Why a Wiki?

Keeping information in a Wiki has many advantages:

• The entire Pilot's Information Wiki can be searched, for example for 'airspace';
• You are always presented with the latest version of a page. A paper document can show it's date of printing / when it was last updated, but there is no way of knowing if it has been altered since without checking the online source - especially important for the Airfield Manual. This is not possible if the definitive source is a Word document on someone's PC;
• Wikis have built in version control, so:
  • There is a Recent Changes link at the top of each page which will show all recent changes to the whole Wiki;
  • You can see the history of all changes to pages;
  • It's easy to compare versions of a page to see what has changed, and who made the changes;
  • if anyone editing a page wants to, they can easily roll back changes;
• Presentation of the Airfield Manual on a table or phone is far better than with PDFs;
• Additionally PDFs generated by DokuWiki include a QR code for the page, which makes it easy to quickly find it online and see if it's been updated;
• Editing pages is relatively easy with the Visual Editor (though not as easy as using your favourite WP program);
• Wikis encourage a top-down approach to organising information - you can make a link to a page before the page itself is created. These links appear in RED.
• It's easy to reorganise information and rename pages. The Wiki software can create redirecta which seamlessly take you from the old page address to the new one.
• Information - text and media - can be organised in 'namespaces', rather than having one big pile of links. Divide and conquer!
• The software we are using DokuWiki is widely used. As a consequence:
  • There is a mass of information and help available, both official and unofficial.
  • It's relatively easy to build a test website to 'learn the wrinkles' - this is what Sally has done.
  • It was also easy to install the software on our Web Server.
• It's possible to limit administration rights (and hence editing) to a small group of users, which has been done.