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.