Team:ETH Zurich/Tools/Automated Wiki

Motivation

At the beginning of our project planning phase we where also thinking on how to manage the wiki. One major shortcoming showed up when we where browsing the wikis of previous Igem Competitions - a lot of them simply didnt work anymore.
The problem that causes this is, that big parts of the old wikis are actully stored on external servers. E.g JavaScript Menus that are actully stored on Students private Homepages.
A good example for this is actully e.g the last years ETH Team wiki: As you can see, the .js file is stored at an external server, which means as soon as for any reason this file is gone the whole wiki page wont work anymore, because the navigation is gone.
And if you browse through wikis of even earlier years, you can see that this is already happening to a lot of pages.

This years situation

When we then started to think of ways how to design the wiki it turned out that apparently the persons responsible for this wiki are aware of the situation, cause embedding any external content into a wiki page seemed not to work anymore.
While this solves the problem of missing content, it arrises a new problem. Wiki Syntax is very simple so that it is easy to handle. While a benefit in first editing pages, it brings with it a big lack of flexibility in design and a lot of work if you would like to still have nice design. The wiki syntax makes it harder to devide design from content like for example it is the case with our wiki page now. Since we have a lot of people beeing responsable for the content while only a few manage the design we agreed on editing pages like this:

<center> <!-- PUT THE PAGE CONTENT AFTER THIS LINE. THANKS :) -->
your text goes here
<!-- PUT THE PAGE CONTENT BEFORE THIS LINE. THANKS :) -->

How to overcome this situation

While the reasons why external content shouldnt be allowed on the wiki where obvious, we still didnt want to settle with "just" doing it with regular wiki editing.
So the idea was born to use some kind of Software to overcome this shortcomings by introducing a middle man who overs easy editing for the user and a devision of content and syntax while still maintaining wiki only syntax on the MIT wiki site.

The Automated Wiki

Menu out of Mysql Database

Page editing with the Automated Wiki

For an example of an Page generated with the Automated Wiki click here

Why we didnt use it in the end

There where two reasons why we didnt use the Automated Wiki in the end.

• Within the team not everyone felt compfortable with the idea that we need an extra tool for editing the wiki, because this also brings an additional source of error/complication.
• For some reason the MIT wiki team decided to loosen up the allowed syntax again and now we are back at the situation that everything from all the html over javascript, up to flash is allowed. And with that the main reason why we introduced the automated wiki in the first place is gone.

Download

Media:ETH Auto wiki.zip Keep in mind that the development of this Tool stopped in the middle. But maybe you can use some ideas/parts of it.