|
|
| (100 intermediate revisions by 17 users not shown) |
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| Note to sign your name+date in a reply type <nowiki>~~~~</nowiki><br>
| | {{cpnavbar}} |
| ''See the [[Ideas for wiki archive|archive]] for more topics''
| |
|
| |
|
| === Toward several levels of privacy === | | {| cellspacing="3" width="712px" class="green1" cellpadding="3" |
| ''I moved this to the top since it's the most current discussion topic.'' --[[Jason Kelly|JK]]
| | | |
| | [[Image:Ideas.png]] Welcome to Ideas discussion area. |
|
| |
|
| Last week I've had an interesting email discussion with Sri, and one conclusion was that '''local levels of privacy''' inside of a given wiki site that could be easily modified by clicking on a specific tab would be a good thing to have. So far I see 3 levels which might be more or less appropriate depending on the page contents:
| | ==How you can help== |
| # everyone can edit without restrictions, like in Wikipedia or Wikiomics.
| | *Distribute information from [[OpenWetWare:Ideas/IdeasArchive]] to respective areas. |
| # only verified users can edit, like in OWW. Verification can be made by a human like right now or by verifying the email address, but the latter might still be a problem (some people can have an infinity of email addresses for a given domain so they don't mind being banned for one address).
| | *Firm up one of these ideas and put it on the official [[OpenWetWare:To do list|to do list]]. |
| # password-protected page, i.e. nobody can even '''read''' the page unless this person belongs to a given group of people.
| | ==Use of Mediawiki commons on OWW?== |
| Concerning technical limitations, MediaWiki does not provide the following features at the moment AFAIK:
| | [[User:Steven J. Koch|Steve Koch]] 03:16, 16 April 2008 (EDT):Has it been discussed previously the possibility of using images from Mediawiki commons on OWW. The way Wikipedia does it, so that you can use the same <nowiki>[[Image:whatever.png]]</nowiki> and if it doesn’t exist on OWW it will try to grab it from the commons? I would use this in my research pages and my courses. (It would also be convenient if private wikis could use public wiki images (and templates) in a similar manner.) I have no clue how hard this is to implement (I was just reminded of it today due to our discussion about tracking MediaWiki with OWW)…maybe it is easily copied from Wikipedia? |
| * automatic account creation that requires email verification (it exists for email notifications, but it doesn't prevent from creating and using an account for editing)
| |
| * the "total privacy" feature is not available in MediaWiki
| |
| * switching from one mode to another for individual pages is not implemented either
| |
| The difficulty I guess would be to maintain these extensions without forking MediaWiki, i.e. by maintaining a patch for the mainstream version of Mediawiki or better get these changes incorporated into MediaWiki. --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 21:30, 18 January 2006 (EST)
| |
|
| |
|
| ::I think the idea of local levels of privacy is a decent one so long as the overarching purpose of them is to ''encourage collaboration''. For instance, having a page which is only viewable/editable by a subgroup is usefull for collaboration on a project that is not ready to be "released" publicly yet -- so that's good. However, having pages be only editable by a subgroup so that I can "protect" my lab pages from being edited by OWW vandals/miscreants (that don't exist) is bad. So the issue becomes, how do you offer varying levels of privacy without labs falling into the knee-jerk -- "set all our pages to only be edited by our lab or else something bad will happen" -- response? One way is to specifically '''not''' offer the option (which you didn't list) of world-readable/specific member list editable. That way if you think that no OWW member should edit it, then it better be something that no one can see either. (ugh, on 2nd thought I don't like that -- see second comment on option (3) below.) My last concern is that adding different levels of privacy may make the process of contributing more confusing, i.e. how do I make sure I don't accidently set a page to be editable by anyone so I end up with spam on my lab website? If that's a point of confusion for new users they are going to be more hesistant to contribute(this is less of a problem if you drop level (1) above I suppose).
| | ==Invitations== |
| ::*Speaking of level (1), on wikiomics how many contributions did you get from anonymous users? Also, what level of spam did you have to combat -- I have a strong concern about the level of that kind of stuff that lab heads will put up with before losing faith in the project. For instance, if someone comes accross a Viagra ad in the middle of a protocol it would do some damage to the credibility of the site.
| | *'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 08:44, 8 August 2007 (EDT):''' Should have a button/page that allows people to easily invite their friends/labmates to join OWW. This is more relevant if we establish lab groups, etc, where we are storing the connections between users. E.g. a person could join and then invite their whole lab, adding all of them to the group 'Endy lab' or whatever all in one shot. |
| ::::I would say half of the edits are made by anonymous users, and it's true that these edits are usually short but yet useful: adding a link to some resource, rephrasing sentences or fixing typos (many people like me are very bad at writing in their native language, and even worse in English, which makes these edits very useful). Look at any page in Wikipedia: I believe new contributors feel really good when they discover that they can contribute immediately, even if their contribution is just to fix a typo.
| | :Agree--[[User:Dan Bolser|Dan]] 14:04, 13 February 2008 (CST) |
| ::::About vandalism, you seem to confuse spam (Viagra kind of links) and manual, subtle degradation of detail-sensitive information (say add a zero in some quantity in a protocol):
| | **'''[[User:Bill Flanagan|wjf]] 14:10, 13 February 2008 (CST)''':I did something like this before. It's pretty simple. Al would be needed would be a form and an emai message. Hmm... let's think about it. I like the idea. You would also get an email message when the user joined. |
| ::::* Today's spam is effectively fought using the [[Metawikipedia:SpamBlacklist_extension |SpamBlacklist extension]] of MediaWiki (uses a blacklist of URL patterns). Occasionally, new spam waves occur so you might have to revert a few changes manually, but the goal of these people seem to be improving their ranking by search engines rather than destroy wikis (although it probably doesn't work). Anyway, so far so good, I don't have to complain too much about spam since I installed [[Metawikipedia:SpamBlacklist_extension | SpamBlacklist]] on Wikiomics. What can happen and reportedly happened on other sites, is that some evil robot made by a frustrated reader clears all the pages of the wiki (let's say several thousands). In this case, the best thing to do is restore the last sane backup of the MySQL database - that's not a big deal if backups are frequent. Specific heuristics can be used to limit this kind of problems, such as quotas of edits per hour or stuff like that. So I am prepared for that kind of accidents and have no fear.
| |
| ::::* '''email notification''' is a great tool to watch the edits made by other people: I often check the diffs, especially if I don't know the author. I am not familiar enough with lab protocols to judge anything here, but computer programs are similar in the sense that they are detail-sensitive and we might be afraid of that. However some people do post short programs on public wikis, and it seems to work okay in practice (see for intance [[Metawikipedia:Category:Mediawiki_Extensions]]). --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 03:44, 21 January 2006 (EST)
| |
| ::*Although I think this is a good idea, I understand Jason's concerns. One of the things that makes this is a useful community is users trusting one another. If people resort to editability restrictions on their pages, in place of community trust would be bad. However, I don't think that's what will happen. (and plus, we can make it such that discussion pages are always public)
| |
| ::*Actually , I'm very worried about option (3) as well. I can easily see a lab joining and deciding that all their protocols should fall into this category. I.e. they should be viewable/editable only by people in the lab, and as a result OWW just becomes a free hosting service for intra-lab wikis. How do we avoid that fate while enabling a way for people to collaborate on more "secret" projects (whatever those are)? [[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 22:33, 18 January 2006 (EST)
| |
| :::: I enjoy working with a private wiki for my own research, and the idea is that people are more likely to convert private stuff into public stuff if they only have to press a button (or two). Of course the opposite is also true, but the net result is more freedom. Farms of free private wikis already exist (e.g. http://pbwiki.com), so if people want to keep things private, they will do it anyway. But anyway, one of the main problems is the '''standardization''' of the wiki markup: even very basic things like hyperlinks vary from one wiki engine to another, and I am not even talking about images or tables.
| |
| :::: I am not worried about the cost of private subwikis: we can impose quotas on the size (in bytes or/and in words), place Google ads, or uglify the page if it remains private too long. | |
| --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 03:44, 21 January 2006 (EST) | |
| :::::*No ads. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 18:38, 22 January 2006 (EST)
| |
| :::*I agree with Martin here, I think the more options the better. However, we may want to make it automatic to publish as is, and provide ways for users to make something private access or public editable. We could always police ex-post facto. Could try as an experiment, and see how many people actually use it for private purposes. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 18:38, 22 January 2006 (EST)
| |
| :::::Yes, but this is not a cheap experiment since it requires non trivial changes in the source code of MediaWiki: we really need faith in what we are doing here. I am still very much attracted by the idea, but extending MediaWiki, due the nature of PHP, is painfully slow. Anyway, people who only know this kind of programming languages won't complain, so it's okay. But not for me; and I hate suggesting things that I wouldn't do myself --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 21:29, 22 January 2006 (EST)
| |
| :::::Maybe we would be better off focusing on '''interwiki/interformat transfers''', rather than make MediaWiki even more complicated than it is already. Being able to transfer some material from one family of wikis to another would be nice. If someone would develop a polyglot wiki language converter, and each wiki engine would use it to import/export material using a central format, that would be cool. Still, I won't do it myself because I am too busy doing other things. --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 21:44, 22 January 2006 (EST)
| |
|
| |
|
| ==Domain Name== | | ==Search within tags/categories== |
| FYI. We now own openbioware.org and .com domain names
| | *'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 09:56, 17 July 2007 (EDT):''' Would be nice to be able to have a 'search protocols' box. If we had tags/categories working well, it seems like this is something that could be implemented fairly easily. If it was well done it would probably remove the need for an auto-generated, well-organized summary page (e.g. [[Protocols]] could be replaced by a search box). This will become more important down the line as I suspect the single summary page won't scale. |
| | *'''[[User:Etchevers|Alethea]] 09:02, 5 September 2008 (EDT)''': ''Is'' there a tag search capacity somewhere? Am I the only person who ''still'' can not conduct a successful search from either the lefthand navigation pane, or from within my lab notebook, and does this have more to do with my navigator or platform than with OWW? |
|
| |
|
| I discovered that I am not the only one to sense a strong sexual connotation in the word ''OpenWetWare''. Maybe our soul is possessed by the devil, but we are probably not the only ones. --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 03:54, 21 January 2006 (EST)
| | ==Private/public lab notebooks== |
| *I think this is silly. If anything, I would worry about being associated with the term [[Wikipedia:Wetware|wetware]] in its more science-fiction definition. Even urban dictionary, the zeitgeist of sexual innuendo, has [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wetware no references] to anything sexual (unless of course, you find intelligence sexy/sexual). Otherwise, I think it is juvenile that we must avoid all names with the words open or wet (I am not quite sure which part of it many people think is sexual). --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 18:29, 22 January 2006 (EST) | | *'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]]:''' A [http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2007/06/nature-should-host-our-electronic-lab.html post here] mentions an idea we've kicked around before that is similar to the "publish to OWW button" where a page from a private wiki is published automatically to the public OWW. One thought is that we might consider private wikis that are specifically dedicated to be lab notebooks, they would publish to a subpage on the userpage User:Jason Kelly/notebookName, so the collisions problem of the publish to OWW button might not be a problem. Also, we could have tools -- like the calendar, preloaded on the lab notebook wikis. I think a set of powerful lab notebook tools would be powerful for both the private and public wikis. The best way to get content on OWW is if scientists are digitizing right when they are doing the work. |
| ::Please don't take me wrong. I don't view this as a problem. It's just a little funny that the first time I found OpenWetWare in Google I was really wondering what kind of web site it could be. --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 21:13, 22 January 2006 (EST) | | **'''[[User:Bill Flanagan|Bill Flanagan]]11:45, 13 August 2007 (EDT):''' I have part of the "publish to OWW" button close to working. I wrote a class that will take all of the templates, images, file attachments, and the wiki text itself from any wiki page and copy it to a new page in another wiki without loss of any detail or formatting information. This would be a mechanism for the publishing of the page itself. I'm creating a new [[OpenWetWare:Software/Publish to OWW Button|Publish to OWW Button]] page to track this feature. I'll put together a demo to let folks see how it works. There are a number of issues that need to be handled in doing this including security, preservation of OWW content (we don't want this walking over similarly named templates or images in OWW, for example), how to select new page names, how to specify multiple pages, etc. |
| :::It is difficult to come up with a name that would sound good in every language and culture. A textbook example is Mitsubishi [[Wikipedia:Pajero|Pajero]] which is sold under the name Montero in North America and Spanish-speaking countries because of the vulgar meaning the original name has in Spanish. | | **'''[[User:Bill Flanagan|Bill Flanagan]]11:52, 13 August 2007 (EDT):''' I can create a set of pages that will be pre-populated in a lab notebook. These pages can contain references to specific extensions which also would be included. There would be a canned set of templates, pages, and images that would be used to seed all new lab notebooks as they are created. Over time, the specific contents of these can be customized as different specializations are required for different labs. |
| | **'''[[User:Bill Flanagan|Bill Flanagan]]11:56, 13 August 2007 (EDT):''' Getting content into OWW fast seems and keeping it there is a great challenge. I've spoken to a few folks about what would make the OWW Lab Notebook more useful. As it is, if it takes longer to do it here than in a paper lab notebook, there still is a good reason to use it. Hopefully we can introduce compelling features that will make them a lot more useful. |
| | ***'''[[User:Steven J. Koch|Steven J. Koch]] 15:26, 13 August 2007 (EDT)''':One thing I want in my lab is one or a couple "cheap" computers that are pretty much just for entering notes on the wiki. In this case, seemingly trivial barriers to using the wiki can prevent users from entering things in their lab notebook. For example, making sure the computer is always on, unlocked, with browser on OWW page, and keyboard usable with gloves on. Here are some things that come to mind that can help from the OWW side: |
| | ***# Group signons (such as "Koch Lab") for making edits. Users could sign their entries with the group identity (<nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>) followed by their real name (which they can manually type). The reason this may help is because users are reluctant to use other people's signon and as trivial as it sounds, people aren't going to log off and back on to add a simple lab notebook entry. Also, group work is common. As far as I know, this wouldn't require code, just a policy to allow user accounts of the type "Koch Lab." |
| | ***#*'''[[User:Bill Flanagan|Bill Flanagan]] 7:36, 16 August 2007 (EDT)''': Steve, if this is for "write-only" updates, there may be another way to do this. I like your idea of a "group login". Let me understand your requirement a little better. Do you need this for general OWW access, where you would be skipping around between several pages or would most of the updates be to a single page? If the updates for each user were all to go to one page, such as a page in a lab notebook, I can imagine a model where we could continuously append updates for a user to the end of a page or within a specified section within a page. Maybe something like "live journal". You could then go back to clean up the page when you take off the gloves (or not!) and get back to your own PC. All of the captured updates could be tagged with their update time. You could append a line or even an entire page. If you specified a section that didn't exist within the page, it could be appended to the end of it. |
| | ***#*:'''[[User:Steven J. Koch|Steven J. Koch]] 09:15, 16 August 2007 (EDT)''':I haven't used LiveJournal (yeah I know, behind the times), but here is what I was thinking that wouldn't require code: We have a regular OWW account with name "Koch Lab". We have a cheap computer in the lab that is always logged on to OWW as "Koch Lab." Multiple browser windows or tabs are open to various project lab notebooks. So, two students could be working on project #1 and go to that page and add an entry such as: "<nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>:Me and so and so made this sample and we saw this and that." and the entry would be signed as "koch lab." I don't know if that is the best idea, but that's what I was thinking. It would be easy, but maybe there's a problem I'm not seeing. |
| | ***#*'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 20:50, 16 August 2007 (EDT):'''The reason we currently don't allow group logins is mostly because knowing who makes an edit helps OWW members be more comfortable with allowing others to edit their work. There's more social pressure against inappropriate edits when you are using you own name than if you are shielded by a group account. Also, you can use it as another metric for quality (e.g. "oh, steve's a smart guy, his change to this protocol is probably legit...") I hadn't considered the shared computer issue though, don't know if solving that is worth the trade off of allowing anonymity. |
| | ***#Longer-lived sign-on cookies. For some reason, my public OWW account expires very quickly. Private wiki doesn't seem to ever expire. In terms of conveneneince mentioned in item #1 above, a very long-lived sign on would be good. |
| | ***#*'''[[User:Austin J. Che|Austin Che]] 15:44, 13 August 2007 (EDT)''': Under your preferences on the public wiki, click 'remember me' (and do this when you log in also). On the private wiki, this option is automatically set for you. |
| | ***#**'''[[User:Steven J. Koch|Steven J. Koch]] 16:04, 13 August 2007 (EDT)''':I did have the "remember me" checked, and have since the beginning (and I just double-checked). I remember some discussion of this from several months ago. Maybe it is some other quirk, such as because I am a member of a private wiki? (I actually have no problem being signed on permanently to the private wiki, even though my public wiki session expires very quickly.) |
| | ***#**'''[[User:Ricardo Vidal|Ricardo Vidal]] 20:18, 27 August 2007 (EDT)''': I too have noticed that the cookie expires too quickly. Could it be a browser issue? I don't have access to the private wiki so it's probably not related. |
|
| |
|
| ==Getting the word out on OpenWetWare== | | ==RSS digests== |
| As a part of the [[ICampus Application for OWW | iCampus proposal]] submitted on behalf of OpenWetWare, several ideas arose about how to cultivate a bigger and more active user base for OpenWetWare. I've started a list here of those ideas that
| | *So we have the capability to provide RSS feeds of labs or projects (see [[Endy:Screening plasmid]] [http://openwetware.org/index.php?filter=Endy:Screening_plasmid&feed=rss&title=Special:Recentchanges RSS feed].), though it's not especially obvious how to set it up. However with every edit showing up it overwhelms the ol feed reader -- would be nice to provide a daily digest. [http://lifehacker.com LifeHacker] does this so might be model there on how to implement. |
| #don't require too much effort
| |
| #can be done by any OpenWetWare user
| |
| #internet-centered
| |
|
| |
|
| The basic motivation for this is that the more people on OpenWetWare, the more useful information that goes up (hopefully).
| | ==Add a reference== |
| | *'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 18:25, 10 June 2007 (EDT):'''A wizard for adding a reference in the biblio format automatically. |
|
| |
|
| ===Trying to get more links to OpenWetWare from other sites=== | | ==Wiki to PDF converter== |
| The [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7068/full/438548a.html Nature article] generated more traffic for the site. It might be nice to try to get other sites that are frequented by researchers to link to OpenWetWare in order to increase the probability that someone comes across our site. This probably simply involves an email to the webmaster for each site.
| | *'''[[User:Reshma P. Shetty|Reshma]] 15:11, 23 May 2007 (EDT)''': At a panel discussion on use of wiki's in education at MIT yesterday, there were several comments from educators that while wiki's were great for collaboration, they aren't great for putting together proper reports. For example, they said that if a group of students start writing stuff up on a wiki, eventually they have to move everything to a Microsoft Word document in order to make a report that was submittable for the class assignment. My guess is that part of this sentiment is psychological ... since the wiki feels like a work in progress, users don't feel as much need to clean up errors and spelling mistakes. And part of this sentiment is the practical problem of it being hard to print out a wiki page and make it look "polished". Right now, since we can compose [[User:Austin J. Che/Extensions/LatexDoc|latex docs on the wiki]] that look "polished", it shouldn't be very difficult to write an extension that goes from wiki markup direct to a latex-generated PDF. It might be useful to be able to generate a "polished" version of a page. |
| | **'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 18:05, 24 May 2007 (EDT):''' This would be especially valuable for the [[Reviews]] section. If you wanted to submit a review periodically for peer-review and publication in traditional journals then it would be nice to be able to dump it straight from the wiki. |
| | **'''[[User:Cameron Neylon|Cameron Neylon]] 22 July 2007:''' Agreed. Even just if people want to print something out of have a portable version of it this would be useful. |
|
| |
|
| *Links to OpenWetWare and/or to some of the internal nodes of OpenWetWare from MIT pages
| | ==Gel annotater== |
| **[http://web.mit.edu/be Biological Engineering Division]
| |
| **[http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/ Biology]
| |
| **[http://web.mit.edu/research/ MIT's research site]
| |
| **[http://csbi.mit.edu/ CSBi]
| |
| *What are the appropriate sites to try and get linked from at other institutions?
| |
| **Can people at other places help out on this???
| |
| *General science sites (just found some from googling, basically a totally random list)
| |
| **[http://www.systems-biology.org/ Systems Biology]
| |
| **[http://www.ibeweb.org/ Institute for Biological Engineering]
| |
| **[http://cobweb.dartmouth.edu/~ambros/otherlists.html C. elegans other protocols list]
| |
| **Off one of the [http://vlib.org/Biosciences virtual library biosciences sites]
| |
| *Can we encourage people to put an OWW link in their lab wiki? Otherwise, how else would the dewikifyed version of the page be connected to OWW for an external visitor? Those visitors are a group of people highly likely to be interested in OWW - they are obviously interested in labs, already. [[User:Smeister|Smeister]] 07:30, 26 February 2006 (EST)
| |
| **I added this comment on the [[OpenWetWare:Dewikify#Promote_OWW|dewikify page]] to remind people to think about promotion. [[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 15:18, 26 February 2006 (EST)
| |
|
| |
|
| ===Promotion of OpenWetWare===
| | *'''[[User:Jason R. Kelly|Jason R. Kelly]] 16:54, 16 May 2007 (EDT):'''Basically same technology that you use to tag images in facebook, but used to tag relevant lanes/bands on a gel or other image. |
| We could conceivably try to actively promote OpenWetWare via online articles and features since there are likely large numbers of interested people who just haven't heard of OpenWetWare yet.
| | *'''[[User:Austin J. Che|Austin Che]] 20:20, 16 May 2007 (EDT)''': See also [[OpenWetWare:Software/Image_Editor]] |
| | **'''[[Sri Kosuri]] ([[User talk:Skosuri|talk]]) 19:09, 17 May 2007 (EDT)''': Doesn't seem very easy to use. I wonder if we could incorporate something like [http://www.frankmanno.com/ideas/css-imagemap/ this] into the site. |
|
| |
|
| *Slashdot
| | ==Tell user about this edit== |
| *MIT spotlight (on the homepage) | | *[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 08:46, 23 April 2007 (EDT): One of the more annoying things about the wiki is that when I post a reply to someone on a random talk page I don't know for sure that they will notice it. A lot of time I end up emailing them "I replied to your comment, follow this link", just to be sure. Would be nice to include a feature on the edit page that had a box to type in the username of anyone you wanted to get an email telling them about the edit. (would include a link, etc). People could opt out of receiving the emails in the their preferences, and the email itself could explain how -- so don't think it would bother people too much or anything. |
| *Digg.com
| |
|
| |
|
| ==Possible Collaboration Between OpenWetWare & Siphs== | | ==Add protocol to my notebook== |
| | Could have a click feature on protocol pages that would automatically put a link to the protocol on a sub-page of the userpage like [[User:Jasonk/Protocols]]. This could also automatically add the protocol to the user's watchlist. |
|
| |
|
| This section was started to discuss opportunities for collaboration between OpenWetWare and Siphs. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to share them here. If you need more information on Siphs, visit http://www.siphs.com
| | ==Down the road features that I would like== |
| | *From [http://www.socialtext.com Social Text], I learned of the possibility of emailing to a wiki. The personal wiki they set up for me by default allows me to email to the main page, or to email and automatically create new pages. They also have a "blog"-type page. When you create a blog, it gets it's own email address, and then when you send an email, it gets added to the top of the blog. I think it is set to only accept email from certain addresses. I have no clue how hard it would be to add this to OWW. It would help me in that I often have ideas or notebook entries that would be nice to quickly add without editing wiki text. I know that sounds lazy, but in general, the lower the barriers to editing the more stuff will get in. |
| | ** I wrote the Wikilist extension with the idea of slowly integrating email with the wiki. Every page currently does have an email ID (e.g. [[Special:Wikilist/OpenWetWare:Ideas]]). If you go there, you can see the email address of a page (e.g. wikilist+SOMEID). Any emails to that address are sent to all users listed on the page (thus it acts like a mailing list). I've also thought about automatically posting the email to the discussion page of the target page. However, the main issue has been figuring out the right way to deal with authentication. Email is inherently unauthenticated. I guess checking the from address against the entire OWW database and then doing a lookup of the OWW user is possible. --[[User:Austin|Austin Che]] 16:41, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | ** I hadn't thought about the spam or authentication problem. Your idea sounds good, but I guess it's still easy to fake a "from address" right? Maybe in the near term I should figure out an off-line solution (just send email to myself and then cut and paste when I have time). Thanks for your answers, Austin! And thanks for showing me that email extension, I will keep it in mind--[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | ** Yes faking from addresses is trivial. If you are willing to (and your email client is capable of it), it would be possible and easy to implement a way for authentication to be passed in extra email headers. So you would have to add to every email to the wiki something of the form X-OpenWetWare-Password: Secret which would kind of authenticate you. Some mail clients let you do this trivially while I believe it's impossible with others, but I could possibly implement this and see who has use for it. --[[User:Austin|Austin Che]] 18:44, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | ** I'd say hold off, since it's not clear anyone else needs it, and I am still learning. Thank you for thinking about this --[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 21:37, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | *In the same vein as emailing to the wiki, I have a dream of being able to call and leave messages on the wiki. This is for when I am in my car and remember something. Of course, an actual voice recording would be a lot of data and too annoying to ever manually convert into text. So, one would want the wiki to have voice recognition software to convert the voicemail into a text notebook entry. Yes, I know this is a long way off! |
| | ** This isn't that much harder than the email. The main thing is how are you going to specify a page name on your phone? Also, voice recognition really isn't that great. --[[User:Austin|Austin Che]] 16:41, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | ** Yeah, I can see that the voice recognition wouldn't work too well. Maybe for this and the email idea above, a better solution is to handle these things "off the wiki" and then manually "dump" information into the right place via normal mechanisms. Actually I guess what I really want is an assistant who I can call. :) --[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | *OK, I know this idea is really tough too, but maybe there's work going on I don't know of. I am a user of evil microsoft products. I actually like Outlook and I suspect that since I will be doing email, I will also use the Outlook Calendar, and task list (to do). Would there be some way of "synching" outlook with a wiki? So that I could use the convenient way on Outlook of adding calendar events and task lists, but have it synched with public wiki pages? Some kind of wiki outlook plug in? OK, I know the market for that would be small. Synching with Outlook would then also make it easier to somehow add stuff to the wiki via a PDA--[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 16:25, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
| | **'''[[User:Rshetty|Reshma]] 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST)''': It is possible to view Google calendars on a wiki. See [[Endy:Victor3_plate_reader#Plate_reader_schedule]] for an example. So if you could get Outlook to sync with a Google calendar, then you could just display the Google calendar on a particular wiki page. That is the most straightforward way to do it right now (or at least the way that requires no new coding/functionality). |
| | **Very interesting, that looks like it would work for me, so I will look into it. Thank you!--[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 17:04, 23 January 2007 (EST) |
|
| |
|
| *I think siphs is doing some cool stuff with tailoring some of the benefits of general online communities towards the biological community. For example, the journal club and references section seem particularly relevant. in addition, the question and answer sections seem pretty cool. As for integration between the OWW and Siphs, what I would be most worried about is understanding the [http://www.siphs.com/ate/termsandconditions.jsp terms and conditions] of Siphs and if that is in line with where we want OWW to go. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 14:33, 27 Nov 2005 (EST) | | ==OWW journal clubs== |
| | *--[[User:Vincent|Vincent]] 05:58, 7 December 2006 (EST): Organizing a section of OWW where several journal clubs would be hosted (Computational Biology, Synthetic Biology, Lab Techniques in Microbiology ...) -- Has it been tried before ? Not at the lab level but with article discussions openly discussed by OWW users. |
|
| |
|
| | A given OWW journal club would have a focus on a defined area (use of categories), a place where people could suggest articles to be reviewed , and a selected article (voted every 2 weeks for example) being open for discussion through an open forum. It could be concluded by a conference call if people are motivated (more constraining to organize). It would be great to build a rich literature review that OWW could share and point to in the rest of the wiki. |
|
| |
|
| *The siphs terms and conditions are there for the protection of siphs and its members against unwanted and illegal use of the tools provided by the site. Rather than a full integration between OWW and Siphs, sharing content, or cross promotion seem like the best options. There are, as was pointed out earlier, license considerations that need to be figured out. We are going to contact the Creative Commons to see what they prospose as a solvency mechanism. If an appropriate solution to the CC licensing issue can't be resolved, then we should move the conversation to cross-promotion.--[[User:Ajhaveri|Ajhaveri]] 23:51, 29 Nov 2005 (EST)
| | Dear OWWers, |
| | I started an online journal club page with a draft here: [[Journal Club]]. Have a look and extend at your leisure. So far it's only a static article review. But with the excellent chat feature that was added recently, people could gather on a specific article page and really discuss world-wide. [[User:Jasu|Jasu]] 09:41, 18 April 2007 (EDT) |
|
| |
|
| ==iCampus Funding== | | ==OWW Short Course== |
| [http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/projects/icampus/proposals-2006/ iCampus student proposal] preliminary deadlines are due November 15th. | | *'''[[User:LonChubiz|Lon]] 13:33, 30 November 2006 (CST):''' Although there are protocol and course pages on OWW, both containing educational information and objectives, it might be good to have some more refined experiments. By this, I mean for newcomers to the biological sciences (new lab members, new labs) or those moving into new areas to have a set of standard experiments they could perform to establish good laboratory techniques and to be able to communicate problems with OWW members and/or their labmates. This could also be an alternative for lab instructors to use. This could be something like an updated and more encompassing Short Course in Microbial Genetics (or any another good lab manual). |
| These awards provide up to $30,000 for development of tools to help research in technology-enhanced education. A preliminary proposal is due November 15th if people are interested. It may be a good way to get money for advertising, hardware/support, and the development of tools for making wiki's better places to colloborate and share information.
| |
|
| |
|
| '''We made it to the final round! We are one of 6 groups vying for 3 grants. Hopefully things will work out, but great job so far everyone.''' --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 06:31, 26 Nov 2005 (EST) | | ==Academic Job Openings== |
| | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 11:52, 10 November 2006 (EST):''' Came up at the last SC meeting, could have a place to post open post-doc positions, faculty, etc. Could also have corporate job postings, but that's probably already covered pretty well by Monster.com type websites. |
|
| |
|
| Check out the [[iCampus Application for OWW]] page for more information
| | ==Calendar with all scientific conferences== |
| | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 11:52, 10 November 2006 (EST)''': Suggested by Tom. This would be a calendar strictly for scientific conferences, since it's often tough to find out about conferences you might be interested in. |
|
| |
|
| ==Copyright Issues== | | ==OWW Journals== |
| [[User:Await|Sasha]] has requested we consider dual licensing OWW. Currently, all OWW pages are under the creative commons copyright (look on the lower left hand corner) that stipulates attribution and share-alike. Wikipedia and other wiki's such as [http://freebiology.org FreeBio] are on the [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html GNU Free Documentation License]. There is also a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights more understandable explanation] of the copyright. What I am not completely clear on what the differences between these two licenses are and the specific advantages/disadvantages to either one. Any thoughts? --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 19:12, 21 Sep 2005 (EDT) | | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 01:50, 25 October 2006 (EDT):''' Based on conversations with Chris Surridge, our 2nd OWW Open Science Seminar series speaker, it looks like starting a journal may get much easier. The general idea is to use PLoS One as a commoditized peer-reviewing service. Articles that get through the PLoS One filter have been verified for publication-quality science, but have not been subjected to any subjective merit criteria (e.g. is this good enough for publication in Nature?) This is where OWW can come in, user groups on OWW could aggregate and "re-publish" open access (OA) content that has made it onto PLoS One (or any other OA journal). Basically, we would serve as an aggegator of articles that conform to some quality standard set by an editorial board from that community. An author published in the OWW Journal of Synthetic Biology could site their PLoS one reference as well as a 're-publication' reference. If the OWW Journal actually gained some clout, an author would probably simply list being published in the aggregator rather than the PLoS One reference, since it would carry more weight (e.g. the paper had to get over the merit quality bar -- "is this good enough for publication in OWW Journal of Synth Bio?"). a very high bar, indeed ;) Additionally, we could provide commentary on the papers that are of interest, "blog-esque" posts from notable community members, etc... |
| | *[http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs open source journal management software] |
|
| |
|
| *I suggest that since we have relatively easy access to experts in this area (i.e. John Wilbanks and Hal Abelson), we consult with them. There may be some legal ramifications to dual licensing that we don't know about. --[[User:Rshetty|Reshma]] 20:02, 21 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| | ==[[OpenWetWare:Reviews]]== |
| *I have emailed John Wilbanks and Hal Abelson about this issue. (I have been discussing it with Drew, Randy, John and many other people at FSF, Wikipedia and Creative Commons for several months now.) Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia is visiting MIT next week, so, maybe we can also include him in the discussion. It is very much in the spirit of Wikipedia to both use the Wikipedia software (mediawiki) and '''make our content compatible with Wikipedia!''' In the short, to medium, term that means using GFDL only or using GFDL and CC-BY-SA (as a dual license). Wikipedia has a huge number of edits (many of them anonymous), so, it's much more difficult (or even impossible) for them to re-license. --[[User:Await|Await]] 00:37, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT) | | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 09:26, 6 October 2006 (EDT):''' Along the lines of adopt-a-protocol, it might be great to have adopt a topic area as well. Basically, trying to solve the problem of review articles always being out of date. It seems like the job of writing reviews would be much simpler if it was done on the fly as new papers came out. THat way when a new paper came accross your desk in the area you review you could read it, and then add the relevant details and the reference to the OWW Review page. This is in contrast to coming back to that same paper a year later when you're asked to write a review and having to re-read it, re-analyze it, etc. Seems like a win-win for the both the review-writer (less work) and the readers (who get a more up-to-date source.) |
| *I like the Creative Commons license because of the search functionality it facilitates since it is machine-understandable. My understanding is that [[Wikipedia: GNU Free Documentation License | GFDL]] does not have these machine-readable capabilities? Or is that wrong? Thus, I would be in favor of dual-licensing over relicensing to GFDL. Of course, I am not sure if conflicts will arise if we try and dual license. That would be one question that we should consult with people about. --[[User:Rshetty|Reshma]] 10:30, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| **Let me second the importance of a machine readable license [[User:Endy|Endy]] 10:45, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *I was hoping for clarification on the two specific and related questions listed below. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 17:42, 23 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *#Why can't you just take content from OWW currently and post it up on another wiki? Currently, OWW is under a CC share-alike attribution license (which, I believe, has the same rights reserved as the FDL? correct?). So as far as i could tell, it has the same effect.
| |
| *#What specific rights are we protecting or giving up with the FDL versus the CC license? Why are they "incompatible"?
| |
| :::They both require to redistribute the works under the same license that was granted to you. With dual licensing, you can accept only one of the licenses and therefore choose to redistribute the works under only one of the licenses. Say OWW grants two licenses: a CC license and the GFDL; it becomes possible to transfer material from OWW to Wikipedia without asking the authors since the GFDL license grants you this right and Wikipedia redistributes its contents under the terms of the GFDL. But you cannot redistribute the contents of Wikipedia articles at OWW under the CC license unless the authors of the article agree to do so. --[[User:MartinJambon|MartinJambon]] 21:24, 18 December 2005 (EST)
| |
|
| |
|
| ==Front page description== | | ==Adopt-a-protocol== |
| The current description reads as follows:
| |
| OpenWetWare is an effort to bring together biologically interested laboratories and groups to
| |
| share information. We hope this will lead to greater interaction between our groups, as well as
| |
| provide an information portal to our collaborators, and ultimately, the rest of the world. This
| |
| page is a portal to the various "front pages" to the wiki listed below as well as resources shared
| |
| between all the labs. If you would like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want
| |
| your lab website hosted on OpenWetWare, please let us know
| |
| I think this could be improved; for example,
| |
| OpenWetWare is an effort to lower the barries of producing, disseminating, and understanding
| |
| biological knowledge. OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own
| |
| information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will
| |
| not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information
| |
| portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world. This page is a portal to the various
| |
| member "front pages" listed below; as well as resources shared between all the groups. If you would
| |
| like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want your lab hosted on OpenWetWare, please
| |
| let us know
| |
| Please put comments, revisions, rewrites in this thread. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 15:34, 17 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
|
| |
|
| [[Drew Endy|Drew]] made changes to the description, this is what the page currently says: | | ''Moved to [[Talk:Protocols/Template]].'' |
| OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among
| |
| researchers and groups who are working in biology. We hope OpenWetWare will lead to greater
| |
| interaction between our groups, as well as provide a knowledge portal to our colleagues, and
| |
| ultimately, the rest of the world. This page is a gateway to the various "front pages" hosted by
| |
| OpenWetWare as well as to resources shared between all OWW labs. If you would like edit access,
| |
| would be interested in helping out, or want your lab website hosted on OpenWetWare, please let
| |
| us know.
| |
|
| |
|
| How about the following synthesis of the last two --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 22:52, 20 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| | ==Page Authorship== |
| OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among
| | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 22:57, 8 August 2006 (EDT)''': There might be a benefit to having the option to lock in an "author" at the time of page creation. We could limit this to pages with a namespace in front of them (e.g. 'Endy:foo'), to prevent someone from locking down a 'shared area' page like [[DNA ligation]]. Other people could edit the page, but there would be an official author -- that means the author would have the benefit of getting credit for the content of the page (e.g. perhaps when you hit cite this page, only the offical author would come up), but also be saddled with ensuring some level of quality (whatever they were comfortable attaching their name to). This might help enable some downstream OWW applications, like providing real scientific attribution for OWW contributions or for publishing results, etc. I suspect that assigning a page an official authorship would be the exception rather than the rule, but might be a useful option to have -- just something to think about longer term, wanted to write it down. |
| researchers and groups who are working in biology. OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and | |
| groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the
| |
| process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but
| |
| also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world. This
| |
| page is a gateway to the various "front pages" hosted by OWW as well as to resources shared between
| |
| all OWW labs. If you would like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want your lab website
| |
| hosted on OpenWetWare, please let us know.
| |
|
| |
|
| ==World readable/writable== | | ==Sidebar== |
| *Are we convinced that the current approach is appropriate in the long term? If world writable works for wikipedia, then why not for us? I'm not convinced the administrative burden is that significant seeing as so many people seem to keep good track of what is changing. I also suspect making wiki-wide changes may become more difficult if the wiki grows at the current rate as the inertia of convincing everybody that a change has merit increases. --[[Barry Canton|BC]] | | *'''[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 16:38, 27 July 2006 (EDT)''':The customize sidebar extension is great, but I don't think any new user would notice it. Maybe at the bottom of the side bar we should include a link be default that says update my sidebar and would take the user to a pregenerated sidebar page for them with comments on how to change it. once they figured it out they could remove the link themselves from their sidebar if they don't want it there. |
| ** I just want to clarify Barry's remark. I think you are saying that it will be easier to decide if we want to create world writable access now, rather than later, when we have to get the approval of many many more groups. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 00:04, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| ***Yes, this is the bigger topic I was getting at. If OWW grows, administrative changes will get harder to apply unless there is an executive group empowered to make those changes.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *Currently there are fewer than 200 users with fewer than 250 changes per day--easy to keep track of. I'd recommend seeing how things go for a bit more, especially because a number of new groups have been added within the last few days and things are just starting to expand relatively rapidly. As the number of users expand, it will be much harder to keep track of what is going on, and much easier for things to be missed. With so many labs just starting up, the number of changes in the near future should increase dramatically, but this should eventually stabilize once the core info is in place. The current users are people who want to contribute in a positive way, but maybe it's best to let this stabilize for a bit before opening things up to the world.--[[User:Kathmc|Kathleen]] 23:52, 15 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| **My thinking on this was that regardless of how big OWW gets, that if it is a "healthy" wiki then there should always be sufficient people willing and able to keep track of it. To put that another way, if the active user group doesn't scale appropriately with the size of OWW then stagnation might be a bigger problem than vandalism.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *When Jason and I are trying to recruit other labs to join, they are at first quite put-off by people's ability to edit everything on the site. One thing that really reassures them is that every user has a trackable email address and that pretty much everyone is involved with a lab. I also agree that we wait on this for a bit. If and when OWW becomes so anonymous that people feel very distant from other labs, there are thousands of users, and edits every second... people will become much more amenable to opening things up (i believe). That being said, I think you bring up a good point. Perhaps we should create a board of directors that are voted on by the community (or something of the sort) that are in charge of decisions that are applicable to all of OWW. That way it won't be as cumbersome to make important decisions in the future. --[[User:Skosuri|Sri Kosuri]] 00:04, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| **Agreed. Additionally, there is a difference between OWW and wikipedia in that labs are using this as a medium to showcase research/information that is attributed to them. Unlike wikipedia in which there is no 'by-line' for articles. So where vandalism in wikipedia reflects negatively on wikipedia as a whole, in OWW someone (not involved in OWW) arriving at a "vandalized" lab website might associate the vandalism with that specific group. I think this is where a lot of the desire to have users who are accountable (e.g. have logins) comes from. --[[Jason Kelly|JK]]
| |
| ***OWW is intended to be a collaborative space for like-minded groups to share info. and resources. Because of this, vandalism in OWW reflects just as negatively on OWW as a whole as does vandalism to wikipedia. If a protocol from lab X is vandalized, that raises just as much doubt over a protocol from lab Y. So I don't think we can ignore the fact that world-writeable is appropriate for wikipedia when deciding if it is appropriate for OWW. If we are committed to creating a collaborative space rather than just creating a medium to showcase research/information that is attributed to the group, then it seems world writable is definitely better.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| ****Just to clarify, I agree that vandalism always reflects on OWW as a whole as well, however my point was that it also can reflect negatively on a specific group (and thus is more frightening to groups), unlike wikipedia. Also, I agree with much of what you are saying, but just some more food for thought:
| |
| ****#one of the biggest complaints about wikipedia is that it is not credible, see [http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 article] here from one of the orginal founders. I don't necessarily agree with everything he is saying, but it is worthwhile to include in the debate. Having members be non-anonymous helps this credibility.
| |
| ****#The major reason to make it world writable with no logins is to encourage mass participation (a la wikipedia) - do we think that will improve the contributions to the protocols section? (from barry's comment below) In particular, who is likely to improve the protocols anonymously who would not be willing to simply email asking for an account? (our current policy would just allow them to join so long as they provide a real email address, preferably a .edu one). I guess the difference I'm pointing out is that wikipedia is a very, very broad resource while this is quite a bit more specialized. That being said, maybe there are some people who think signing up is too much work...--[[Jason Kelly|JK]]
| |
|
| |
|
| **In response to Sri's argument, I feel that if people become very used to the idea of a closed user group, they will be much harder to convince that a change is warranted. We might have to expect the argument - "we designed our page and the information on it with the fact that OWW was world readable only in mind. We wouldn't feel comfortable with what we currently have up being writable by the public." Maybe this is just a transient thing as a lot of new groups are added but its also possible that we are seeing this effect already - labs are mainly posting descriptive stuff about what they do rather than using it as a collaborative space. With the exception of a few groups, contributions to the protocol sections is lagging behind that of the lab websites.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| ***I wouldn't be quick to write off collaboration simply because "labs are mainly posting descriptive stuff". A very small step away from full-on collaboration is decentralizing information sharing by enabling more people at the ends (the grad students) to frequently post "descriptive stuff" about what they are doing. As a result, users (and everyone else) are more likely to come across something that is interesting and strike up a collaboration. This becomes more difficult, I think, when you only see things in their final published form (after the work is over) or only on dept retreats/confs (a small subset of the space of people you might collaborate with).--[[Jason Kelly|JK]]
| |
| ***I am having a little trouble getting all of the members of our lab "on board" with the wiki. To try to encourage people to participate, I have tried to set up our space such that there are immediate lab benefits. As a consequence, our postings have been very lab-centric and not so collaborative (with a few exceptions). What I'm hoping to do is to get people to participate in a way that they can see an immediate benefit for themselves and the lab, and hopefully have this evolve into a greater contribution to the community as a whole. I think we need to give things a bit of time. Some people aren't so comfortable with this, so small steps may be the best way. As an example, I've talked to several people in the lab and some of them think that their protocols are too specific to put on to the wiki. This essentially provides a barrier for them to put anything on the wiki. I've tried to tell them that it will be useful for people in our lab, and then we can link out things to the general page. I think that we shouldn't try to implement everything you want this to be all at once for fear that we'll lose a lot of people who need to be eased into things. As Barry mentioned, openness is quite a new concept for most biologist. Let's let everyone get used to the idea.--[[User:Kathmc|Kathleen]] 11:14, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *I'm very impressed by the recruiting of other labs to join OWW that has been done so far. The general thrust of the arguments used above has been that it would be hard to convince people to join OWW if it was world-writable. While I'm sure this is true, it might not be a reason not to do it. Biology has suffered from being very cautious about sharing information. One important intention with OWW has been to open up that culture. So going with what people are most comfortable with right now might not always be best thing to do. Establishing the culture of openness and sharing is key and I think that world-writable is one way of doing that.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| **One thing to keep in mind is that at least in the case of [http://syntheticbiology.org Synthetic Biology], in addition to establishing an open and sharing culture, we are also trying to promote a culture of accountability and responsibility. Therefore one argument in favor of retaining the user accounts is that it encourages people to be responsible for their work since their name is on it. Perhaps this is more of a concern for those of us engineering biology rather than studying it but nevertheless, it is a valid one. From a longer term perspective, one could imagine that venues like [[Main Page | OpenWetWare]] and [https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/18185 DSpace] become an alternative and reputable method of sharing/publishing ones work. For instance, what if a wiki page undergoes so many revisions that it ultimately stabilizes and becomes the authoritative work on a particular topic. Then since the scientific community tends to use "publishing record" as a metric for evaluating people, it is also useful to maintain user accounts because it enables a record of each person's contributions. --[[User:Rshetty|Reshma]] 13:09, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *I do agree that a board of directors would make it a lot easier to implement major changes such as this in the future.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
| *Doesn't each lab/group on the wiki have an administrator? Maybe this group of people could be the "board", as each person could gather ideas from the group they represent and present them to the larger wiki community. This should reduce the potential for hundreds of opinions posted on a particular subject that may be hard to sort through and consolidate personal perspectives/ideas to make it easier to get a general consensus.--[[User:Kathmc|Kathleen]] 10:18, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
| |
|
| |
|
| ==Calendar== | | ==Navigation== |
| From [[User:Jimhu|Jim Hu]]:
| | *'''--[[User:Johncumbers|Johncumbers]] 16:38, 16 July 2006 (EDT)''': A big problem I've found with OWW, and I'd like to see if anyone else has the same problem. I can't stay logged in, e.g Flickr, Amazon retains who I am, but OWW doesn't. Is this just me? This leads to the seconds part of the problem. When I go to log-in, it always returns me the link to go back to the main page, I then have to use the back button to go back to the page I want to edit. These are not huge problems, but they really confuse new people that I introduce to the site. They find it really frustrating to navigate at the beginning. Anyone else found this when trying to introduce new people to OWW/Mediawiki? |
| For the calendar, you might think about using phpicalendar to generate an RSS feed that gets parsed into the calendar page. That way the content can be controlled from a desktop mac using ical or a pc running mozilla calendar. More importantly, this means that those users can also subscribe to the calendar.
| | **[[User:Smeister|Smeister]] 07:38, 17 July 2006 (EDT) OWW keeps me logged in unless I log in from another computer - in that case I get logged out from the first. Are you maybe sharing your account? I assume you do not have any cookie setting problems since Flickr etc works for you... |
| | **[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 09:25, 17 July 2006 (EDT): I stay logged in as well normally... However, to avoid getting linked back to the main page, use the link at the top right corner to log in - it will then offer a link back to the page you were coming from, rather than a link to the Main Page (I agree it is annoying when it links to the Main Page). |
| | **[[User:Austin|Austin]] 13:59, 17 July 2006 (EDT): On one computer, I can't stay logged in. On another, I always stay logged in. I've not been able to figure out the cause. |
| | **[[User:Skoch3|Skoch3]] 16:14, 23 January 2007 (EST): I always seem to have to re-log in. I use one computer, but it's a laptop with a lot of different IP addresses during the day I think. It seems I have to log in to my private wiki more often than the public, but not sure. I have been assuming that it was just some quirk between the private wiki log on and the OWW. |
|
| |
|
| ==External authentication== | | ==Page watch function== |
| It seems possible to add [http://wiki.case.edu/CaseWiki:External_Authentication external authentication] to the wiki via MIT certificates. --[[User:Ilya|Ilya]] 16:33, 11 Nov 2005 (EST)
| | '''[[User:Smeister|Smeister]] 08:20, 17 July 2006 (EDT) ''' I love the "watch page" function and would like to organize more activities in the lab, taking advantage of it. However, there is no way of knowing who in the lab is watching a page at any moment. You basically never know if anybody is paying attention at all. Would a query page for this be very hard to incorporate? It sure would enhance overall transparency and I guess it would also be useful for some of these OWW discussion pages... |
| ==Wikicities==
| |
| In the newest Tech. Review, I stumbled upon [http://www.wikicities.com/ wikicities]. They have connections with Wikipedia. It looks to be a relatively new site (2004?) but they basically host a collection of wikis on specific topics. Some kind of community openwetware like site on there seems like it would be a good idea. We would not need to be responsible for the system administration headaches and I'm sure there are other benefits of having a centralized location for the wiki. We should definitely keep lab/group specific stuff here. I'm not sure what the use of this could be, but I see lots of benefit of allowing the world to edit some things like protocols. They currently have almost nothing under their biology category. --[[User:Austin|Austin]] 17:01, 29 Jul 2005 (EDT)
| |
|
| |
|
| ==Adding new groups to OWW==
| | *'''--[[User:Johncumbers|Johncumbers]] 13:14, 17 July 2006 (EDT)''' I agree, I don't use the page watch as much as I'd like. I like you ridea Steven, It would be also nice if it had a little number like 'my watchlist(44)' to let you know what's inside there each day and encourage you to click on it. |
| I would like to build an OWW-based wiki for a student group in which I am involved, Students for Global Sustainability. I think there are many benefits of using OWW for this purpose, including:
| |
|
| |
|
| # Many OWW researchers are interested in building bugs that will help solve world problems (energy, pollution control, material production, etc.) and SfGS is also interested in the same problems. Discourse amongst the two groups would prove mutually beneficial.
| | ==Comment button== |
| # Biologists are underrepresented in the sustainability community at MIT, and the community would be strengthened by their inclusion.
| | *'''--[[User:Johncumbers|Johncumbers]] 13:14, 17 July 2006 (EDT)''' could the signature button be changed to include the * and <nowiki>'''</nowiki> that we put in for comments. Another idea would be a protocol notes button that creates a note link for a protocol. Currently if you want to add a note to a protocol, you have to either put it at the bottom, it would be better if it created a link within the page without you having to type it all out. e.g if the protocol is located at Protocols:Drosophila/chip on chip then when I post a note, it automatically creates a link to Protocols:Drosophila/chip on chip/note1 without me having to do it. get the idea? |
| # SfGS provides a different interface with the poltical/conservationalist scene than OWW researchers typically encounter. Such exposure could be good for career development, enhanced world view, etc.
| |
|
| |
|
| I have set up a prototype page called [[Students for Global Sustainability Wiki]]. Please let me know how you feel about welcoming in the SfGS community to OWW.
| | ==Active Discussions== |
| | '''[[User:Lucks|Lucks]] 20:16, 3 April 2006 (EDT)''':The topic on Flexible Science Databases has been moved to [[OpenWetWare:Software/Flexible_Science_Databases]]. |
|
| |
|
| --[[Samantha Sutton]]
| | ==Subarticles== |
|
| |
|
| :: I think this is a fine idea. For the most part there is little downside to bringing more MIT people into the wiki, as long as they are respectful of naming conventions, etc. For instance, even if a group creates a new wiki front page that is largely self-contained (i.e. it doesn't link to anything else in OWW) it doesn't really hurt the rest of the wiki at all. It just means we have more people using OWW which means they are more likely to encourage their labs to use it / copy edit stuff they see on our pages, etc. For a particular group there might not be huge upside, but i don't see much downside at all. | | |
| ::-[[User:Jasonk|Jasonk]] 08:22, 24 Jul 2005 (EDT)
| | ==Recent Changes in Ideas== |
| | {{Special:Recentchanges/n=OpenWetWare^b=Ideas,n=OpenWetWare talk^b=Ideas&limit=50}} |
| | |
| | |} |
| | |
| | __NOTOC__ |
