Building an archive

We are starting to make use of this wiki for creating a community archive. This is a Mediawiki wiki and we have used TWiki in the past on different projects.

Why Mediawiki?

Mediawiki is the software used in the most famous of all wikis Wikipedia. Mediawiki is also used for Wikimedia Commons which is large archive of images and sounds, all of which must be licenced under a Creative Commons licence

 What is the Wikimedia Commons?

 Wikimedia Commons is a media repository that is created
 and maintained not by paid-for artists, but by volunteers. 
 Its name "Wikimedia Commons" is derived from that of the
 umbrella project "Wikimedia" managing all Wikimedia projects
 and from the plural noun "commons" as its contents are shared
 by different language versions and different kinds of Wikimedia
 projects. Thus it provides a central repository for freely
 licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text,
 video clips, and media of all sorts that are useful for any
 Wikimedia project.

In fact, any project, Wikimedia or not, can use material from the website as long as they do so under the licence.

However, there has been some suggestion that Mediawiki is not the best software for an archive: it has good points and bad points. Mediawiki or Twiki might help in building an archive, but may not be the best format for a completed archived. One big advantage for wikis software is that it allows for an archive to grow, without the need to present a finished product.