Subject: web site additions

A couple people have suggested additions to the gas tax web site.

   Ben suggested "a table of uses and their correlated VGT charges" ... "in general people don't have a clear picture of how much fossil fuel they each use in many different ways. A table of uses and relevant figures would [be good]"

   Alan suggested: "How about an issues page of the VGT web site devoted to all the issues that people can think of that relate to fuel consumption?"

I think it'd be great if we could get the gas tax site set up so that anybody could add new pages. I just learned about Wikis last year. You may know about Wikis already, but in case you don't, a Wiki is just a kind of web based collaboration platform. Using a Wiki, a group of people can set up a web site where any of the web pages are editable by anybody who is reading the page. Traditional web pages are set up so that one person publishes and many people read. The publisher effectively "owns" the content. In contrast, with a Wiki web site the content is all collectively owned. Anybody can make corrections or additions whenever they want. Alternatively, it's also possible to set up a Wiki site where not just anyone can make changes, but where all of the people who have accounts and passwords still can. For more info, check out the TWiki home page at http://www.twiki.org/

I think it'd be great to get the whole gas tax web site set up as a Wiki site. I like the idea of web site being run in a collegial way instead of a publish-subscribe kind of way. But I think there are some practical problems with that. For one thing, just installing the Wiki software can be pretty involved, and then administering it might be some work, and it might lead later to portability and migration problems. Plus, right now the gas tax site is hosted through a service that only offers a limited range of features, so it might not even be possible to install the Wiki software there.

But I'd love to see us move to a wiki-based web site, if that became practical. Let me know if you know of an easy way to do that, or if you know someone who might be interested in hosting that site, or voluntering their time to get it set up.