Samuel's Tech Blog

Being completely new to development for Bioclipse, I'm trying to dig into the developer-centric information available, primarily on the Bioclipse Wiki. Thinking that the feedback from a newcomer might be of some value, I'll below share my reflections and ideas for the wiki.

MediaWiki as platform

I think it has been a wise choice to use MediaWiki as a backend. since it is today becoming a de facto standard, both for huge community-driven knowledge bases with millions of users, as well as in the industry. This makes sure it is developed into a very robust software and with a wealth of add-on functionality available. Least but not last the MediaWiki syntax is indeed a de facto standard, known already by millions of MediaWiki users.

Lots of useful content - Just need to make it easy to find

The wiki really seems to contain lots of useful information. The tutorials I've found and used have been highly useful and well-written, and it seems that people are actively contributing to it, which is indeed a good indication.

What I'm missing, is an easy way to get an overview of the content.

Iteratively adding structure prevents over-doing it

As being a MediaWiki old-timer I thought I should share some proven ways to work with wikis to provide the right amount of structure while not over-doing it.

Working with wikis the Wikipedia way (or at least taking inspiration from it)

The success of Wikipedia is obvious, in terms of the amount of information they've managed to build up, so I'll try to tinker a bit on the reason for their success, as a possible inpiration for how to fomulate a good policy for how to work with the Bioclipse wiki.

I'd say that the success of MediaWiki lies much in that wiki software enables users to make the changes they are confident with directly, without required consultancy with others (while that can many times be beneficial), while possible problems are dealt with as they arise instead. This takes away an prevailing obstacle for people to actually do what they know needs to be done.

Making people contribute with their expertise

Another important factor is that people with different skills can - bacause of the wiki/community contribution mindset - build upon works of each other with what they are best at doing. One puts in the information, another corrects the spelling, a third knows how to categorize things, a fourth adds some nice graphics, a fifth is a template-guru and creates some useful and stunning templates etc. etc.

Since people have the ability to contribute with their own expertize they will be spurred to keep them doing it persistently, and overseeing their own creations etc.

Creating just enough structure

This approach works in practice because everything can always be edited, even renaming of pages, templates, and categories etc. is readily done and because of MW:s automatical redirection the old names can still be used.

Conclusion: Wikis, when used in proven ways, make it possible to start out simple and building upon that as the need grows. Always keeping as much structure as is relevant for the size and usage of the wiki.