Why use wiki?

1) Hazmil: Based on my discussion with some other group. This description is very basic at the moment. There are many exciting and useful ways to use this wiki platform and I will expand on this, and others can add through directly editing the text or through the comment.

What is wiki?

“A wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser.”

We don't have to really worry about the hierarchy and structure of the content. Everyone (with privilege) can just continously add/edit information, reorganise, and relate different pages or piece of contents via hyperlinks.

Why use wiki?

Knowledge base for incrementally build up our collective capability where every privileged members can contribute, for seamless collaboration (a hive mind).

Knowing current collective knowledge/capability/expertise of the members, new projects (FYP, Master, PhD) can be designed to fill-in the identified gap or explore interesting topics/tools, building up on existing knowledge of the group.

Wiki greatly support the use of open-source tools.

Members which directly work on a certain topics will store exact configuration to run a certain problem (the version of softwares, config files, etc), complete to reproduce results, including data analysis routines.

This is important as a workflow of computational mechanics using open source tools usually use those developed by different group therefore compatibility with specific versions can arise.

Computational packages are quickly evolving, therefore it is encouraged that the person working with specific tools to continously document a working or improved workflows for other members to keep updated with recent changes.

Ideally, for long term usability, the set of tools including its software environment used for a certain project should be containerised, and a properly organised wiki with a group of maintainers can ensure that the setup is always reachable.

Privacy?

Groups can be created with specified read-only/edit privileges to certain pages. For example, top level admin can read/edit all pages. A group of undergraduate students working on a very specific industrial problem will be added to a sub-group where they can only see pages relevant for their projects.

Wiki vs github

github more on source code for a software, and documentation around it. Whereas wiki is for more general contents.

large media storage?

can embed files from other host e.g. Youtube, Facebook, Google Drive.

wiki server will only store text and formatting to save space to keep load on the server low.