Extension:WorkingWiki

What can this extension do?
WorkingWiki is a software extension for MediaWiki that makes a wiki into a powerful environment for collaborating on publication-quality manuscripts and software projects.

The WorkingWiki extension allows you to store "source files" in your wiki and develop, test, run and publish them easily. Examples include a project of five LaTeX files and six EPS images that compile together into a single PDF file, or an R script that includes two other R source files and produces a CSV data file and several EPS figures. The WorkingWiki extension keeps track of when the source files have changed and when to redo the processing to update the output, and how to display the various file formats involved. The output files and images can be displayed in wiki pages along with the source code, and can be used as inputs to further computations.

For instance, a research team can use WorkingWiki to archive experimental data (using the wiki's history features to record who uploaded which data points when); develop the data-processing scripts that interpret the data collaboratively in the wiki; develop the scripts that produce figures and tables in the wiki; create the manuscript that presents the results in the wiki; and finally export the manuscript as a .tar.gz file ready to submit to a scientific journal. The data, source code, and manuscript can then be made available to the world as is on the wiki. This process captures all the material needed to understand and reproduce the research project, with its revision history intact, and in a form that is easy to annotate and publish online. A research team developing simulation programs rather than using experimental data can use WorkingWiki similarly. WorkingWiki is developed principally for research groups, but is likely to have a variety of other uses as well.

WorkingWiki operates on source files that are stored in standard wiki pages. Source files are collected into projects. When an output file is called for in a wiki page or by other means, WorkingWiki does its work by invoking  to create or update the file from the source files in its project before displaying it. In this way, you can edit your code (or your data files, or .tex documents, or whatever files) by editing the wiki, and run the code and view the output (the typeset version of your paper, the latest version of your figures, the textual output of your program) just by previewing or saving the page.

For more information, see WorkingWiki's home page.

Download instructions
WorkingWiki's code is housed at sourceforge.net, and is accessible by SVN: svn co https://workingwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/workingwiki/trunk workingwiki

Installation
See http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/projects/index.php/WorkingWiki/Downloading_and_Installing_WorkingWiki for full installation instructions.

Configuration parameters
There are many configuration variables to control the behavior of WorkingWiki. See  and   for commented code explaining each of them.