This is an old revision of the document!
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 - especially important for the Airfield Manual; * You can see the history of all changes to pages; * Wikis have built in version control 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; * Editing pages is quick easy with the built-in[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor Visual Editor]. * Wikis make collaboration easy, so a group can work on the same topic. * 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 will create a [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Redirects redirect], which seamlessly takes you from the old page address to the new one. * Pages can belong to [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories Categories] (the pages in the Airfield Manual do), and if appropriate to more than one Category. Categories can belong to other categories. Not such a big deal at the moment for our small Wiki, but this can greatly facilitate organising of larger Wikis. * The software we are using ([https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki]) is widely used, the most famous site using it being [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia]. 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's also relatively easy to install the software on our Web Server. * It's possible to limit editing important pages (such as those in the Airfield Manual) to a small group of users. * Each page has an associated discussion page which facilities input from the club's membership.
