benefits_of_a_wiki
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.
benefits_of_a_wiki.txt · Last modified: 2022/06/03 13:16 by 216.244.66.200