Design Philosophy

The philosophy behind the Railway Knowledge Base is to create a repository of data related to Railways 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 is not aiming to necessarily hold actual data, but be a simple means to record what data is held where. In some ways it 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 page 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 points 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 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.

Robert Storm January 2022

Jan 2022