OpenWetWare:Information management/Standard protocol submission

This is a discussion area to talk about ways to aggregate protocols, as well as how to encourage high quality protocol submissions.

How should we categorize protocols?

 * Jasonk 20:16, 13 July 2006 (EDT)': At the last SC meeting we had a small discussion about whether it would be best to use heirarchical/non-heirarchical tags for the protocols. Moving the debate to the wiki so that mroe people can chime in / we can get the ideas down in a permanent form.


 * Jennyn 22:32, 13 July 2006 (EDT): I like Austin's idea that we should categorize all the protocols under category:protocol so that if someone wants to look up a category using FIND key, they can just type a keyword that would be listed in the protocol name. We can have a page that links to the category:protocol page for those who like to use the Index approach rather than the Table of Contents approach. I also like Reshma's suggestion about having protocols be categorized with the keyword approach. And of course, we can keep the protocols the way they are for those who like to search by certain topics. But having all these options linked from the sharing page would be useful. As far as heirarchical/non-heirarchical, I would say non-heirarchical because it requires too much work (thinking, really) to implement the heirarchical approach and requires a lot of link-clicking until you reach your final destination.

What should we do with the existing protocols?

 * Jennyn 14:25, 16 June 2006 (EDT): Something that I could spend my time doing is going through each of the protocols and formatting them to the new template. Otherwise, we can have a little "protocol standardizing committee" who can do this. I'm not sure if there's a faster way to do this. Please comment.
 * Jasonk 14:56, 16 June 2006 (EDT): I think in general we'll have to leave any protocol posted by someone else unchanged, since they may have it in a format that they find most useful. I'm assuming we'll need to work towards protocol aggregations like DNA Ligation, but we should talk about it.
 * Kathleen 15:13, 16 June 2006 (EDT): I agree with this. Maybe we should focus on standardizing the main protocol pages and leave individual protocols alone. Different labs may have different formats that they like and we don't want to do anything to discourage submission of protocols. We can encourage addition of a link to the main page of each protocol, and provide a suggested format if people want to use it. If we provide a template, people may just standardize out of convenience. I think that eventually all of this will evolve and stabilize into a more standardized format, but we need to get more people actively contributing first.
 * Jennyn 13:50, 17 June 2006 (EDT): Oh, I wasn't meaning the individual protocols, but the ones shared on the protocols page we should change (I don't really mind how people format their own protocols, personally, but it would be great to have a standard for those, also). However, I think Kathleen is right in that it'll soonly evolve and stabilize into a standard.