Wiki Link

The exchange of information on technical matters employing the world wide web is hampered in at least two different ways:

1.it is very difficult to compose and display equations, and

2.it is virtually impossible to do the same with figures and/or sketches while for chemists, the use of “chemical” designators is well nigh impossible.

It seemed therefore worthwhile to consider schemes other than e-mail which might make information transfer and discussion easier between technically oriented users of the Internet.

To this end two versions, vide infra, of a program, “TechWiki”, have been created and mounted on the WWW for use by students and others. TechWiki allows technical communication of things like subscripts (C₂H₅OH) (and other linear chemical formula and equations), and mathematics, etc..

The TechWiki program is a variant of the Wiki suite of programs intended for information exchange on the WWW in textual matters only. Wiki's are programs which allow users to annotate each others text either by editing it or linking to it. TechWiki just interposes LaTeX between the editing and the presentation of edited material (in a browser's window) so that equations can be typeset and displayed properly, in context, on the World Wide Web.

The two versions of TechWiki (residing on two different servers) differ in that one uses native LaTeX (and therefore requires users to know and employ LaTeX) , while the other uses “Natural Math”, an invention of Prof. Stephen Montgomery-Smith. Natural Math allows students to input mathematics in a linguistic mode which corresponds more nearly to English than any typesetting language.

In the original TechWiki's, LaTeX2HTML was employed to translate the edited message from text (and LaTeX equivalent) to something which could be exported to the WWW for viewing in standard browsers. After using the system for a bit, I became convinced that the indistinct quality of equations which had been converted to GIF's using LaTeX2HTML was such that a better method was needed, so the programs were converted to use pdflatex, a program which generates pdf files from latex input. These are read by Acrobat on the WWW, and provide a much clearer medium for reading and understanding (the rationale for TechWiki in the first place).

The major impediment to communication in a TechWiki environment is the need to e-mail respondents informing them that changes have been made in the Wiki files so that they are aware of a need to re-read the files to see the (new) communication. This asynchronous (rather than chat) mode of interacting artificially slows the process of communicating, but the need for incorporating mail notification of changes has not yet been ascertained.

Lastly, it should be noted that those unacquainted with LaTeX find the system intimidating (unfortunately).

TechWiki can be found at http://mosy.chem.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/Wiki/TechWiki.pl in the LaTeX version, and at http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~cdavid/cgi-bin/techwiki.pl in the natural math version.

Cdavid[?] 20:35 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)