What Is Wiki?

 /Wiki wiki/: super-fast (Hawaiian); a dynamic, collaborative website

*Why wiki*

This wiki is a tool to create and access readily-updateable, organized and searchable multimedia documents on a variety of topics - from lab protocols to English usage - and aims to collect, organize, preserve, improve and spread collective knowledge and wisdom.

The wiki's underlying computer code generates attractive, hyperlinked web pages from normal-looking text. The code runs on a piece of webserver software and this allows users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser from anywhere in the world.

Allowing everyday users to create and edit a web page using a wiki encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users. Such role of wikis in collective knowledge organization is best exemplified by <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</a>, considered the world's largest encyclopedia.

*About this wiki*

This wiki is powered by modified Qwiki Wiki, a minimalist PHP wiki engine originally developed by David Barrett, that uses plain text files to store data. The 'engine' is used to edit the data as well as to format it and present it as a web page. Significant modifications were done to the codes of this wiki for bugs and enhancements (XHTML compliance, UTF-8 encoding, backup maintainance, page deletion, etc.) by Santosh Patnaik.

 Also see - _Wiki_features_

This version of Qwiki Wiki (13 May 2006 release) is available for <a href="wiki.zip">download</a> and simple installation - a <a href="readme.txt">readme</a> file is enclosed. Newer versions and support may be available at www.bioinformatics.org/phplabware

This wiki has an automated backup system that ensures that all editions of a page are archived. Currently, content may be added to this wiki from lab computers only.

 Also see - _taking_care_of_this_wiki_