Portals to the wiki for other websites?

[ka3jjz]

With the wiki now well over 1200 articles and still growing, it becomes apparent without too much difficulty that this might well be somewhat overwhelming to the newcomer. In spite of all the indexing and categorizing, that's still an enormous amount of information to navigate.

While I know of several websites that have links into the wiki (the Capitol Hill Monitors, the DC Scanning Blog and Scan New England's wiki to name but 3) that's just the tip of the iceberg.

While looking at the Scan New England wiki website, I saw that site uses 'portals' - groups of articles devoted to a single state or topic. It occurred to me that this might be very useful for other websites that have forums (and many do these days) who gets the same set of questions or topics over and over again. Even if the person who answers it just points to the RR wiki for an answer, as soon as they see the front article, they immediately get overwhelmed. For example, do questions about what digital scanners are available keep coming up? Questions about DMA? What about terminology - and lets face it, our hobby is no less guilty than any other about having a glut of strange sounding terminology.

A portal - or even a series of portals - could be coded to concentrate on these kinds of questions. Instead of having to navigate from the first article, a portal has a direct link to the topic desired. For example, if there was a question about the basics of trunking, a portal page would point directly to the trunking basics article. No searching, no digging - it goes directly to the article needed.

I've coded up a partial 'standard' portal using the MediaWiki markup language, but it shouldn't be all that hard to change it to HTML. If you code the portal(s) in HTML, you get the added benefit of being able to use the RR API to pull data from the database directly to the webpage. That might benefit websites that don't have much data (or perhaps not a lot of up to date data) for their area. Doing this in the wiki, we simply build links to the database.

There are many possibilities, and many ways such a 'portal' could be created. The wiki can be linked to in exactly the same way you would link to any other site - just the way it's coded is very different between HTML and the Wiki markup language. Webmasters are certainly encouraged to link to the wiki where they feel it's appropriate - but I think most will agree that a more targeted approach, designed to address the needs of their local membership, is much more likely to be successful.

What do you all think? 73 Mike