Introduction to the Railway Knowledge Base

This Wiki has been conceived out of a need to see a more organised way of storing and 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, initially as a spreadsheet. This has now been successfully translated into a wiki table covering the South Island 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 2022 which will then provide well over 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 carefully designed 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). The scroll on the mouse will ordinarily scroll the page up and down. There may be more to discover about wiki tables so I am still hoping a fix can be found for this. Having to use the main computer window, rather than a browser window, 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 i.e. by an individual Railway Line where you would have an option to 'jump sideways' to its originating (or destination) Line, or other branch-lines. Ultimately the users will dictate how things develop beyond this initial attempt.

While this first step in creating a wiki only deals with railway facilities, have a look at the Vision page to get an idea of some of the directions this wiki could head. It will be up to you as users to steer it in the direction you want.

Of course this wiki only provides a structure for holding data, the actual data has to be gathered and formatted for presentation. That will take time and effort, and 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 in such a way that only authorised 'editors' will have access to editing the main topic pages, but most other pages will be able to be edited by any registered user, with the Info Submission 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, which will hopefully 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 Railway Stations in New Zealand created by Juliet Scobel. 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 tab called File Records at the top of each Station page. Those of you who are keen, could start using that data to create the beginnings of the Station page articles. This of course should be done on the Discussion or Info Submission pages from where an authorised editor will take that story, format it in a consistent way, and make it available on the Main page for that station.

There is a second file that Juliet created which details the opening and closing dates of Stations. It is intended that this data becomes part of an information box on each station page.

To add content at this early stage, station pages will include a link to the Wikipedia articles for those stations where they exist. These will give users some idea of how a wiki article is structured . Without being critical, Wikipedia articles are generally scant on detail and this repository will allow as much detail to be entered as one can find. It would add something special if it contained a good number of personal stories, recollections of happenings and a good record of dates of major changes.

As with any specialised topic, users need to understand what various terms mean so a Glossary of terms is being developed. The Discussion page associated with the Glossary is a good place to ask questions about the exact meaning of something so an explanation can be added. We will often find that the same term might mean different things in different areas. The main Glossary page is is of course a restricted-edit page as that should ultimately become the agreed meaning (or meanings) of a term, not available for random editing. Every wiki page has a Discussion page, 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, in some ways it is self policing. So, make use of the discussion pages and let your wishes be known so collectively we can work on improving both the layout and the data.

In preparing the Network Diagram, I have relied heavily on the Quail Publishing maps, my own knowledge of most parts of the South Island rail network, and many KiwiRail resources. While I can claim rights to the format the data is presented in, the facts themselves are in the public domain. Images however tend to have a rightful 'owner' and all efforts will be made to respect those.