From FrugalReef

Contents 1 The frugal reef exists to 2 Services We Provide 3 How our Wiki differs from Wikipedia 4 Printing 5 Blogging 6 Contact A Director

The frugal reef exists to

• Provide technology support for the creation of a more cohesive reef community
• Expand the hobby by researching and documenting cost saving measures
• Protect natural reefs by researching and documenting captive propagation
• Provide printable community reference and care sheets under the GPL FDL Licence

Feel free to read, contribute, and distribute all frugal reef docs. If you're involved in a retail operation feel free to print out and hand out our care sheets. To learn more about the GPL Free Doc License click the icon on the lower left hand corner of this page.

Services We Provide

• Reef News Beam RSS Aggregator for the best source of reef news on the web
• Full wiki for collaboration on reef inhabitants, concepts and construction
• Wiki documents are free for download and distribution, and modified to print very well. (Click print preview to see, it's all automatic)
• Free reef blog hosting with 50Mbytes of upload space
• Advanced and easy to use forums

If you have a question that's not answered in our database, please post it in the forums so that we can research it and use it to improve our care sheets!

How our Wiki differs from Wikipedia

Our editorial point of view and policies makes our articles different from what you'll find in Wikipedia, and if you're looking for information on the care of marine animals in captivity, what you'll find in Wikipedia is not much at all. To understand why you must first understand the the Wikipedia culture, and the goals of the organization.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Often you'll find articles about many of the reef creatures you've come to love in Wikipedia, and their biology and life cycle in their natural habitat will usually be discussed in general. What you will not find in Wikipedia is information on how to care for the animals. Wikipedians will tell you that Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, or textbook, and will delete information related to how to care for animals on those grounds, especially if that information smells like an opinion.

They will tell you that information in the Wikipedia must be cited from third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Unfortunately, almost no research has been done on the care and handling of marine creatures in saltwater aquariums. Only creatures which are profitable to aquaculture on a large scale have had any significant research preformed, but most creatures kept in reef aquarium today will not even breed in captivity, much less be a candidate for aquaculture. There is virtually no high quality scientific scientific data to cite. Almost all information available in this field comes from the hard earned experience of amateur hobbyists.

We here at Frugalreef have a great respect for the awesome accomplishment of the Wikipedia, we believe in the model and even based a large part off this website on their software, but as the absence of any care information in the encyclopedia suggests, their editorial policies prevent them from serving this niche, and that's why we created the Frugalreef wiki. So please, come inside and share your experience.

Here, we focus on how specific species perform in captivity, what they require to live a healthy life, and if known, what it takes to propagate them. We try not to duplicate the effort of the Wikipedians, but we do draw on their generalized articles and some of their photo resources when appropriate. We have more relaxed criteria for citation and actively encourage howto information.

Printing

Our wiki engine has been hand modified to print high quality pages, and our editors often edit articles with the express purpose of making them as print friendly as possible. The contents of this wiki are designed to be easy to print out and hand out at your organization or place of business.

Blogging

We provide a free and easy to use blogging system at http://blogs.frugalreef.com with 50 Meg of upload space for posting pictures or videos.

Contact A Director

Email or contact us at:

Phone: 1-309-314-5021

Postal Mail:
David Hinkle
700 16th Avenue
East Moline, IL
61244