piece of information or suggest a rewording that improves clarity. For example, if you notice that an idea is touched upon but not fully developed, a sentence or two of additional elaboration can improve the richness of the Wiki’s content. You can also harmonize formatting or fix spelling and grammar issues. Or, there may be outdated content, like a preprint that is now a published paper, that you may want to update. Further, some content may be out of scope for the Wiki (e.g., not at the intersection of climate change and artificial intelligence), and may need to be removed. Or if the content is too verbose, feel free to shorten text, remove resources, or add concrete examples to improve focus. If you notice something worth discussing, you may also want to join one of the community activities.
• Identify and develop application areas: The current structure of the Wiki is based on the Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning review paper. However, this field is moving fast, and there may be gaps and topics that are missing. Expand the Wiki by creating new pages on application areas, subpages within an application area, cross-cutting schemes, or other cross-sectional topics. For instance, within a general problem domain (e.g., electricity systems), there are often a few more specific subproblems of interest (e.g., supply and demand forecasting). These are typically linked from "Machine Learning Application Areas" sections on individual pages across the Wiki. We invite you to both add new application areas and develop the associated pages. See Creating a New Page on how to create a new page.

Don't worry about making mistakes. The CCAI Wiki uses an established Wiki software that saves the past versions of the page. Therefore mistakes can easily be corrected. If you have trouble correcting a mistake, reach out to wiki@climatechange.ai.

Creating an account

You can click on "Create account" in the upper right or go directly to the account creation page. Then choose a user name and set a password. We highly recommend choosing a secure and unique password that you are not using on any other website.

Note that your username will be public, as well as any activities by the user. If you don't want the user to be associated with your real name, you should choose an anonymous username. If you use your real name as your username, your real name will not be private and cannot be made private later. However, you are welcome to use your real name! We aim to facilitate the exchange of people researching and working in climate change and machine learning. Hence, for active moderators and editors, we provide the opportunity to link your account to your real-world profiles and information, like your affiliation (see attribution page).

Editing

Everybody can edit the CCAI wiki -- even without creating an account. However, only edits approved by moderators and maintainers are visible on the current version of the page. Maintainers are members of the CCAI core team. Moderators are active community members that we have granted the right to accept changes. Do you want to become a moderator? Then see Moderating.

To edit content, there are generally two ways to edit a page: The visual WYSIWYG editor and Wiki markup.

• Visual WYSIWYG Editor: A WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor allows you to edit the content, similar to typical word processors, visually. As we use the same system as Wikipedia, you can also see this introduction to the visual editor. This can be used by clicking edit on the specific section or page you want to edit.
• Wiki Markup: Wiki Markup is a markup language similar to Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML, where a special syntax controls the formatting of the text. The menu bar gives you some short-cuts, but you may also see this introduction to Wiki Markup. This can be used by clicking edit source on the specific section or page you want to edit.

To avoid editing conflicts and make changes more transparent (e.g., to moderators), you should follow the following guidelines:

• Open the editor in the narrowest scope needed: If you are editing a specific section or subsection, open the editor (source or WYSIWYG) only in this particular section or subsection. This makes conflicts with other editors that maybe be editing the same page as you less likely. Only open the whole page in edit mode if you need to fix structural problems or want to edit the summary at the top of the page.
• Save intermediate results if needed: If you are working over a more extended time on a section (e.g., hours), you may want to save intermediate results. This again makes conflicts less likely and avoids losing contributions due to technical issues, e.g., by the browser.
• Add a summary: If you edited a specific section, you may want to inform other editors and especially the moderators about the intent of your edit by adding a summary before saving the edit. This avoids misunderstandings and may be used to signal a preliminary state.
• Approve the edits (only for moderators and maintainers): After saving your changes, they are not immediately visible to others on the main page. Changes will only be visible if approved by a moderator. Hence, if you are a moderator, don't forget to approve changes.

Moderating

Becoming a Moderator

Moderators are trusted individuals, known experts in the field, or generally contributors with a good editing track record. Moderators can accept (or change and revert) changes by other users. Moderators get a "Wiki Moderator" badge in our Wiki Community on Circles and lead discussions on application areas. Do you want to be a moderator, and are you researching or working in the field of the intersection of machine learning and climate change, or are you just generally interested and motivated? Then sign up here as a moderator, and we will contact you.

Approving Changes

Moderators have the final authority on all decisions about content on the Wiki. For that, moderators can see the latest changes to a page via "View history" at the top of the page. This Review History page provides a tool to compare different edits by selecting two versions in the history (using the round tick boxes) and click "Compare selected revisions" to get a line-by-line comparison of the versions.

Moderators can then accept the edit by clicking approve or revert the changes by clicking undo.

To see all the recent changes that happened in the Wiki, you may view the Recent Changes page.

You can also review only certain pages on your so-called Watchlist. You can click the star of any page to add it to your Watchlist. In your user settings, you can also refine what is shown on your Watchlist.

User Management

Moderators can block users that violate the Code of Conduct. You may appeal a moderator decision by posting a request to unblock on your User Talk page. All appeals will be reviewed, but moderators hold no obligation to reply.

Creating a new Page

There are generally three methods to create a new page:

• Search: Enter the name of a page in the search field. If the page for the text you entered does not already exist, the search result page will allow you to create a new page.
• Creating an internal link: When you edit an existing page and create a link to a non-existing page using the doubled square brackets, e.g., [[Proposed Title]], you can create the page by following the link. Note, this can also happen by accident, e.g., through a typo or inconsistent spelling. If it happened by accident, see how to delete a page below.
• Changing a URL: You can simply change the last part in the URL of the CCAI Wiki (e.g., Electricity_Systems in the URL https://wiki.climatechange.ai/wiki/Electricity_Systems) to create a new page.

Templates for New Pages and Sections

Once the page is created, we demand the pages to follow a specific structure. You need to create this structure manually by simply copying the headings from either any other page or you can copy it from either the Subpage template or the template for application areas. To do so, you can simply click "Edit Source" on the template page, then highlight all text and copy it to your clip board and then click "Edit Source" on your newly created page and paste the content. Double-check that the correct headers have been created.

Note, that those templates contain tags that can expand to Wiki text. These are useful to indicate work in progress for pages or sections that are work in progress:

• {{Disclaimer}}: A note at the beginning to make sure people don't confuse CCAI Wiki with Wikipedia (or other Wikis), expanding to: This page is part of the Climate Change AI Wiki, which aims provide resources at the intersection of climate change and machine learning.
• {{Stub}}: A note for pages with missing content, expanding to: 🌎 This article is a stub, and is currently under construction. You can help by adding to it!

• {{SectionStub}}: A Note for individual sections with missing content, expanding to: 🌎 This section is currently a stub. You can help by adding resources, as well as 1-2 sentences of context for each resource.

Such a tag can be included as follows:

• In the visual WYSIWYG editor: Insert > Template > search “<Name of Template>” (E.g. "Stub") > Insert;
• In the source editor: Use the double curly bracket notation {{<Name of Template>}} (e.g., "{{Disclaimer}}")

Delete a page

If a page needs to be deleted, then this can be achieved by clicking "More" > "Delete Page" and then confirm the action on the next page. Note, that generally pages with content should only be deleted after a thorough discussion and and agreement of the moderators. However, if you created a page on accident (a through typo, inconsistent spelling, or you noticed content should rather be integrated with another similar page), you can also go ahead and delete the page (needs moderator rights).

The latest deleted pages are visible in the deletion log.

Community

Circle Community

If you want to discuss or follow discussions on the CCAI Wiki, join the Wiki Community on the CCAI Circles platform!

If you are interested in moderating (get a Moderator badge in Circles!), please fill out this form and we will contact you.

Feedback

If you have any feedback or ideas on how to make this Wiki a more valuable ressource, feel free to reach out to CCAI at wiki@climatechange.ai.

Attribution

We provide a List of CCAI Wiki Contributors that allows you to provide additional information about your and link your account to your real-world profiles and information, like your affiliation or social media.