Introduction to the Railway Knowledge Base

This Wiki has been conceived out of a need to see a more organised way of presenting information on the web about rail heritage matters in New Zealand. The key to unlocking that came after I developed a new way of presenting the railway network in a compact way using a spreadsheet. This has now been successfully translated into a wiki table that you can see here and is accessible from a link on the main page. I hope to have the North Island completed by June 2021 which will then provide some 3000 pages where any information relating to railway tracks and facilities can be saved in a very structured way, and quickly found again.

Due to the less than usual use of a table, I have had to work around some of the Mediawiki constraints. There is a lot of automatic formatting built in to the tables and to prevent that 'messing-up' my careful layout, I have had to force the table width to be very large (3 times the width of my wide-screen laptop). This in turn means you need the main window slider to conveniently move across the page (or use the mouse scroll with the CTRL key depressed)

While this first step only deals with railway facilities, have a look at the Vision to get an idea of where this wiki could head.

Of course this wiki only provides a structure for holding data, the actual data has to be gathered and that will take time and effort. It is clearly an impossible task for one person, hence the decision to make this a Wiki instead of a normal website. The key difference here is that with a wiki, anyone can input data whereas a website it is only administrators that can edit the site. That said, to keep this wiki as reliable as possible it is arranged such that only authorised editors will have access to editing the main topic pages, there are separate data submission pages that can be accessed by any registered user. Registration is a simple process that just allows the administrators to track data back to an email address if necessary, to avoid malicious access or unhelpful data being submitted.

As with any specialised topic, users need to understand what various terms mean so a Glossary of terms is being developed. This again is a restricted edit page but as you can see, every page has a Discussion page with it. This is where comment about a particular page can be entered and edited by anyone. You need to keep in mind that while you may add something to a discussion page, someone else may prefer to delete it so, i some ways it is self policing.