online resource - Good practices with lab wikis?

OpenWetWare and Google Sites have been effective strategies in curating lab knowledge. I was curious about what are effective ways to create an effective wiki. Factors include:

• Ease of use and low learning curve


• Speed of sharing and diversity of shared files


• Privacy and protection from sabotage


• Organizational flow


• Legally sharing papers/manuscripts

Answer

In one of the labs (about a dozen people) I work with, we use a MediaWiki install given to use by the university that requires log-in to view everything but the front page or to edit. Although the learning curve is not steep (most people already know how to use Wikipedia) it has been hard to convince the undergraduate lab members to use the wiki. It mostly serves as a place for:

• short project summaries (since the lab has many different projects)


• notes/minutes from lab meetings, a place to store slides and presentations, and


• link repository (for instance I maintain a big collection of links to relevant StackExchange questions).

With a former supervisor, we used to have a private MediaWiki install that was used by a our small group (3 or 4 people). Since we worked on theory/math it contained:

• short tutorials on how to do automated calculations as experiments for testing potential theorems (before trying to prove them), and



• collection of special cases that we had calculated by hand.

It was relatively well maintained by the prof, and a pretty good guide for understanding some of the work behind his earlier papers.

I also keep a personal private TiddlyWiki, there I keep:

• notes from papers I've read (although I am slowly moving this over to Mendeley)


• collections of relevant links from the internet


• a more structured index of the folders and files on my harddrive (through local links) that is easier to navigate and search than my file system directly.


• partial documentation of code and notes on partial results of simulations


• administrative stuff like members of mailing lists, and groups I organize.

For me, the most useful was the private Wiki, the second most useful was the small group wiki because of the good maintenance by my prof, and least useful is the large lab wiki.