User:IntrigueBlue/CATS/About

The CATS Wiki project is an initiative of the Education Committee. The proposal regarding the project is as follows:

Introduction
A wiki is a web resource which is open for all visitors to edit as they choose. The most popular application of this concept is Wikipedia, the largest encyclopædia in the world with nearly 2.5 million articles. It is this collaborative nature that allows the project to be so successful, as each site member is able to contribute according to their own abilities and areas of personal experience.

Given CATS’ decentralized nature, a wiki is an ideal tool to encourage collaboration and information sharing among jurisdictions without the need of a single administrator to manually assemble each contribution. Using a wiki, articles can be easily kept up-to-date, making it easier to share time-sensitive information and for the site as a whole to operate. User accounts are restricted to CATS members and technical support staff, but anyone with a site account will be able to contribute to the site as they choose.

Site structure
Wikis are not intrinsically organized, with the only automatic system to this end being an alphabetical listing of all articles. As this is obviously suboptimal, it is necessary to create a series of categories and “hub” pages to facilitate easy navigation. These can be edited and updated as necessary by any committee member.

The front page provides links to a number of broad categories, such as the following:


 * Precedent and Procedure: A collection of information from sources such as Beauchesne’s and Erskine May, which can be updated to include more modern and complete references from members’ respective jurisdictions. As well, each assembly’s standing orders could be included and annotated with relevant information.
 * Committees: This is a list of each current committee and its membership. Each committee has its own page, with reports linked directly from this page and the option of maintaining a collection of sub-pages for committee-specific collaboration where useful.
 * Members: Each CATS member has an account on the wiki, which means that the wiki is ideally positioned to replace the current membership list. All biographical information can be copied into members’ profiles on the wiki, allowing them to be updated and expanded by the owner. In addition, a full membership list would be available to easily navigate the members’ profiles by name or jurisdiction.

Of course, this is by no means a complete list. The chief benefit of a wiki is that this structure can be modified or augmented at any time by any member, making it a truly dynamic reference.

Indeed, it may even be beneficial to replace the entire CATS site structure with the wiki, moving all content within the wiki site. This way, the time commitment involved in site administration is significantly decreased, and information is more easily updated as necessary.

Summary
With the benefit of a wiki site, CATS will be better able to maintain the information already present on its own servers, and will be able to undertake more complicated long-term projects that have previously been impractical. In this way, CATS’ web-based operations will become both more efficient and more effective.