Advantages, Uses and Users
The wiki platform allows for collaborative content sharing and editing for anyone who has access to the site. Users can add content with very little programming knowledge.11 Examples of wiki language can be learned by going to a public wiki such as Wikipedia, finding the desired formatting, and mimicking it. Students don’t have to learn a new language such as html, reducing the barrier to participation. In addition, the lab wiki format is conducive specifically to computational research because command-line syntax or code for short programs are autoformatted in a separate gray box by just putting a space before each line of text. The ease of writing a wiki page makes it possible for novice students to contribute to the group knowledge. The lab wiki also includes edit histories for each page. Student mistakes can be backed out; nothing is permanent and mistakes can be easily fixed. Because MediaWiki is mainstream open software, updates with operating system are made by a third party. The broader wiki community also continually develops extensions. It is a searchable, collective project.
Wikis have been used in a variety of educational contexts.12-15 Here, the lab wiki is both an educational tool and a repository of research group knowledge. It can contain tutorial materials for certain research steps, background for computational theory/methods, guides for using specific programs, group scripts, weblinks to key resources as well as introductions to basic science and specific projects. These are all items that graduate students might be expected to find themselves after being referred to a few recent papers. Undergraduate students need more guidance and a lab wiki provides an intuitive interface with structure. Others also use a lab wiki as a repository of group documents. These might be group meeting presentations, proposals or theses. As students are ready to learn a soft skill such as a proposal, these documents serve as examples. New students can also become oriented to the project by reading the introduction of a thesis or group meeting presentation. Repositories on a lab wiki do require disk space considerations on the server and some flags need to be customized (see Practical Implementation).
A research lab wiki serves a number of different groups. The faculty member and new undergraduate students who join the lab have an organized repository for research group collective knowledge. New students find the lab wiki accessible and easy to navigate. As students progress in a project, they have access to group collective knowledge through the lab wiki. More advanced students involved in creating the wiki sites are also actively engaged in constructing group knowledge.13 Pedagogically, undergraduate students gain confidence from writing the tutorials because they are held up as experts on a topic and the process additionally serves as a vehicle to reinforce knowledge. The lab wiki can similarly be shared with other faculty or colleagues who aren’t familiar with the logistics of a particular technique and its contents are already organized.
A lab wiki can be password protected. This way only those with a username and password can edit the site or read the site. Individual standard users can be created but that can make management cumbersome. Some labs choose to create different access levels. For instance, one group username can be created for all group members with edit capabilities. Or novice members, transient members or classroom students could receive a username with read-only access. Password protection gives the research group optional privacy for sensitive information such as group meeting presentations and proposals but still encourages collaboration.