OpenWetWare:Ideas
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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)
- 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)
- 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)
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.
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:
- 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.
- Biologists are underrepresented in the sustainability community at MIT, and the community would be strengthened by their inclusion.
- 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.
- 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)
