Re: [ccp4bb] CCP4 Wiki

[Kay Diederichs]

Anastassis Perrakis schrieb:

Kay - disagreeing once was enough ... so:

I share your thoughts about the wiki !


and corrected by an expert, due to the smaller number of contributors.

Since there are less crystallographers that Greeks, I would conclude,
that the English Wiki dynamics can not be taken for granted.

However, the dynamics of Wikipedia are an interesting issue and relate to 'vandalism'. Being a small contributor to the Greek Wiki, which has far less subscribers than the English one, I can see that the dynamics do not work well. People can sneak in loads of crap, that are unlikely to be read So, some thought might need be given not to 'security' but if you prefer 'access rights'. People at CCP4 should (I guess are) thinking for moderation, access rights to types of articles etc.

What this means to me is



Kay

I agree that it is good to think about possible problems before they occur. On the other hand there is a proverb that I don't quite remember, something to the effect of "fear is a bad advisor". a) the "vandalism damage" is moderate (the MediaWiki software even stores older versions of each article), and what the "risk of vandalism" is we actually don't know (even given your experience with the Greek Wiki). b) why not just start and see how the Wiki develops? Maybe a bigger risk than that of vandalism is that no-one contributes if the hurdles are too high! c) I see this as a community effort. Having only a few selected persons contribute is against this idea, and reduces the potential benefit.

For hierarchies, parallel efforts, GPL, I agree. ;-)

Tassos



On Jul 27, 2007, at 11:14, Kay Diederichs wrote:

PS Kay, your digital signature has some trouble for me - cant read it - you may want to know.

Kevin Cowtan schrieb:

Yes, that is our intention. CCP4 would probably be at the third level of a hierarchy including:

Macromolecular crystallographic techniques
  Structure solution, analysis and visualisation software
    The CCP4 suite

Kevin,









thanks,

Kay

why does/will/should the CCP4 Wiki have a hierarchy at all? I thought that the structure of the Wiki emerges from the links between the articles. As far as I know the MediaWiki software does not even support a hierarchy (but of course I may be wrong, and other software might support it). And why are you concerned about security? In what sense? Breakins into the computer that runs the software, or vandalism of articles? I believe the first point is best dealt with by setting up a virtual machine dedicated to the Wiki, and running an OS that gets automatic security updates for a number of years. The "vandalism" thing is probably less of an issue than it is in Wikipedia - but even at the Wikipedia scale it can be handled well, it seems. One other thing that I thought about has to do with permissions. Let me explain. The easiest way to come up with useful articles would probably be to just write summaries citing people's emails to the CPP4BB. Citing Eleanor's postings alone would certainly produce a great Wiki! But - is it appropriate/allowed to cite people's old emails to the CCP4BB on the Wiki, without their consent? I for one would certainly give permission to cite my earlier CCP4BB postings, provided they are cited in the proper context. And finally: why is there a concern by some people about the "premature" setup of a Wiki, like the one that was set up by Artem? If the articles in a Wiki are good they can just be copied over to the "CCP4 Wiki" when it exists. At least that is my understanding concerning Wikipedia articles - you can just use them under the GNU Free Documentation License.

So there would be room for other software packages at the same level as CCP4, and things like purification and crystallisation off of the top level.

James Stroud wrote:

Would a "CCP4 wiki" be different from a general crystallography wiki? Would it reflect, for instance, the breadth of topics on the CCP4BB?

On Monday 23 July 2007 09:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Contributions from volunteers to establish and maintain the CCP4 wiki will

be definitely appreciated.

--
Kay Diederichs                http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]    Tel +49 7531 88 4049 Fax 3183
Fachbereich Biologie, Universität Konstanz, Box M647, D-78457 Konstanz

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