Lisgar's AVA:Why we needed a wiki

We only stay in high school for four years. After that, the senior AVA-tors leave with all their knowledge. That means we need a way to put all our knowledge into a place that future members can refer to, which saves time in the long term. At the same time, AVA needed a stable, consistent way to reach out to other clubs. AVA's teacher supervisors have set up their own websites in the past, operated only by them, which means those sites are no longer maintained when that teacher is no longer the supervisor. A wiki fulfills both the need to have an up-to-date, presentable site for others, but also is a great way to store helpful information for members.

For recording information
Instead of spending time exploring the back of the school, looking for cables, we can have their locations all recorded. We can identify what equipment works and what's defective, so newer members can know next time. We can even have an orientation course that can help train new members and troubleshoot certain issues. We've made exploratory adventures before, finding many AVA relics from decades ago, and our hope is that this wiki can help encourage future-proofing by being a bank of information that AVA members can refer to.

For communicating
Back in 2010, AVA had a simple Google Sites page that served its purpose perfectly well, but apart from holding a calendar of upcoming events and a PDF of the form, there wasn't anything else it could do for us. It was also dependent on the teacher supervisor to maintain it, and if he left, AVA members wouldn't be able to use it (this has actually happened with the Google Sites one). Every year after that, there were plans to make a new student-run site, but every time, plans fell short when we realized that:
 * Making a website was far too much effort for our purposes
 * Having a domain name and hosting would be a regular cost for the club
 * There was no motivation to further develop the idea

For the website, one of the reasons we discussed for building one was that we could streamline our setup process by having more online communication with other clubs (who had Facebook profiles and stuff), such as by offering an online submission form, emailing notifications, or managing our events on a spreadsheet instead of The Binder. The idea of "going digital" was dismissed because setting up a website just to "go digital" was doing so simply for the sake of doing it.

As of 2013-14, an online form has since been developed, using Typeform, a new service that launched that year, which provided a sleek, mobile-friendly way of taking the submission process (and we all know how kewl smartphones are).

The solution
The year 2013 brings us this wiki, started by then co-head Jon. A wiki turns out to solve both problems. The wiki website itself is ready-to-use, so we could start writing information into articles without having to spend much effort setting up the wiki. ShoutWiki's hosting is free and the terms for hosting are quite reasonable (unlike Wikia's). It's also a nice, front-facing way to communicate with other users, such as clubs looking to request an event setup or visitors (whoever they may be) looking to learn about us. It's been a wild ride since 2010 to get a worthwhile student-maintained website going, and it's time we put it to work for us.