Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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It is incredibly easy to create formal structured
directories of people and groups within
MediaWiki using the MediaWiki categories
feature. If the names of organisational groups
should change, MediaWiki handles this in an
elegant fashion by allowing you to 'move' pages
- automatically creating a link from the old
name to the new for anybody who subsequently
attempts to access it through an out-of-date
cross-link or URL
Collaborative authoring
Wikis are unique at providing true collaborative
authoring, many authors can improve the same
page at the same time. Every MediaWiki page
has a 'history' tab, providing a log of exactly
who has changed what and a 'discussion' tab
to discuss changes. With features like RSS and
MediaWiki Email Alerts, users can be notifi ed
when specifi c pages are updated by other
authors
Profi les
One of the great strengths of MediaWiki is the
ability to see exactly who is contributing to what
topics. To enhance this feature even further,
users can create a page describing themselves,
populated with links to areas within the wiki that
refl ect their work. MediaWiki will automatically
aggregate and display their contributions; this
can be very valuable when you can remember
the name of somebody who contributed to a
piece of work but not the name of the topic they
contributed to
Inside Pfi zer, a single general-purpose instance of MediaWiki was
installed and named Pfi zerpedia (Figure 13.4). At inception it was
envisioned that this would develop into a scientifi c encyclopaedia, akin to
Wikipedia, for the research and development community. However, it
was rapidly recognised that wikis could enable collaboration in a much
broader sense and the idea that Pfi zerpedia would be restricted to being
an encyclopaedia was relaxed. Pfi zerpedia evolved to become a
knowledge-sharing tool supporting a wide range of use-cases, including
encyclopaedia pages, hints and tips pages, user/team/department/
organisation profi les (Figure 13.5), application/process support/help
pages (Figure 13.6), acronym disambiguation, portfolio/service catalogues
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