Weather Wiki

[Aaron Kennedy]

I recall somone had/has a weather wiki. How difficult is it to setup a wiki? While forums are a great method of communication, I believe that setting up a storm report wiki would be ideal for this type of information.

In my mind, there would be a general summary for each chase day with general storms outlined etc. The key component of this wiki would be the ability to have everyone modify the wiki to include links to their chase reports/pictures.

Thoughts?

Aaron

 

[Robert Dewey]

Actually, I really like this idea. It would allow a user to narrow down storms by date, event type, location, etc.. It's also beneficial because you have one central "hub" for events, which could include radar screen shots, analysis information, chase accounts, links to chasers blogs, etc..

I also see benefits of a "wiki" for case study information for significant meteorological events (tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.).

http://stormwiki.unk.edu/index.php/StormWiki:About

 

[Scott Lincoln]

This idea really does have alot of potential. Think about it.... an archive of virtually every severe weather case, built as they happen. Start throwing in pictures and links to case studies and chase logs, and you would have the ability to lump all kinds of information about a day together. I think this is something that really should be looked into... and we should try and give it a test run by this coming spring storm season.

After looking into what it would take just a bit, we'd need a place that probably has a dedicated server or server cluster that could handle this... thats assuming that it takes off and becomes frequently used.

 

[Aaron Kennedy]

Eventually it would be nice to have this linked to: http://ams.confex.com/ams/23SLS/techprogram/paper_115421.htm
(check the end of the presentation)

Any idea how much server power is required for wiki? No promises, but maybe I'll try to get a test wiki going over winter break with an example chase day.

 

[Mickey Ptak]

I personally have having a hard time understanding what would be the difference between a regular forum (such as this) vs. the wiki thing. I have never used wiki, so perhaps I am being a little to bias towards the pro/cons to the idea. Simply having anyone come in at anytime and change the information doesn’t sound very positive when referring to accurate information. Well, I guess it depended on what steps the wiki site master took in order to maintain the integrity of the information.

What would really be so much better about the wiki vs. a forum? Just curious…

Mick

 

[Aaron Kennedy]

Mainly as a one-stop summary of chase days. For instance:

29 May 2004

Synopsis:
(brief discussion of the day's events)

Individual storms:
Details about noteworthy storms on the day

Chase Reports:
Links to every chaser that was out on the day.

Additional information:
Links to say the SPC thunderstorm database, LSRs, event summaries from NWSFOs etc.

Vandalism isn't neccesarily too large of a problem. Users would still be required to have an account, and if an individual starts destroying things, they can be banned.

 

[Jayson Prentice]

Something like that could be very neat! To help with what Mickey was pointing out, you could set it to where only certain members could edit the synopsis and individual storm sections, that way people with a true understanding of what occurred could cover those sections. Then you basic member could simply edit it to add in their link or any other link to a chasers webpage of the day.

Sounds like you may have landed on something Aaron!

 

[Tom Dulong]

Pbwiki site

We are using PbWiki as a vehicle for web-based training development. It works well for virtual teams. Your own Wiki page is free (initally) and easy to set up. It allows uploading of images and files. You can have layers of pages.

Check it out at http://pbwiki.com

 

[Scott Olson]

To my suprise, someone had already started this entry into Wikipedia, I just added the chaser links and some tornado information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota-Minnesota_Tornado_Outbreak_of_August_2006

I certainly think this would be something we could all benefit from. Not to long ago I was putting a lot of thought into some sort of chaser search engine, that you would crawl all known chaser sites and index their chase reports. Then someone could type 'mini-supercell' for instance and get a complete record (that which is on the internet) of all the different mini-supercell releated chase reports. Of course a date indexed Wiki would be even better but would need to have a lot of participation (or just a couple people working really really hard).

 

[Paul Austin]

I love this concept. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Oh, right...someone has to volunteer the time and effort. I certainly would contribute entries, given the opportunity. The only difficulty I see is with entries submitted by uninformed (and by uninformed, I mean truly uninformed) weather observers (scud reported as a tornado, etc.), but this difficulty exists on every reports forum. I say go for it.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

I personally have having a hard time understanding what would be the difference between a regular forum (such as this) vs. the wiki thing. I have never used wiki, so perhaps I am being a little to bias towards the pro/cons to the idea. Simply having anyone come in at anytime and change the information doesn’t sound very positive when referring to accurate information. Well, I guess it depended on what steps the wiki site master took in order to maintain the integrity of the information.

What would really be so much better about the wiki vs. a forum? Just curious…

Mick

Have you ever used wikipedia? It is for the most part a great resource. This would be just like that, but primarily for important weather days. The ability of users to edit and add content is what makes it work so well. It's one of those things where you'd think it would be full of falsehoods and problems.... but it generally works well. Wikipedia is updated by users, and policed by users. Users who violate rules and vandalise pages are banned. I really think that this is something that should be looked into as a one-stop archive for big weather. The possible uses for this really are unlimited... i cant possibly list them all.

 

[Mike Peregrine]

What if two chasers on the same storm have completely different perspectives of what happened? Which chaser's account would end up as the 'official' record of the event? I think it's a cool idea, but just curious how it would be organized.

 

[Aaron Kennedy]

Mike: that would be debated behind the scenes. Each wiki page has a discussion page where editors can chat about changes.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

What if two chasers on the same storm have completely different perspectives of what happened? Which chaser's account would end up as the 'official' record of the event? I think it's a cool idea, but just curious how it would be organized.

It could be posted that there were two different accounts of the storm. The more information the better. There isn't always a "right" answer in science anyway.

 

[Angel Dimitrov]

TornadoWiki

Hello,

I saw the post of Aaron and the others and I decided to look if I can install it. It took me two hours to learn the Wiki software and two to install on my production server.

Here we go:

http://84.43.158.75/wiki/

I will be very glad if you start to maintain it.




Cheers,

Angel