Team:NEFU China/Software
Attitudes towards creating a wiki
According to a survey conducted by us, we found that most teams agrees the thesis that creating wiki is a difficult or tedious work to finish with high quality, especially when time is very limited. So, we’d like to make some changes.
*You can see all raw data by click this.
About half of teams we surveyed hold the opinion that creating a wiki requires superior skills in programming (29/56), which lead them feel hard about it. We sincerely invite you to click the right arrow and discover what giant changes Flight iGEM can make.
Step 1
To create a wiki, a HTML template is necessary neither with Flight iGEM nor without Flight iGEM.
Step 2
Without Flight iGEM
Once the template is done, other teammates can start to summarize the project, record experiments’ data by using their Word or iWork.
With Flight iGEM
Flight iGEM requires you and your teammates to work online. We use CKEditor(a free, Open Source HTML text editor) to set up edit environment like Word or iWork.Step 3
Without Flight iGEM
Without Flight iGEM, you need to upload all images and other media files which involved in your articles to the iGEM server manually.
With Flight iGEM
If you use Flight iGEM, all media files(especially the images) which you insert into the article will be automatically upload to iGEM server.
Step 4
Without Flight iGEM
You need to assign the content which converted from Word or iWork documents to the template. In this step, there will be numerous words and sentences that will be copied and pasted, which cost a lot of time and memory.
With Flight iGEM
Flight iGEM can assign contents with template automatically, all you need to do is to select what you want to display, and then click 'Magic'.
Step 5
Without Flight iGEM
After you merged this two page, there are you should upload the "code soup" to the iGEM server, and this is the final step of the whole procedure.
With Flight iGEM
Flight iGEM will upload your pages to the iGEM server after step 4, and the only thing you need to do is to visit your target page and check if the page is exactly what you want.
A typical iGEM wiki can be divided into no less than 8 sections (like the home page, project, safety, team, and so on). Under each section, there are a lot of issues which you want to present. Just like the ‘Project’ section, you may need to tell others about your background information, design, etc. Tedious as it is, we, the same as other 52 teams (52/56), believe that online collaboration can improve the efficiency of creating a wiki. Flight iGEM provides you an online platform, in which you can collaborate with your teammates, so every teammate can create page and edit them at any time or anywhere. To avoid version conflict(covered by others’ edition), we mimic the concept of SVN. You can click me to watch a short video which explains how it works.
According to our investigation among 65 teams, 18 of them thought there were too many deadlines in iGEM and they might be forgotten easily. Moreover，43 teams surveyed indicated that it would be better if there are certain reminders for the deadlines. As we all know, iGEM is a competition composed of a lot of events. To help users manage their time better, Flight iGEM also covers a deadline reminder. Most noteworthy is that this reminder is able to convert time zones automatically according to the users' geographic positions.
Considering that 83% teams (54/65) have encountered the situation that the iGEM server got slower or went down when it is close to the freeze of wiki, we decide to linearize all our request. It means if you want to build up a page and post it to iGEM server, you have to queue for a while until people who requested before you finished their query. To speed up all the requests, we create more than ten queues, which we believe is enough to handle them.