On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 11:09 AM, federico.urban@libero.it federico.urban@libero.it wrote:
I work as a researcher in physics and I often need to work on notes or drafts for scientific papers with people in different places around the world. Most physicists / mathematicians write their notes and papers in LaTeX, which needs to be compiled and can be then viewed with a DVI previewer (all this is open source software).
MediaWiki supports math markup with LaTeX, using the <math> tags. It only supports a whitelist of LaTeX, however, not the full language, to avoid denial-of-service with trivial infinite-loop macros (or just inefficient code). The LaTeX is normally displayed as PNG images. It's not really meant for writing up entire LaTeX documents on the wiki.
I was wondering whether there is, or could be, a wiki for academics, students, and such, in my field which would allow the co-authors of a paper or notes to work on it online, including compiling and previewing, with all the nice features wikis usually have (records of changes, etc). Only the members of the collaboration should have access to the notes / drafts of course, so in this sense it isn't a true, open, wiki.
MediaWiki doesn't support fine-grained access control, by design. If you wanted to use MediaWiki for this, you'd have to set up a separate wiki for each group of collaborators.
Generally speaking, wikis allow you to write pages in HTML or something that translates to HTML, not in LaTeX. If you want to collaborate on full LaTeX documents, you might be better off with a general-purpose version-tracking system, like git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, etc. Like my git repository here:
http://aryeh.name/gitweb.cgi?p=rtg;a=summary http://aryeh.name/gitweb.cgi?p=rtg;a=commitdiff;h=c7b23634b746eb868c5b4bab7d... http://aryeh.name/gitweb.cgi?p=rtg;a=tree
gitweb isn't the most friendly web interface, though.