OpenWetWare:Why join?

This document is a work in progress to describe the advantages of using a wiki as an information repository and collaborative space for institute research labs. The goal of the document should be to provide both pros and cons to better enable new labs to decide whether they would like to participate.

Pros

Persistant Information

Much "lore" and information is lost when lab memebers leave (problem given high turnover rate of academic labs), the wiki provides a low-barrier of entry method for lab members to contribute that information to a database which will persist after they leave the lab.

Dynamic Information

The ease of wiki linking enables much more rich documents and information than is availble in static documents. For instance can link out to informative pages about particular words in the wiki, enabling someone reading the protocol who doesn't understand a concept to quickly locate a reliable, accurate definition.

Research Collaborations

By providing a common space for people to post information about thier work, graduate students are more likely to be aware of the work going on in other labs locally. It seems like this will improve the likelihood of collaboration.

Easy to contribute

Wikis are nearly impossible to break, since changes are very easily reverted. Easy to edit, easy to contribute. There is no centralized webmaster who has to deal with making every little change that someone in the lab might want.

Shared Materials Information

Chemicals, antibiotics, etc can have their own wiki pages listing general information, safety, etc. Since these are things which are general information rather than lab-specific stuff (like protocols) they could be shared accross labs. For instance, Ampicillin. If a protocol called for the use of Amp, it could include a link to this, so if you forget the mode of action of amp you just click rather than have to go dig it up in Mol Cloning.

A list of equipment is a useful shared resource to make labs aware of the available equipment in the building. Also, equipment pages serve as a central repository for control experiments and other information about the device, see Victor3 Plate Reader.

Examples

The current usage of OpenWetWare provides some compelling examples of why joining the site may be useful to your lab. ...fill in

Related Information

• other wikis