OpenWetWare:Ideas: Difference between revisions

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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)
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)
*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)
*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)
::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)


==Getting the word out on OpenWetWare==
==Getting the word out on OpenWetWare==

Revision as of 19:13, 22 January 2006

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See the archive for more topics

Toward several levels of privacy

I moved this to the top since it's the most current discussion topic. --JK

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:

  1. everyone can edit without restrictions, like in Wikipedia or Wikiomics.
  2. 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).
  3. password-protected page, i.e. nobody can even read the page unless this person belongs to a given group of people.

Concerning technical limitations, MediaWiki does not provide the following features at the moment AFAIK:

  • 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. --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).
  • 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.
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.
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):
  • Today's spam is effectively fought using the 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 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). --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)? 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.

--MartinJambon 03:44, 21 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. --Sri Kosuri 18:38, 22 January 2006 (EST)

Domain Name

FYI. We now own openbioware.org and .com domain names

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. --MartinJambon 03:54, 21 January 2006 (EST)

  • I think this is silly. If anything, I would worry about being associated with the term wetware in its more science-fiction definition. Even urban dictionary, the zeitgeist of sexual innuendo, has 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). --Sri Kosuri 18:29, 22 January 2006 (EST)
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. --MartinJambon 21:13, 22 January 2006 (EST)

Getting the word out on OpenWetWare

As a part of the 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

  1. don't require too much effort
  2. can be done by any OpenWetWare user
  3. internet-centered

The basic motivation for this is that the more people on OpenWetWare, the more useful information that goes up (hopefully).

Trying to get more links to OpenWetWare from other sites

The 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.

Promotion of OpenWetWare

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.

  • Slashdot
  • MIT spotlight (on the homepage)

Possible Collaboration Between OpenWetWare & Siphs

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

  • 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 terms and conditions of Siphs and if that is in line with where we want OWW to go. --Sri Kosuri 14:33, 27 Nov 2005 (EST)


  • 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.--Ajhaveri 23:51, 29 Nov 2005 (EST)

iCampus Funding

iCampus student proposal preliminary deadlines are due November 15th. 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. --Sri Kosuri 06:31, 26 Nov 2005 (EST)

Check out the iCampus Application for OWW page for more information

Copyright Issues

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 FreeBio are on the GNU Free Documentation License. There is also a 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? --Sri Kosuri 19:12, 21 Sep 2005 (EDT)

  • 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. --Reshma 20:02, 21 Sep 2005 (EDT)
  • 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. --Await 00:37, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT)
  • I like the Creative Commons license because of the search functionality it facilitates since it is machine-understandable. My understanding is that 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. --Reshma 10:30, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT)
    • Let me second the importance of a machine readable license Endy 10:45, 22 Sep 2005 (EDT)
  • I was hoping for clarification on the two specific and related questions listed below. --Sri Kosuri 17:42, 23 Sep 2005 (EDT)
    1. 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.
    2. 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. --MartinJambon 21:24, 18 December 2005 (EST)

Front page description

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. --Sri Kosuri 15:34, 17 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Drew made changes to the description, this is what the page currently says:

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 --Sri Kosuri 22:52, 20 Sep 2005 (EDT)

OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among
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

  • 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. --BC
    • 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. --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.--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.--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.--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. --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. --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.--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:
          1. one of the biggest complaints about wikipedia is that it is not credible, see 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.
          2. 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...--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.--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).--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.--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.--BC 09:16, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)
    • One thing to keep in mind is that at least in the case of 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 OpenWetWare and 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. --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.--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.--Kathleen 10:18, 16 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Calendar

From Jim Hu: 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.

External authentication

It seems possible to add external authentication to the wiki via MIT certificates. --Ilya 16:33, 11 Nov 2005 (EST)

Wikicities

In the newest Tech. Review, I stumbled upon 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. --Austin 17:01, 29 Jul 2005 (EDT)

Adding new groups to OWW

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Biologists are underrepresented in the sustainability community at MIT, and the community would be strengthened by their inclusion.
  3. 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.

--Samantha Sutton

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.
-Jasonk 08:22, 24 Jul 2005 (EDT)