Shouldn't we make a wiki?

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Michael Flynn

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Sep 25, 2017, 12:37:16 PM9/25/17
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One thing that's notably missing from this community is a centralized knowledge repository like a wiki. 

This wiki would contain things like a "ramp" of procedures, annotated with dollar costs, to take someone from 0 knowledge in bio to someone that could make contributions.

Anyone else agree that this is missing? Perhaps we can make a kickstarter.

Bryan Bishop

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Sep 25, 2017, 12:40:10 PM9/25/17
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Maria Chavez

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Sep 25, 2017, 12:48:26 PM9/25/17
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FYI we compiled a HUGE list of this (resources), this weekend and can
share the list. Will share more later, but about a couple of dozen of
us are on it. All numbers of topics, resources and info. Its funny
that I see this as we are in process of starting to sort info.
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Jérôme Lutz

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Sep 26, 2017, 4:49:13 AM9/26/17
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Hi Michael,

I had the same though a while ago! Everything on bio is so spread out and every where you find bits n pieces of information, but it takes ages until you get an overview. That's why we started http://www.synbio.info

What have you had in mind when you where thinking of a wiki e.g. What content would you put up?

Best,
Jérôme

bostjan

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Sep 27, 2017, 2:35:39 AM9/27/17
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Hi Michael,

I had the same thoughts when I joined the community and so we started this overview of DIY labware: https://github.com/symbiolab/bio-labware/blob/master/000_bio-labware_overview.md

Would be nice to have something like this for procedures as well...

All the best, B

Dne ponedeljek, 25. september 2017 18.37.16 UTC+2 je oseba Michael Flynn napisala:

Cathal Garvey

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Sep 27, 2017, 6:36:49 AM9/27/17
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An open wiki would be cool, though the value of a wiki is in democracy and resilience, so an open standard would be best. I've considered GitHub wiki's because at least the data is standard format and easy to migrate, but Wikimedia is the generally-most-loved wiki out there.

Proprietary wikis are to be avoided IMO: at best they end up a semicommercial silo, at worst a graveyard of good intentions. I consider "Proprietary Wiki" to be a tautology, given the overtones of democratic editing Wikis have come to be associated with.
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Gerald Trost

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Sep 27, 2017, 7:32:09 AM9/27/17
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I am newbie and I would really NEED a wiki!
 
 
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 at 8:35 AM
From: bostjan <bos...@irnas.eu>
To: DIYbio <diy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [DIYbio] Re: Shouldn't we make a wiki?
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Michael Flynn

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Sep 27, 2017, 10:47:38 AM9/27/17
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Multiple information sources is part of the problem. There needs to be a place for consensus. If wikipedia was spread out over 10 different sites it would be 1/10^6 as effective. I wish I had time to put this together. 

Jérôme Lutz

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Sep 27, 2017, 11:34:00 AM9/27/17
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For me, the wiki was the perfect way to learn pretty much everything i now know about synbio / diy bio etc. since once you wrote about a topic, you got an idea of it. That's also pretty much how www.synbio.info happend. First, it was just a notebook for me and then Eddy from deskgen had the idea to make it public and that's what we did. 

Everytime the wiki idea starts off in this forum it get's after a few posts into a "which tech should we use" discussion, open source, etc. but I think that's not a relevant discussion for starting such a thing. 

Much more interesting I find the question "What content would you want to have on such a wiki?", from that you would need to figure out on what level you start writing your articles. Should it be for complete novices in the bio field, should it be for biologists that have never worked with DIY Bio, should it address the greater public on what's going on in the field? 

What are you thoughts on this? 

Virenfrei. www.avast.com

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Cathal Garvey

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Sep 27, 2017, 12:32:40 PM9/27/17
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Bryan's suggestions contain most of the great information that's available under a free license, afaik- because of the implicit license, like wikipedia, one can import that data freely into a newer effort. That's why standards, technology, and license are crucial considerations. ;)

I think OWW requires moderator approval to join, which is effective against spam but makes participation hard. HPlus has always been a communal effort AFAIK, though you might need to use IRC to get involved beyond merely contributing content.

Bryan Bishop

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Sep 27, 2017, 12:52:44 PM9/27/17
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On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 11:32 AM, Cathal Garvey <cathal...@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
HPlus has always been a communal effort AFAIK, though you might need to use IRC to get involved beyond merely contributing content.

That community has been around for almost 10 years now, take a look at http://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap for a broad overview and about the IRC aspect, and also for contributing there's https://github.com/kanure/diyhpluswiki which has the same git repository. Originally there was a mailing list which began in 2007. The IRC logs http://gnusha.org/logs/ only go back to 2008. There's a lot of weird history in the IRC logs, like that time in January 2009 where I was commenting on some "lousy work" from "some guy Satoshi Nakamoto" .... although perhaps that oversight https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/776900184836046849 is forgivable due to other circumstances.

There's some interesting resources on the wiki that you might be interested in; they make up mostly notes I guess:

one sentence summaries of all iGEM projects

whole bunch of word-for-word transcripts from relevant conferences/meetings

IMHO the way to add content is to bookmark and link to diybio mailing list content, and just turn that into more pages. There's already a wealth of content and knowledge from this community, it's just a bit scattered. So if you want to spend 12 hours organizing the ol' mailbox file http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/diybio.maildir.tar.gz then that's certainly one way to make sense of things.

There's also this stuff:
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/diybio/
 
On Monday, September 25, 2017 at 9:40:10 AM UTC-7, Bryan Bishop wrote:
On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 11:37 AM, Michael Flynn <mfly...@gmail.com> wrote:
One thing that's notably missing from this community is a centralized knowledge repository like a wiki. 

This wiki would contain things like a "ramp" of procedures, annotated with dollar costs, to take someone from 0 knowledge in bio to someone that could make contributions.

Anyone else agree that this is missing? Perhaps we can make a kickstarter.
 
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