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Project documentation in a WIKI

WHY?

Project documentation is probably the most important part in science. Essentially, experiments and results that you don't document have been done in vain. Meanwhile, an electronic documentation has gained increasing attention, because the information is easy to write and format, easy to backup, and easy to share with other project partners. Popular examples are Markdown, jupyter solutions, or WIKIs. Certainly, you have visited wikipedia before, and we trust that you found it pretty helpful. So no need to introduce WIKIs and their importance.

We do the project documentation using a DokuWiki. The software is easy to install, DokuWiki pages are quickly generated, information can be easily entered, and your partners will see them as soon as you hit the Save button.

Read more?

Read more?

We assume that you are already familiar with retrieving information stored in a WIKI. Thus, there is little need to introduce how to use WIKIs. However, generating a WIKI yourself is probably new. So, we will devote one day of our course on this matter. You will then have plenty of opportunities to practice this knowledge, since you will document the rest of your course work using your own WIKI pages.


The WIKI lives from the information you enter. We distinguish different kinds of information, e.g.

  • Text formatted in different ways, e.g. a written paragraph, bulleted or numbered lists, and the like
  • Images
  • Tables
  • External and internal links
  • Task assignments
  • Polls
  • …

Follow the links at the end of the page to learn more about how to create WIKI pages.

What to consider

Of course, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when using a WIKI

  • You need a computer, and when you access a WIKI via the web, you need an active internet connection
  • Unsaved changes will be lost once you leave the page (or the computer crashes)
  • Web-based access represents a security risk1)
  • WIKI-set up is not straightforward for everybody
  • If you mix editing with the simple DW editor2) and with the CKG editor3), DokuWiki can do funny things. Essentially, it can start to mix the Wiki syntax, which is considerably easy to learn, with way more complex html code. You don't want that!!.

    Our advice

    Our advice

    Use the DW editor only, and learn the WIKI syntax

Click on the tabs to learn more

1)
although there is no report that we know of where a WIKI was used to hack a computer
2)
you have to remember the wiki syntax for this
3)
this is an editor that looks a bit like what you are used to when working with MSOffice