Documentation

INTRODUCTION

While this page will eventually become or provide links to the full documentation regarding the design of this wiki, it will in the interim provide details that allow users who have full write privileges to access the rules that have been established to enable the wiki to behave in predictable ways. Given the way the wiki developed, some things may have been done differently had I known what I know now (some 3 years in), and the learning curve may still mean changes could be made in the future. Changes will of course involve more and more work as the data grows, so these types of decisions are not made lightly.

Updated September 2024

Page Names

Page names are a key component of any wiki and here at RKBNZ that probably applies to an even greater extent. As greater use is made of the Cargo database, more thought has also be given to page names so for Books for instance, the pages all start with Book, and for People, they start with Person. These two examples each stemmed from different reasons, in that the initial pages that were created all had to do with Stations and the sections between them, and they ended up with no prefix to the page name. When I came to wanting to enter book titles, I found that a few books had the title of a Station, which could get very confusing. I therefore decided to prefix those with Book and a hyphen separator. For some reason (possibly readability) I also added a space either side of the hyphen, and that has now become the default. For Persons, the reasoning was slightly different. Every wiki Page must have a unique name, but when you are working with perhaps a million people, there will be many instances of the same surname and initials. I have currently processed just over 5000 names and I already have twelve "J. Smith's". and five "J. Cameron's" and "W.Smith's", to list just a few examples. For that reason I elected to use a number to represent a Person, even though that is very impersonal. To then make it clear that that number represents a Person it is prefixed with "Person". When I get to designing the Person Pages, ther person's name will be in bold at the top of the page rather than just listed as a record in a table as at present.

The following Pagename conventions have been use so far:

Station Names

These all refer to physical Locations, generally ones that were officially referred to as a Railway station. The page name is simply the  Station name. I have had to introduce a few sub-rules for situations like two stations with the same name, often over different time periods, or in different Islands, and these each have a singl eletter suffix in brackets. The letter represents the 'provincial area they are located in. There are also stations that have been rebuilt on a new site like Wiri which has now had four locations with the latest also involving a name change. This does not include a reconstruction 50m down the road, but rather a whole new site. These have the original station site shown as the standard station name, and subsequent sites as (2), (3) etc. Christchurch is a good example with the first location being about 750m from Waltham, the 2nd and 3rd sites being about 1.2km from Waltham and the current 4th station being about 4.5km from Waltham

Track Sections

These are the sections of track between Stations and  Location--Location

Books

Book - short title