PBHS JROTC wiki was a project I took on while I was in JROTC. A very heavy contributor was my assistant Smith who eventually became the S6 when I left the class. During that time however I thought of bringing my ideas of how the open source world usually deals with something no body knows everything about but many people know a lot about differently: use a wiki to help centralize that information. In doing so I thought we had solved many current and future issues, but as with many technologies that ‘solve everything’ they create new problems to solve.
For one we discovered the beauty of spam. OH spam, and how we then proceeded to lock every page because spam kept creeping on to the server and changing it. Once we fixed that we were basically left to edit the wiki our selves. Then it was the wiki language which was weird as well to anything we had already known. But the issue wasn’t for us but for others who wanted to edit would have to edit in wiki format! This isn’t arch linux, people were amazed when I setup Dropbox and Google Docs, so I began to understand that it wasn’t going to be excatly like arch linux’s wiki by any stretch of the imagination.
Our goal was to create an online cadet hand book that could be easily edited for any changes in the future and serve as a way to improve all cadets who were motivated by their cadet leadership to take action. Many times in JROTC there is a lack of capitalisation on the motivation many new cadets show by giving them the tools needed to advance. Their motivation leaves and that is when the leadership suddenly wants to teach them everything. Sometimes they get it and do well and other times they do not. Cadets could focus on other things if these initial things were handled better. At least this was my idea.
We created as many pages as possible which we then tried to fill up with useful information. We also turned each ribbon and rank in to it’s own image so we could in the future give a page to each ribbon. We made many pages and completed many of them as well before I had left. Namely the Ranks, Ribbons, Promotion Board, and Staff pages were particularly well done.
Looking back I wonder if I should have contacted other battalions in an effort to spread this work load as well. It would have been the ‘open-source’ way of doing it and probably would have resulted in some better content for everyone to link and use as well as improve. Although issues related to giving other cadets in other school an account to edit makes me uneasy it would have resulted in more work being accomplished.
And with that I give you the gallery!
