On Jan 30, 2012, at 4:22 PM, Bill Horne wrote: > > It's almost never going to be the program or environment or online tool that > /you/ are most comfortable with, but it /will/ be the one that your users > have bought into, and therefore the one they will use. Over time, as the > tradeoffs of non-optimal first-pass choices become obvious, you'll be able to > guide the group toward more robust and more easily maintained solutions, but > if you start out by _dictating_ a course of action, it won't work.
This. What Bill says here is why I asked about publishing vs. collaboration (and I'm still awaiting an answer). Saying "we need a wiki" is just going to cause you problems if you really need something else. Wikis are good for collaborating. If you have physicists at MIT, Fermilab, CERN and J-PARC working on the same research then a wiki is a good way for them to collaborate. This is the kind of writing that wikis were designed to manage. On the other hand, wikis are *terrible* static document repositories. If you have a Lab full of professors, each with a their own syllabus that needs to be distributed to students, then a wiki is the worst way I can think of to do it. The reason is simple: these faculty cannot just put their documents into a wiki. They need to be rewritten or converted to the wiki format, and that is a gigantic waste of time for a slew of one-offs. Getting those documents back out can be even more painful unless you set them up with file uploads for the static documents in which case the wiki itself is a waste of resources. You all would be better off with a basic web server fronting some kind of networked storage. --Rich P. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
