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.