Our head of school asked me "are wikis common?" I said it was hard for me to be objective ;-) Assuming that he meant "in an academic life science research setting", what do you think? Do your lab, or labs that you know, routinely use wikis? Are the biologists that you know aware of them? - Neil Saunders

to most non-techie people I know, wiki = wikipedia... - Andrew Su

I would say uncommon but becoming more widely used and fairly widely known in some specific settings. Fairly alien in experimental biology but well established and known as you move more towards computational biology? - Cameron Neylon

In my academic experience, wikis are well known but not always common. My department has a student wiki, my lab has a wiki (for posting tips, etc), and a bunch of classes I have taken have used wikis. But they all tend to get only sporadic participation. Research-wise, there are lots of wikis for annotating genes/structures like WikiGenes and TOPSAN but again, sporadic participation. - Shirley Wu

Perhaps more accurately, wikis are common but not commonly used (in the sense of both passive browsing and active participation, though more so for the latter) - Shirley Wu

In corporate environments, HEAVILY used, pretty much everywhere I have worked - Deepak Singh

Deepak, I'm a bit surprised and interested. Heavily and *successfully* used? In my neck of the corporate woods, several wiki-like initiatives, none of which really have gotten to critical mass... (Even within my computational group, 90% me, 10% other group members) - Andrew Su

Every place I've worked developers have used wikis for every project and that's been the place of record and where they capture all their discussions. At current place place to go for all kinds of stuff is Wikis including tips and tricks for your iphone on the corporate network etc etc. In all cases wikis existed before I got there. Outside of dev, most life science places no usage. - Deepak Singh

My experience is similar to Shirley's. In academia the _existence_ of wikis is not uncommon, but the participation is limited and sporadic. I've tried to promote a lab wiki on two occasions (two different labs, one for protocols/info and one for shared data), and twice I'd say I failed to get any decent participation ... not really sure if it was my ability to rouse contributors that was at fault, or something else. - Andrew Perry

Our group has a wiki and it's very difficult to encourage participation, so I don't think it's your people skills at fault :) It only keeps going because the boss is enthusiastic and relentless with a carrot/stick approach; e.g. contributions are a factor in handing out travel money. - Neil Saunders

We have a wiki and works great. Is not updated everyday, but people in the lab post announcements as they need (lab meeting changes, new emails, etc.). We are the only ones in the department with a wiki, though. - Pepe JG

I know a several major labs that use wikis for at least 6 years. Ours is used by the whole institute. The usual rules of participation (90/9/1) do apply but wikis are nothing special in this regard. - Roland Krause

I think we're on our third incarnation of various bits of wiki software, and we've finally hit on the right software for both our wet lab and bioinformaticians. Sometimes it's just finding the software everyone likes, and then it just works. But it was a long road to get people using it! It's Dan's favorite, DokuWiki - Allyson Lister

Ally, my favourite too. - Neil Saunders

We have a wiki in our lab, too, and although it had a hard time to get off the ground, it is now being used on an almost daily basis in both ways, as people use it to structure their ideas and experiments and to digest the literature. No other wikis in this department (psychiatry), as far as I know. - Daniel Mietchen

Another thing: Citizendium has an initiative by which students can get credit for writing articles on their wiki: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki... . Given that writing a well-structured "encyclopedic" entry on a subject is a great way to learn about it, this initiative may really have promise. - Daniel Mietchen

There's at least three run out of this corner of the building (in Biochemistry @ UCL) -- all using different platforms naturally (Doku seems nicest) -- but outside of the bioinformatics and IT people I don't know how well known they are... - Andrew Clegg

In my experience - no. I don't know anyone that uses a wiki; and like Andrew said, I think most people think "wiki" is short for wikipedia. - Paul Bacchus

So why do developers feel that collaboration is good and others don't? I learnt how to get into our corp firewall from my personal mac, cause there was an internal wiki on it and many such subjects, not just work related, so why not other folk? I can think of syntax being one. What about others? - Deepak Singh

Our student Web site is a wiki. It was absurdly easy to set up. Our cyberinfrastructure group here uses a wiki, too, and it works well for information pushing. - tim from Alert Thingy

My lab uses OWW wiki. Crucial organizational and communication platform in my opinion. - Maureen

Hey Neil. Tell our head of school that my lab book for the last year and a half has been a wiki ;-) - Mitchell J Stanton-Cook

Agree with Deepak - at NPG we use wikis for all technical, editorial and publishing projects, sharing info (eg meeting reports), scheduling, everything you can think of. Heavily used tools - esp as we are distributed over so many offices. In my experience of talking to scientists, most do not use them or don't know what they are (apart from, as mentioned above, Wikipedia - some of them have heard of that;-), and the more tecchy ones such as those on FF ). - Maxine

Sure. Our lab wiki is at biowiki.org, and most consortia that I've worked in use wikis (e.g. ENCODE, modENCODE, 12-Drosophila comparative genomics). I don't know what baseline people are using in terms of contributions, but I would say it's considerably easier to get people to edit a wiki than a barebones HTML site. Of course, if wikipedia is your baseline, then all other wikis are abject failures. - Ian Holmes

Isn't defining something as a WIki just saying something is a group project? - sofarsoShawn