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.