What Is CoalSwarm?

CoalSwarm is a collection of over 4,000 articles about coal. The articles are housed on SourceWatch, an open-source encyclopedia sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy. CoalSwarm is based on MediaWiki, a software platform developed by the Wikipedia Foundation that allows anyone to edit existing articles and create new ones. A key feature of wiki software is that each successive version of an article is saved along with a time stamp and a brief description of the change. This feature makes it possible for mistakes to be corrected and for the rare instances of vandalism to be easily undone.