Henry raises an interesting issue here. To me for a couple of years wiki has been a component in the PostNuke content management system which does not appear to work so I've ignored it. In fact the Wiki concept is pretty interesting. It seems to have started in 1995 and had its origins in HyperCard for the Mac (so it must be good!). See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory Or possibly something called ZOG - a hypertext system dating to 1972 ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiOrigin ). "Apparently Ward Cunningham claims that he chose the term "wikiwiki," the Hawaii word for "fast" or "quick," because "QuickWeb" already referred to another program. Cunningham, usually abbreviating the terms to just "Wiki," describes the core concept as...." (See http://mako.yukidoke.org/projects/collablit/writing/BenjMakoHill- CollabLit_and_Control/x705.html ) I had problems installing the system Henry mentions below but I had much better luck with TikiWiki from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory which took 10 minutes to install and is now running just fine on my laptop. It has additional features to Wiki and is more of a content management system. In a sense TikiWiki would be used a little differently to phpWiki as it has blogs, chat, and forum components built in as separate modules. See http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki for a little more about the Wiki concept. I started playing with it and it *really does* offer some interesting possibilities. Whether or not chemists would use such a system is an interesting question. Are we the right personality type? And the notion that anyone can edit a page might take some getting used to. Anyway, there are a number of Chemistry Wiki sites out there, try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Chemistry (same as above?) http://wiki.cs.brynmawr.edu/index.cgi/PhysicalChemistryWiki http://www.tamucc.edu/wiki/LMorgan/CourseOverview Regards On Thursday, October 30, 2003, at 05:24 pm, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
Earlier this year, I posted about the "Blog" phenomenon, and how it had grown up into RSS. Well, here is another "ground up" phenomenon; the WiKi (or WiKiWiKi). If you follow
http://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/fsatom_wiki/
you will find out what Wiki means. The above is actually one set up by the FSAtom community, but there may well be a few others in the chemical community (and if anyone has seen a good one, let this list know!).
The concept is somewhere in between a Blog (or personal web page), and an email or chat list. Several interesting concepts pervade; thus a WiKi is in one way what the creator of the Web TimBL intended all along, which is one which is much less asymmetric (the Web is a write by one, read by many medium) in that a WiKi is a write by many/read by many system. Lest you worry that what one person writes, another could delete, a full revision history is kept (so in that sense it is similar to the CVS system used by programmers to record the development of code).
I found out recently that postgraduate students here are starting to use WiKis to keep laboratory notebooks of their research; the FSAtom WiKi is a group of chemists interested in atomic-scale simulations, and so forth. As a collaborative phenomenon, its both sophisticated enough to provide a rich environment, and simple enough that the learning curve is not steep. And to revert to the opening sentence of this post, RSS has been fully assimilated into some WiKis, hence providing another link into data rich environments.
If you want to set one up, one place is http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/, but you will need a PHP module (and probably a MySQL database) as part of your web service. In this sense, like the Web, its a server/client model with the former a single point of failure (or suppression). If anyone knows of a peer2peer version, do let us know!
--
Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
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