A Community Maintained RailWorks Knowledge Base ?

[CosmicDebris]

If it ever sees the light of day, I wish the UKTS-born wiki a better fate than ours. (Which suffers less from vandalism than somnolence. )

[AndiS]

Sad to hear about the French Wiki.

Regarding CMS, a friend also recommended Drupal over Joomla.

I, too, believe that a CMS is better. My feeling is that Web 2.0 reminds me about base democracy. Nice idea, but without a few good guys steering the crowd, it easily gets messy. Not bad, but messy.

Most of us just want to dump hints.
Some will also be good at asking the right questions.
Most will be happy if someone does the structure juggling.

Basically, the same entering facility like in phpBB would be ok. Type-and-see editors like Google blogger may be considered fine by some, and for a reference oeuvre, layout should be a bit better than for posts. But the most important thing is that you can easily insert images. Nice if you can centre them, but more important that they retain their size, and that you don't need to move them around in a small entry field. The way you do it at Google blogger or Google sites is just a joke. It never was intended for more than putting a photo there with a comment, I know. I just mean that this is about all the functionality you need.

Some easy way to cross-reference other pages is good, of course, but the most important thing here is that you see before clicking on the link whether it pays to click on it at all. The RW Wiki is horrible in this regard, with loads of dummy paces and sluggish response when you click the back button.

[nobkins]

Ok I will have a look at Drupal. I will try to set up a quick demo server tomorrow at work and then send a login to Matt for him to have a peak.

[alexedwin]

An exellent idea Jim!

[alanch]

Ok I will have a look at Drupal. I will try to set up a quick demo server tomorrow at work and then send a login to Matt for him to have a peak.

The Web Applications guru writing for PC Pro recommends using WordPress - http://wordpress.org/ - for ease of use and power. Thesis - http://diythemes.com/ - would provide extra functionality, if you feel it is needed.

Might be worth a look.

[nobkins]

WIll have a look at wordpress.

No time today to install drupal

try again tomorrow.

Jim

[RSAdam]

Heya,

Been watching the discussion here and love the enthusiasm. Saw the mention of Drupal though and had to comment. If anyone remembers the old RSDL forums and original RS website, that was all done with Drupal (not by the dev team mind, we were far to busy with RS developments). Anyway, we all know how that site and forums turned out...

Look forward to seeing this develop though.

Regards

[NeutronIC]

I've seen what Drupal can do having spent a little time with my brother-in-law and his project, so i'm happy that Drupal *can* do good stuff - and I wouldn't want to be using any other forum system anyway (certainly not one that isn't a dedicated one, bolt-on's are never as good as dedicated systems).

I've used Joomla and it seemed very good too.

Matt.

[AndiS]

I guess it is more important to have a good short list of features when selecting a system, than which to consider first.

Based on my vision of a collection of articles for which someone maintains one or three indices, my items would be:

• Clear mark-up of who changed what when, on a separate companion page a la Wiki. This encourages people to correct or expand other persons' pages, and if the original author is discontent with the changes, there are clear communication procedures (tell about the correction of the correction first, ask to refrain from such actions, warn then, complain to some moderator in the end). At the same time, there is a great chance that the original author will appreciate the modification.
• Easy, basic WYSIWIG editing. Bullet and number lists, italics, bold, optionally type writer and underline. Some (little) font size adjustment, maybe. And something for code snippets. The less options there are, the more it will look uniform, and the easier people will learn to use all that is there. But without easy formatting, people will not format at all and then, difficult things will be hard to read.
• Easy way for basic image placement. It should also have an integrated image repository, i.e., you place the image and the software stores it, all by itself. Not like the Albums here where you first need to upload and then to reference. Also not one of these for-free hosting sites where you need to click around to get to the image. Good enough for a quick screenshot, far too unreliable and cumbersome for a reference source.
• A dedicated keyword slot. Maybe two: A pick list which is maintained by some global structure maintainer plus a text field for free keywords.
• Keyword search along with full text search. Maybe Google can be used for full text because they put lots of brains into improving it.
• Google-compatible URLs for all the pages, whatever that means. If I enter "Railworks signalling", my blurbs on signalling should show up. Not that I am one who builds his ego on Google ranks, but if this is to be a unified, global reference, then it must be found by the searching, wherever they are. Also, some people may need motivation to contribute.

My long list would also contain:

• The possibility to attach internal comments to changes.
• An option to distinguish personal points in the official page. You can also put that there in plain text, and plain text is more flexible, like "untested assumption by AndiS" or "described as ... in ... but seems to be ...". But it encourages people to spell out the basis of what they state. I might think too academic here, but we have all types of "evidence levels" from well tested to the name of a function that Ben found in his special explorations and which no one tried out. Also in my research on AI, I find that what you observe today can be refuted tomorrow. This, of course, would be an argument to stick to freetext annotations in the main text, instead of a dedicated slot.
• Some viewer count per page. Not everyone types as much as happily as myself. Some will find it hard to justify the effort for themselves (instead of "doing something productive"). In the past, I asked myself several times, who the hell is going to read what I type in the course of several hours. Then, if phpBB tells me that 100+ people saw the post and most are not robots, then there must be a dozen persons somewhere out there who actually read it and that is a good thing to know.
• Maybe some easy form of feedback. In my blog, I added tick boxes to rate articles: "good" and some lesser ratings. Only "good" was ever ticked, by very few, but the article in AI speed is a clear winner, which is not exactly what I expected. So, although all these things are questionable, something where you just click "was helpful" if you like it can be useful in addition to viewer counts which say much less.
• Some easy standard way to reference other pages. The deluxe version would be if you would click on "insert cross-reference" and a hierarchical list of all pages would show up, from which you pick one. I don't believe in the Wiki syntax and philosophy where lots of links lead nowhere. If they can be distinguished as such, it is fair enough. If not, it renders the feature totally useless as readers quickly stop wasting time.
• The option for anonymous users to comment pages. Can be useful, in particular if not shown to the public, at least not before someone acknowledged it. This should discourage flames and spams. Looking at UKTS history, I am worried about some contributor being turned off by a single comment. But Matt's initiative for comments at downloads seems to indicate that the nice:bad ratio has an upwards trend, currently.
• Attachments, also stored locally on the CMS server. There are a few nice PDFs with tutorials which should be hosted in one place, like that place. Hopefully RSC agree to have their original KRS developer docu uploaded there, too. PDFs are indexed in Google. For other stuff, I am not so sure. Sample files come to my mind. It could be a matter of storage space. But then, I don't see loads of sample files being created anyway. And for some tutorial-like articles, the example file can be an important part of the communication.

Not really required is:

• An embedded discussion page, although maybe nice, it would work as well to have a private forum here. The Wiki approach of having one discussion per page does not help in restructuring, and breaking up and merging of pages is one of the things that need discussion. Also, a set of comments sometimes is all you need to discuss local things, like the wording of a certain paragraph.

I mentioned "my vision" shortly above. What I mean is, there will be people who contribute knowledge, and there will/must be one or two who take the time and make it accessible by grouping it such that all the diverse readers with their diverse backgrounds and searching strategies find what they need, maybe even quickly.

To this end, content contributers will see that their articles focus on just one thing. For a group of such things, an introductory page would contain links to all the parts, and "next" and "previous" and "back to introduction" links would take people around. These "back to index" links are crucial for those who jump into the depths of the hierarchy from Google, and want to learn more.

The ultimate dream would be two groups of contributors. Some hardcore fact / insight contributors and some tutorial writers who spell it all out to the public, ushering readers along the lines the tutorial writers went themselves, with lots of "more on X" links to the hardcore bits. In addition, the hardcore pages could have "see X for how to use this" links to the tutorials. These connections between the complete, detailed reference information, and the easy to read how-to guides are what is lacking most, currently, both ways.

[sanyix]

community knowledge base is an excellent idea! It can help to make more freeware addons (as i see the payware makers don't need this since they probably get inside infos from rs.com, at least it's looks like this when i see they firstly use completely undocumented hidden features of rw)

[FoggyMorning]

community knowledge base is an excellent idea! It can help to make more freeware addons (as i see the payware makers don't need this since they probably get inside infos from rs.com, at least it's looks like this when i see they firstly use completely undocumented hidden features of rw)

Perhaps instead of waiting for documentation they experiment and find things that work?

[AndiS]

No need to worry about the secret knowledge of the payware producers. As soon as they release a single item (and they will do that, I have good sources which predict that they will release their creations!), then we will scoop all their knowledge from their scripts and XML files and stuff it into that knowledge base.

Actually, if you look through the forums, you see that it is a long way from having the theoretical knowledge (a lot is known since 2007) and getting something to work. That is what the above is all about.

[RSderek]

Ben Laws for example (along with others) often come to me and tell me what can be done.

There is no secret society with special hand shakes I can assure you.
(though I think that might be a good idea, I will go home and think about the Masons)

Some folks are just more pro active than others, and that is not a dig at anyone.

I am all for the wiki, regards

Derek

[nobkins]

Well I have drupal up and running. Very early days but looks like it might do what we want. I will try to get the modules etc running in the next day or so then see if we can do what we want with it.

Jim

[Squatch]

Ben Laws for example (along with others) often come to me and tell me what can be done.

There is no secret society with special hand shakes I can assure you.
(though I think that might be a good idea, I will go home and think about the Masons)

Some folks are just more pro active than others, and that is not a dig at anyone.

I am all for the wiki, regards

Derek

Derek - without hi-jacking the thread, just seem the post on the RW Blog re: your asset packs, and just wanted to say thanks in advance, they look excellent. I'm really looking forward to the modular stations, if you need any suggestions for small ones that used to be on the Leeds -Wetherby line, I'd be more than happy to provide pictures (and biscuits!)

Back on topic, great idea, there must be so much collective knowledge by now, it's got to be worth sharing in one place....

Matt