Hi everybody,
I'm new on this list (in fact, it's my first ever list) and am not 100% sure this is the best place to discuss this, so I'll keep it short. I'm thinking of a wiki for people in my field for drafts / notes writing, but I'm not sure if it is practically doable (and I've never developed a wiki before).
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).
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. These are the very basics, but I have a much more detailed idea in mind that I'm willing to discuss. If this isn't the place for it, it would be great if you could redirect me to the webpage / list / IRC or the people I should talk to, thanks!
Cheers,
Federico
Take a look here: http://www.vdash.org/
This is a project just like yours, IMHO. But I guess there are many similar projects here and there; wiki software is free and there are plenty of "not wikimedia" implementatios, covering vatious fields of knowledge & interest.
(Saluti anche in italiano.... homscritto inglese perchè tutti i membri della lista possano leggere :-) )
Alex
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.
* Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com [Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:30:54 -0500]:
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.
I understand that MediaWiki is not the best (although not the worst) for math, but speaking of fine-grained access control, what do you think of HaloACL? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Halo_Access_Control_List Dmitriy
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
I understand that MediaWiki is not the best (although not the worst) for math, but speaking of fine-grained access control, what do you think of HaloACL? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Halo_Access_Control_List Dmitriy
I haven't looked at that. It's a user-submitted extension, so use it at your own risk. From reading the description, it's not clear whether it allows restriction of viewing -- it sounds like it only allows restriction of editing. MediaWiki is not set up to allow granular restriction of viewing, and no extension can easily allow it in a secure fashion. For information on some of the many things that can go wrong with an extension that claims to do read restrictions, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions.
The *only* reliable type of read restriction in MediaWiki, with or without extensions, is when you forbid entire groups (e.g., unregistered users) from reading or editing the wiki at all. If you can edit any page, or view anything beyond a very small and carefully-selected whitelist, you can probably get some information about pages that are hidden to you.
* Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com [Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:48:05 -0500]:
For information on some of the many things that can go wrong with an extension that claims to do read restrictions, see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions.
The *only* reliable type of read restriction in MediaWiki, with or without extensions, is when you forbid entire groups (e.g., unregistered users) from reading or editing the wiki at all. If you can edit any page, or view anything beyond a very small and carefully-selected whitelist, you can probably get some information about pages that are hidden to you.
Thanks for pointing out to the list. I think I've seen it sometime back ago - it was expanded since then. I should check my small access restriction extension against it. Anyway, even the list itself proves that the most (although not all) of issues are fixed since 1.10 and later. It seems that MediaWiki needs only a small step to make it relatively secure for fine-grained views, too. Dmitriy
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