# Caregiving and dementia/About

This project aims to foster openly-editable knowledge and training resources about caring for people with dementia.
The Caregiving and Dementia Wiki Project was supported by the NSW/ACT Dementia Training Study Centre (DTSC; 2011-2013), one of five DTSCs in Australia. This wiki project was undertaken to help address the Knowledge Transfer (KT) DTSC National Priority Area (NPA).

## Why wiki-based knowledge transfer?

This project gathers, disseminates, and fosters the development of free and open resources about key aspects of psychosocial care for people with dementia. The project utilises the popular wiki hosting and editing platform provided by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). This allows the project to:
* Capitalise on pre-existing wiki resources and functionality
* Contribute additional free and open resources and knowledge about caring for people with dementia.
Wikis were conceived and developed in the 1990s as the simplest way of providing editable web-pages. The most popular wiki project is Wikipedia, which provides an openly editable online encylopedia, although there are a great many other wiki projects contributing to the knowledge commons.
This project is primarily situated currently on Wikiversity, which is a WMF sister project for educational, training, and research materials. However, the intention is for the Wikiversity content to also feed into caregiving and dementia content into other WMF sister projects, particularly Wikipedia.

## Goals

The goals for this project are to:
* Create a demonstration open wiki space for caregiving and dementia knowledge development
* Engage experts and stakeholders in content development (via the DTSCs in Australia)
* Represent current open knowledge, projects, problems and resources on the wiki
* Develop the Caregiving and dementia (Wikipedia) article
The project is open to viewing and editing from anyone, with contributions actively sought from the Dementia Training Study Centres (DTSCs) in Australia.

## What is the status of the project?

* Phase 1: This project was initiated January, 2012. This phase developed a proposal for development of a caregiving and dementia wiki and recommended utilising the Wikimedia Foundation platform.
* Phase 2: Intensive development of demonstration content utilising readily available material via Australian Dementia Training Study Centres (Feb-May), leading to project launch (June), with final report including sustainability recommendations (June 2012).
* Phase 3: This phase will engage experts and stakeholders in open knowledge development about caregiving and dementia to support them in contributing resources.
* Phase 4: Wider community engagement, marketing, search engine optimisation
For more information about the project plan, see outline.

## Where is the project located?

* Short URL: goo.gl/8Jt7H
* Long URL: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Caregiving_and_dementia
* Platform details:
** The project is currently coordinated on English Wikiversity, with the goal of also contributing to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia Foundation sister projects.
** The project is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation to leverage their technical capability (Mediawiki software and reliable servers), active editing community, and social popularity and to contribute and improve to the quality of open knowledge available about caregiving and dementia.

## Who can contribute?

Anyone can contribute. The project aims to engage with a wide array of people with various levels of knowledge and experience of caregiving and dementia, including researchers, health professionals, students, carers etc.

## How can I contribute?

* Everyone is welcome to edit these pages - it's easy to learn and there are helpful collaborators who can help you out
* Create an account and sign the participants page
* To learn more about Wikiversity see this tutorial

## Who's responsible?

Everyone is welcome to contribute. To date, the people most directly responsible for the wiki project so far have been:
* Professor Richard Fleming, Faculty of Health Services and Behavioural Sciences, University of Wollongong,
* Dr. James Neill, Centre for Applied Psychology, University of Canberra
* Hannah Baral, Faculty of Health Services and Behavioural Sciences, University of Wollongong
* Dementia Training Study Centres around around Australia