OpenWetWare:FAQ

General

Who are you?

OpenWetWare is a group of researchers that are interested in increasing the amount of organization, dissemination, and communication in biological research (or just want an easy way to keep a lab webpage up-to-date). Everyone that has access to OpenWetWare can edit all pages in the site. Thus the evolution of all the pages are due to everyone involved. If you want to know who has done what, check out the history file associated with every page.

Can I/we join?

Yes!!! The more people that are contributing, the more useful the site becomes. Please email us.

Why would I (or my lab) want to join?

Check out this page.

What's the deal with access?

Currently we have the site as world-readable and member editable, and there are essentially no options to make pages be otherwise. We decided upon the current level of access based upon our key goals of open access and collaboration. We also understand there are times where information cannot be posted for the world/other students/et al, to read. In our lab, we handle this by certain members having private wiki's on their own computers where they organize their thoughts and information.

In the future, we may be able to implement the beginnings of what you describe. After talks with some of the people over at Mediawiki, they have begun writing code to make such edit/view access more dynamic and programmable by individual users. In time, perhaps we can incorporate some of these improvements as they are made available. This will offer some semblance of security (and would not get indexed by google for example), but is not as safe as say having a site behind a firewall. Anyways, there are a variety of options, but in the end you have to balance increased security with decreased ease of access and manipulability. For the time being, we will keep OpenWetWare at the current access level.

Do you ever plan on going commercial?

No.

Technical

Are there any rules?

Check out the etiquette page.

How do I make the wiki pages for my lab/group look like a static website sans wikiness?

Check out OpenWetWare:Dewikify.