Difference between revisions of "Template:Latest news"

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<h2 style="font-size:105%; font-weight:bold; text-align:left; color:#000; padding:0.2em 0.4em; width:50%;">August 25, 2014:</h2>
<h2 style="font-size:105%; font-weight:bold; text-align:left; color:#000; padding:0.2em 0.4em; width:50%;">June 1, 2024:</h2>
[[File:Information overload1.jpg|left|180px]]'''Have you ever experienced information overload?''' Maybe you were like the person in this image at one point, baffled by too many choices and not enough organization. Yet as society continues its march towards further digitizing and storing content and data, finding exactly the information you want becomes increasingly daunting. Organizing and presenting large amounts of information well is now a desirable trait, whether it's a programmer developing a user interface and query tools for [[laboratory informatics]] software or a teacher creating an online course using a learning management program like [[Moodle]].
[[File:WLA icon news.svg|left|120px]] '''It's been a while. How about a few updates?''' First, today you'll notice a bit of a refresh of the front page. It was becoming increasingly obvious that for a wiki that's been around for well over a decade, finding something across the various namespaces (i.e., areas) still wasn't easy. A plethora of links were pasted across the front page, but that wasn't enough. This front page update is the first of several steps towards making knowledge and information a bit more findable on the wiki (there's always more that can be done). We now have a mini search portal for our four larger non-encyclopedic areas: guides and white papers, Q&A articles, journal articles, and books. This not only highlights these four areas more prominently but also gives users several ways to search and navigate the content in those areas. Second, a difficult decision was made to scale back vendor content. To the point prior about highlighting this wiki's encyclopedic and non-encyclopedic knowledge repository, it was time to move the vendors from the encyclopedic space to their own namespace, the ''Vendor:'' namespace. While vendor content is still highly useful to LIMSWiki users, its no longer as front-facing. Additionally, maintaining feature tables for each vendor was increasingly labor-intensive. As such, feature tables were removed, recognizing at the same time the onus remains fully on vendors to be more transparent about making public the full functionality of their offerings so potential buyers can make more informed decisions. Vendor records still retain their history, highlight offerings (i.e., LIMS, LIS, ELN, SDMS, and CDS), industries served, and other original information.  [[User:Shawndouglas|Shawn Douglas]] ([[User talk:Shawndouglas|talk]]) 19:06, 1 June 2024 (UTC)


We've also tried to be cognizant of this problem when determining how to present information in this wiki. The front page has evolved to better and more appealingly organize data access into little "portals" or jumping-off points. But even that becomes increasingly daunting as wiki content continues to be added. This requires a more thoughtful approach using built-in and third-party tools for the wiki software. One recent attempt to organize information involves the use of [[MediaWiki]]'s category tags to better effect. I personally create 18 broad categories that all or most of our non-vendor wiki content falls under. The results of that effort can be found at the '''[[LIMSWiki:Glossary]]''' page. Some may find those categorizations too broad; however, articles can have more than one category. I want to use these 18 categories (with the potential for more later) to cover the entire non-vendor article base. Additional category tags can be applied to further granulate those categories, including crossover. For example, [[electronic data interchange]] may be categorized under the glossary category "Software and hardware terms" and [[hospital information system]] under "Software systems," yet both share the category tag "Health informatics."
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Another attempt to organize this wiki's content is via the MediaWiki [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection Collection] extension. This allows users to render wiki content into a digital book-like structure. We have a live example with the '''[[LIMSWiki:Publications|The Complete Guide to LIMS & Lab Informatics]]'''. The upside is a user can learn about a topic from a curated collection of wiki content. The downside is the content is static, meaning like traditional published documents a new copy must be made to contain updated content. However, we've included live links to the contained articles on the wiki page.
<h2 style="font-size:105%; font-weight:bold; text-align:left; color:#000; padding:0.2em 0.4em; width:50%;">November 20, 2023:</h2>
[[File:Fig3 Liscouski SciStudGuideLabInfo23.png|left|180px]] '''Are you studying some sort of [[laboratory]]-based science in university?''' How well do your classes address [[laboratory informatics]] topics, particularly in the scope of industrial labs and how they operate outside of academia? If you find the discussion lacking, then his guide by industry veteran Joe Liscouski will be worth a look. In his guide ''[[LII:A Science Student's Guide to Laboratory Informatics|A Science Student's Guide to Laboratory Informatics]]'', Liscouski presents "an annotated map of the laboratory portion of a technological world, identifying critical points of interest and how they relate to one another, while making recommendations for the reader to learn more." Hope you find it useful! [[User:Shawndouglas|Shawn Douglas]] ([[User talk:Shawndouglas|talk]]) 18:48, 20 November 2023 (UTC)


As we continue our efforts to add more content, we're hoping tools like the glossary and Collection continue to make approaching the wiki's content less intimidating, alleviating the worries of information overload. We'll also continue to evaluate the front page and how it can be used to better make content easier to find.
[[User:Shawndouglas|Shawn Douglas]] ([[User talk:Shawndouglas|talk]]) 12:53, 25 August 2014 (EDT)
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<h2 style="font-size:105%; font-weight:bold; text-align:left; color:#000; padding:0.2em 0.4em; width:50%;">April 30, 2014:</h2>
[[File:Medical Software Logo, by Harry Gouvas.JPG|left|180px]]'''I wanted to highlight some of the projects''' we've worked on over the past few years. I feel like as the wiki grows, some of the tools buried within it tend to get lost. First, I'd like to again mention the [[LIMSWiki:Resources|LIMSwiki informatics resource portal]]. This project was dedicated to collating as many useful online scientific and health informatics-related materials and research tools as possible. It includes links to books, magazines, journals, blogs, organizations, special-interest groups, government entities, academic programs, conferences, trade shows, research tools, job boards, and a whole lot more related to [[laboratory informatics|laboratory]], [[health informatics|health]], and other types of [[informatics (academic field)|informatics]]. I can't stress enough how extensive we've tried to make this collection of resources.
We have other resources too that shouldn't go unnoticed:
* The [[Laboratory, Scientific, and Health Informatics Buyer's Guide]]: a guide to buying informatics systems, with a list of vendors who have public pricing
* [[LIMSWiki:LIMSforum and LIMS/LI forum posts]]: a collection of popular laboratory informatics discussions dating back to 2010
* The [[LIMS and laboratory informatics questionnaire]]: a request for information (RFI) document to help users in buying an informatics system
* [[Limspec]]: a related but different tool for building a personalized collection of cataloging requirements and vendor questions
[[User:Shawndouglas|Shawn Douglas]] ([[User talk:Shawndouglas|talk]]) 17:43, 30 April 2014 (EDT)
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Latest revision as of 19:06, 1 June 2024

June 1, 2024:

WLA icon news.svg

It's been a while. How about a few updates? First, today you'll notice a bit of a refresh of the front page. It was becoming increasingly obvious that for a wiki that's been around for well over a decade, finding something across the various namespaces (i.e., areas) still wasn't easy. A plethora of links were pasted across the front page, but that wasn't enough. This front page update is the first of several steps towards making knowledge and information a bit more findable on the wiki (there's always more that can be done). We now have a mini search portal for our four larger non-encyclopedic areas: guides and white papers, Q&A articles, journal articles, and books. This not only highlights these four areas more prominently but also gives users several ways to search and navigate the content in those areas. Second, a difficult decision was made to scale back vendor content. To the point prior about highlighting this wiki's encyclopedic and non-encyclopedic knowledge repository, it was time to move the vendors from the encyclopedic space to their own namespace, the Vendor: namespace. While vendor content is still highly useful to LIMSWiki users, its no longer as front-facing. Additionally, maintaining feature tables for each vendor was increasingly labor-intensive. As such, feature tables were removed, recognizing at the same time the onus remains fully on vendors to be more transparent about making public the full functionality of their offerings so potential buyers can make more informed decisions. Vendor records still retain their history, highlight offerings (i.e., LIMS, LIS, ELN, SDMS, and CDS), industries served, and other original information. Shawn Douglas (talk) 19:06, 1 June 2024 (UTC)


November 20, 2023:

Fig3 Liscouski SciStudGuideLabInfo23.png

Are you studying some sort of laboratory-based science in university? How well do your classes address laboratory informatics topics, particularly in the scope of industrial labs and how they operate outside of academia? If you find the discussion lacking, then his guide by industry veteran Joe Liscouski will be worth a look. In his guide A Science Student's Guide to Laboratory Informatics, Liscouski presents "an annotated map of the laboratory portion of a technological world, identifying critical points of interest and how they relate to one another, while making recommendations for the reader to learn more." Hope you find it useful! Shawn Douglas (talk) 18:48, 20 November 2023 (UTC)


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