Imported:YPM/Why join

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What is a wiki? A wiki is simply an application that allows multiple users to easily create and edit webpages via a web browser. It also permits easy linking between pages and tracking of past changes to the wiki pages. See Wikipedia's wiki page for more details. What good are wikis in general? Decentralized contribution Wikis make it easy for anyone in a group to contribute without an administrative bottleneck. There is no "webmaster" who approves every contribution to the site. Thus, content is created and edited much faster than is possible otherwise. Ease of contribution All you need is a web browser (and a login/password in the case of this site) to contribute to a wiki. The editing language is meant to be extremely simple and easy to learn. Hard to break Wikis are nearly impossible to break - changes are tracked and can be very easily reverted. The entire history of a page can be seen quite easily. Why are wikis useful for model building? Persistent Information The amount of information that is accrued during model building is tremendous. Conveying this information to the greater scientific community is difficult as model builders tend not to document models in ways that are accessible to others. The wiki provides a low-barrier of entry method for organizing and distributing models and model documentation. Research Collaborations By providing a common space for people to contribute to a single model, the community of researchers studying the yeast mating pathway can work together on a single well-documented model and information resource. It seems like this will reduce the burden that individual researches would bear by documenting their own models. Additionally, this shared resource should provide grounds for fruitful discussion about likely mechanisms and parameter values (protein abundances and rate constants). Common Concerns These concerns are quite common, and important enough to list out here. Vandalism One of the biggest concerns with wikis is the ability for anyone to vandalize other people's work. While sites like wikipedia are able to deal with it because they have such a large benevolent user base compared to the number of vandalisms. The community we would like to create with YeastPheromoneModel is significantly smaller. Thus, we can't assume that vandals will be caught quickly. Therefore, we have decided to make it such that only registered users and groups can edit content. That way, each edit is trackable to a specific person, which can be tracked down by their email address. We find that this public embarrassment factor, while increasing barriers to entry, provides sufficient impetus to prevent malicious or inconsiderate editing. Since instituting controlled user signup (with valid email addresses), we have had no problems with vandalism, or unwanted edits, whether malicious or otherwise. Thus, we feel that this system is working. We will re-evaluate if and when a single instance of a problem arises. Related Information See the Interwiki map for other wiki's.

Note that the contents of this page were based on a similar page on OpenWetWare.