Talk:Protocols

This is a proposed restyling of the protocols page. I thought I would put it here to see what people thought before making it go live on the real page. Comments welcome. I just thought the page could be made more compact and easy to view. Feel free to retweak if you have a better idea. A similar thing has been suggested for the materials page. My only concern is whether it makes it more difficult/intimidating for those new to wikis to edit? Which is definitely not what I want. -- RS

I made a protocols template. It has all the formatting from the layout below. Power users can edit the template to add new categories, formats etc. This page has the new version of the protocols using that template. This makes it a tiny bit easier for people to edit the protocols list without dealing with all the formatting. This is good but it means that users need to go edit the template page if they want to add new categories so there is trade off between making some editing simple and higher level editing more difficult.

It looks like the ease of editing afforded by using the template as described above probably doesn't merit the extra complexity of having templates as well as pages. It might however be beneficial if the protocols, materials, help pages etc, were all formatted in a common way. Then you could just change the template and style changes would be applied to all pages.--BC 12:14, 11 January 2006 (EST)

• agreed on both points - template probably not worth it for the page, though eventually moving to a common template would be pretty nice. Also, this is WAY better, I think we should go live with this ASAP. Though might be nice to have a graphic saying 'protocols' beneath the OWW logo...-- JK

• yeah that was Austin's objection to the page as well. That it looked TOO similar to the frontpage. I just didn't know how the openwetware graphic was made and if we could easily make a "Protocols" graphic to go under it and similarly for the Materials page. As for the templating, I kind of like it. It does make things easier to look at. -- RS

• I was going to suggest removing the OWW logo altogether. Maybe replacing it with a protocols graphic will work, but most people will have navigated their way here, so they'll know what they're looking at. I think the template may be bit too complicated for now and may inhibit the addition of new protocols to the shared page. I also don't think the categories we have now are anywhere near "all-encompassing" especially given that some real biology labs are joining up now. I do agree that a template to standardizing formatting will be a good thing in the future, though.--Kathleen 15:22, 11 January 2006 (EST)
  • i don't like the implications of your "real biology labs" comment, kathleen ;) --JK
  • I was talking about our lab, too. Some of these people work with what most people in the world would consider as critters, not the single-celled guys we play around with, and do things like study behavior. Anyone up for studying the ecology of E. coli? Didn't mean to offend. :)--Kathleen
• In all my offending, I forgot to mention that I like this organization scheme. It makes it much easier to find stuff. --Kathleen

We have two levels of info. on this page - protocol categories and actual protocols. When the real biologists start adding more protocols, it may make sense to put the actual protocols on subpages. Were we to come up with a more "all-encompassing" set of categories and scrape any extra protocols that are lying around we might not be too far away from needing to do that. This looks great for now, I agree with replacing OWW with Protocols.--BC 18:31, 11 January 2006 (EST)

Sri kindly offered to do a "Protocols" graphic that is similar in flavor to the OWW graphic. He should be doing it tonight supposedly. Once that happens, perhaps we can replace the old protocols page since most people chiming in here seem to be in favor of it. Sri ... want to make a Materials graphic too while you're at it? :) --RS 18:38, 11 January 2006 (EST)

Making this revised version go live. Feel free to revert back or change it as you see fit. --RS 20:02, 11 January 2006 (EST)

• If there is sufficient interest in the community for in silico protocols (from BLAST & CLUSTALW to FBA, Homology Modelling for protein structures and so on...), we could start up a section in this page on it. We will certainly have some inputs from our group (Chandra Lab).

--Karthik 12:51, 15 February 2006 (EST)

• Sounds great! Go for it!--Kathleen 13:02, 15 February 2006 (EST)

Just added in silico protocols section. Will keep populating them. Further, it does appear that the Protocols section has grown well enough to warrant categorisation. Could we have some guidelines as to how to go about putting the protocols into Categories? Once we do that, the Category:Protocol page will also be a very good index to the protocols, apart from this very page.

—Karthik 23:03, 15 February 2006 (EST)