Design Philosophy

The philosophy behind the Railway Knowledge Base is to create a repository of data related to Railways in New Zealand which will eventually become the first port-of-call for railway researchers. Too often in recent years I myself have spent inordinate amounts of time trying to find a particular piece of information I know I have seen before, but cannot remember where. So with that in mind, this wiki was conceived. It is not aiming to necessarily hold every possible bit of data, but be a simple means to record what data is held where. In some ways that aspect is aimed at images as they often hold far more information than even the original photographer imagined, so building up an index to as many published images as possible and adding as many key words as possible will allow researchers to track down source material for their topic of study. It was out of that need that the vision of this Wiki was born, and there are really only a few basic principles that the design is built upon:

   It must ultimately be able to cater for the broadest possible audience in the easiest possible way.
   It must have simple data entry options to encourage as many contributors as possible
   It must have good search capabilities to encourage its use.
   It must have the ability to record references back to a source document or person.
   It must have both digital and print output options
   It must have a good level of security, meaning users will need to register to use the site, not every one will be able to edit all pages, but every one can submit data
   It must have the ability to create a discussion about any and every topic without that cluttering the true Knowledge about a topic. 

Considerable time was spent experimenting with different concepts before the basic framework of the site was settled on. Underlying the ease of use is the representation of the Railway Network for both the North and South Islands. This was originally developed in a spreadsheet format in MS Excel, and it's successful replication in MediaWiki gave me confidence that other aspects of the site would also be able to be developed successfully.

I do not expect to be able to come up with the best possible solution in line with the above goals on my own. An urgent need is to link up with others who perhaps have experience in wiki building, but above all, are able to work through concepts and issues. I also welcome any ideas that would help make this site a better repository, easier to make a contributions, easier to find a fact, while still maintaining a record that can be relied on. It will only be through discussion that a clear understanding can be got of what the community of rail enthusiasts and researchers require.

To get a good amount of data into the site as quickly as possible, I am transferring all the entries from the "Station Archive" file available from the Rail Heritage Trust website into a File Record page for each station. This data was collected by Juliette Scobel and includes a whole lot of interesting information and could be used as the basis for creating the main 'story' for each station.

Each page also has a Discussion Page (Tab at the top left of this page) where things relating to the topic can be discussed, A Data Submission page where you can enter facts that you know about. and a Page Notes tab where you can write ideas and comments about how the page should be laid-out or modified. By the time this site goes live I would hope to have a bit of a road-map prepared listing what I see as the next steps to tackle. In the meantime, the site in its basic form should be able to start accumulating text and images and be available to do some basic searching.

You may be asking why we don't just spend the effort in making Wikipedia hold what we want it to. Well the answer really comes down to control. This is a standalone wiki where the users can have total control of how they want the site to develop. Any aspect on NZ rail can be worked on to whatever level of detail you desire, as long as it stays within topic on a given page. I have to acknowledge that there is a lot of information in Wikipedia on detailed topics that will exist here too, and I have been thinking of creating links to them in the interim. Most of the articles I have looked at in some detail leave a lot to be desired. they are shallow in facts, usually do not cover much of the time period intended, and often have mistakes. If you want to develop a history knowledge base as specific as ours will be, I believe it should be a local effort, not one controlled by an international group. Also, this is a knowledge base, not an encyclopedia, so aims to hold far more detailed items than you would expect to find in an encyclopedia, and not necessarily presented in story form.

My specific aim will focus on building the structures to hold the data. As I deal with each section, I will enter enough data to show how the rest could be built up. While many hours have been spent just dealing with data loading, I do not see that as my responsibility. Data needs to come from all corners of the community and have flavours way beyond what I can provide.

As the site is being developed, Documentation outlining the functionality of the various sections will be added. This will allow future users and developers to research how the various aspects of the wiki were originally conceived and be able to understand the implications of making future changes.

Robert Storm

Updated April 2023