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Welcome to Andrew Flaus' lab wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of web pages. They are specially useful for sharing knowledge between members of a community. The keyword here is sharing. A wiki is only as good as its users, the more knowledge they share the more knowledge will be available.
Since most people are not used to have their knowledge editable by others, they keep it in folders and may give it to others but never allow others to change anything without their permissions, there's a couple of concepts that must be learn
- you do not own what you write on the wiki - this means that you have to accept that others may edit the pages you write. No one's the author of a page (although you can see who wrote what) so you can't forbid someone or sulk just because someone added content to or even changed a page that you started. And if you are worried that errors are introduced…
- you can always revert a page to a previous state - this is the reason (if you don't believe others will only try to improve the content) why you shouldn't worry about other people editing pages you started. If something wrong is added, just go click in “Old revisions” in the “Commands” box (left side) and select the revision where there's no error. If you really don't want to see the changes other people may do you can bookmark any revision of a page.
Most wanted
Molecules
How to use the wiki
Finding what you want
There's two ways to find for what you're looking for in the wiki. By using the search box (top right corner), or by looking through the contents box (left side). However, some pages may be correctly placed in more than one place (should PCR be inside “methods:cloning” or “methods:dna”) so it's probably better to use the search box.
Creating new pages
Creating a new page is easy. First think of the best place to put it and then type it in the URL. For example, you want to create a page named northern_blot, inside the mRNA namespace, inside the methods namespace, you'd type the following URL
https://af-lab.nuigalway.ie/wiki/methods:mrna:northern_blot
You should then be redirected to an empty page. Click on “Create this page” on the commands box and you're done.
Receive notifications about changes
It is possible to receive notifications every time new content is added to the wiki. It is also possible to be more specific and receive notifications only when specific pages are edited or created inside a specific namespace. There's two ways to do it:
- subscriptions to pages
- RSS Atom feeds of pages or namespaces
Your lab notebook
You can use the wiki as your electronic lab notebook, or maybe just a place to have your list of cells lines and some notes. All pages and namespaces created inside “lab_notebook:your_username:” are private which means visible and editable only by you.