MediaWiki

Coming up next week is WikiSym 2008, the 4th International Symposium on Wikis, taking place in Porto, Portugal.

OpenWetWare will be presenting a poster and also a demo of how we use MediaWiki software to produce an environment that enables collaboration and sharing of scientific information among life science researchers.

So, what exactly is WikiSym?

WikiSym is the foremost conference devoted to using, developing and researching wikis. In our fourth year, only WikiSym brings together organisations that use wikis to meet face to face with leading and emerging vendors, active researchers and leading wiki consultants.

WikiSym 2008 explores and extends our thriving wiki community, building on the past 4 years to again bring together researchers, practitioners, and technical writers to gather, discuss, share best practices and develop knowledge .

For more details on the OWW poster/demo please visit “our” page on the wiksym2008 wiki.

In the May/June issue of the Mathematics Association of America’s news magazine MAA Focus, you’ll find an article titled “Student Collaboration using a LaTeX wiki” [pdf].

The article demonstrates the usefulness of the LaTeX extension for MediaWiki by enabling this great syntax to be used online in a collaborative environment such as a wiki.

It just happens that the LaTeX extension referenced in the article was written by Austin Che, a member of OpenWetWare’s steering committee. Which means that we’ve had a LaTeX enabled wiki for quite a while now

If you don’t know what LaTeX is, I’d first suggest a read at Wikipedia’s LaTeX page.

If you’ve got a grasp of what LaTeX is, I’d recommend you head over to OWW’s LaTeX page where you’ll find information on the advantages and disadvantages, software for writing LaTeX, PhD thesis LaTeX templates and more…