Wiki

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.

One recent SciFoo related post that caught my eye was Mario Pineda-Krch’s thoughts on the idea of distributed open notebook science. Yes, distributed.

As Mario mentions, by using a client based wiki setup like Tiddlywiki, the user has more flexibility by not having to rely on network access. Furthermore, a version control system like Git brings redundancy allowing anyone to download the latest version of the notebook. The wiki + the data with full control.

The idea of open notebook science is not necessarily a new one. The term was coined by JC Bradley roughly two years ago. However, it’s been tough to go mainstream due to the fact that notebooks are usually foreseen to be private, thus failing in the “open” department. However, this hasn’t stopped many from setting up lab notebooks online like Jean-Claude Bradley, Garrett Lisi or any of the dozens of OpenWetWare lab notebook users.

Jonathan over at Working the bench has just recently posted about how impressed he is by OpenWetWare and the available protocols:

It takes a little digging, but the website is really sweet simply because it gives you the feel that, for any given protocol, you are looking at something that works. It’s been tested, validated, and in many cases even commented on and modified by any number of additional people.

Jonathan makes a good point here where he mentions that you are looking at something that has been tested, validated and in many times worked on collaboratively by a group of OWW members.

What Jonathan doesn’t mention is that although OWW is a great resource for protocols, there are other great features like the materials section, indexed reference sources and above all, a large community of researchers from all over the world.