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 way I have created the network Diagrams (by using a very large table structure), I have had to work around some of the Mediawiki constraints associated with tables. 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 stay very large (3 times the width of my wide-screen laptop). This in turn means you need to use the slider at the bottom of the main window to conveniently move across the page (or use the mouse scroll with the CTRL key depressed). It also means these diagrams are not at all practical for small screen mobile devices. Again this is an area that we can start some serious discussion about and there may be ways that smaller portions of the diagram are able to be separately accessible. Ultimately the users will dictate how things develop beyond this first step.

While this initial design only deals with railway facilities, have a look at the Vision to get an idea of some of the directions 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 is that with a wiki, anyone can input data whereas a website it is only administrators that have access to modify 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, but most other pages will be able to be accessed by any registered user, with the Data Entry pages aimed at being the main input pages for users. 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.

To get things started, I have made use of the Station Archive file, a table of some 70,000 entries of facts relating to each station. Some of those facts are duplicated, some are trivial but together they help provide detail for a story that can be written about each station. The data from the Station Archive file can be accessed by selecting the the tab called Station File Data at the top of each Station page. Those of you who are keen, could start using that data to create the beginnings of of the Station page articles. This of course should be done on the Station Discussion page from where an authorised editor will format it in a consistent way on the Main page for that station.

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.