This is an old revision of the document!
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 - especially important for the
Airfield Manual;
Wikis have built in version control, so:
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;
* 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 a redirect, which seamlessly takes you from the old page address to the new one.
* Information - text and media - can be arranged in 'namespaces' which helps keep it organised, rather than having one big pile of links. Divide and conquer!
* The software we are using DokuWiki is widely used. As aconsequence:
* 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.