[chemweb] What is a WiKi

[Rzepa, Henry]

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.