Creating Lab Wiki Content
Content creation becomes a community effort with a lab wiki and should be managed. On the author’s lab wiki, all undergraduate research students have edit capabilities. If there is uncertainty in material, students are advised to add content rather than delete content. However, the principal investigator ultimately serves as the editor. In the unlikely event that an erroneous entry is created, and the previous version of the page should be restored, lab wiki page edit histories are saved. For each lab wiki page, select the histories tab. By choosing the previous version, the previous page is restored. In this way, management is minimal, students feel freedom to contribute and disasters are correctable.
The Main Page of the lab wiki is a table of contents to the site. This is the first page that a user encounters. It can be made into an organized list (Figure 1). After four headers are made, the header titles are automatically made into a list. Each blue item under Contents is a Topic Heading. Contents can be organized by general topic much like chapters in a book. Under each Topic Heading is a set of wiki pages. The introductory material for new students may come first, followed by more project-specific information, specialized methods and guides for creating dissemination materials such as papers or posters.
The lab wiki can serve as a transfer knowledge mechanism from a faculty member to a student, where parts of the lab wiki are referred to in an in-person meeting. For example, the lab wiki can contain sets of directions commonly given such as a checklist for new group members, beginner basic science information and resources as well as links to key project articles. The Checklist for New Members (Figure 2) is a list of tasks such as attending fire safety training, obtaining keys and who to talk to about obtaining accounts on various machines. In addition, all new members have beginning tasks and software they must learn before they can be productive. These are listed and directions for the assignments are given on the lab wiki. Additional resources are listed in the assignments.
The lab wiki also contains tutorials, resources and descriptions in small tractable portions that undergraduate students can digest at their own pace. For instance, the Intro to Computers section (Figure 3) started out with information on common commands in Unix and Vi Text Editor. However, as the group grew, students began to have conceptual issues about working remotely and where their files could be found. Tutorials describing a file path, remotely logging into a computer and how to transfer files between computers were created. Some of this can commonly be found on the internet or through books but the advantage of the lab wiki is that it can be customized with lab-specific information, such as the research group’s directory structure or the addresses of specific computers.
Individual research steps can also be easily explained in a lab wiki format. If a student is going to go through a common process, the lab wiki can have a page for each step of the process. For example, if an undergraduate needed to build an explicit water system in the software Amber, the steps in Building Systems (Figure 4) would be followed. Most of these beginning tutorials were written by the faculty member but as students worked through the steps, modifications to the wiki page were made by undergraduate students.
Preservation of research group knowledge is a significant advantage of the lab wiki. Analysis methods and scripts are often created for a specific project. Through a tutorial on the lab wiki, analysis types can be preserved. For instance, a student in the group might develop inputs for monitoring water residence lifetimes in a particular system. Then if that student graduates and another project needs similar analysis, there is no student-student transfer of knowledge. A thesis, which may have a general description of the analysis philosophy, may not have detailed inputs and scripts used to create the end result. A lab wiki tutorial explaining the analysis philosophy but also giving step-by-step instructions might be more productive.
The lab wiki can also be used as a repository with examples of student theses, presentations and posters. By seeing examples, students are able to see what is acceptable and also variation in quality. These can be used a templates for future students. The lab wiki also organizes sometimes haphazard student files into a coherent, accessible list. If organized by project, a poster would much easier to find in a wiki page list than in each student’s user space.
There might also be a proposal writing section on the lab wiki. In this section, there might be a guide to writing proposals or directions for a specific call for proposals. For example, if there is a local on-campus call for summer research proposals, there might be guidelines and examples of successful proposals. Sometimes departments teach a writing-enhanced course in which the students write proposals. A link to NSF or NIH proposal guidelines could be made, but for undergraduate students a guide with explicit page lengths and descriptions of each section are more useful. Externally funded proposals from the faculty member could also be posted in this section. Oftentimes, students find these useful when trying to get oriented to a project and to see the future directions of the project.