Challenges
There are a few challenges of keeping up your own lab wiki site. After
setup, the largest barrier to lab wiki success is upkeep of the content.
If protocols change, then the tutorials need to be updated. This author
encourages everyone in the group to constantly update the wiki, but the
majority of the upkeep falls on the principal investigator. As students
work through tutorials or follow directions, students find errors in the
wiki pages or find better ways to accomplish the same task. At group
meeting, if a student finds an error, a shortcut or a preferred syntax,
small edits are encouraged within the week. About a month before the end
of the semester, students who have mastered a particular task, are asked
write a tutorial or update a tutorial. This is part of their
end-of-semester product. It is also difficult to delete users because
MediaWiki associates users with wiki contributions. One solution is to
block a user, which renders the user read-only access. The other option
is to merge the username into another username; this action also
transfers the page contributions. Because MediaWiki is commonly used,
there are often solutions posted online. If one chooses to maintain a
local webserver and wiki site, security is always a concern. If a wiki
site needs to be moved to another server, it does take effort. Both the
wiki site (tar the folder of the wiki) and the database should be backed
up and then be reconfigured for the new webserver.