Biomedical Informatics is a science about information. Almost all of the job is wrangling data into forms that are more understandable. In other words, we transform data into information. Wikis essentially do the same thing. They take human knowledge and transform it into accessible information.
We have all used Wikipedia. It’s a great resource for learning information about all types of things. A BMI wiki would serve the same purpose, but specialized for the BMI program and biomedical informatics as a whole.
The non-paper talks given to the first year PhD students are a great example of what could be included on the wiki. That way, when a student forgets how to write an abstract, they can refer to the wiki. My main motivation for creating the wiki is because I am that student who forgets what to include in a talk or how to access the compute cluster. I want a resource that is searchable and accessible for students throughout their graduate career.
Another goal of the wiki for me is to get students familiar with common tools, like git. There are so many tools that exist make a scientist’s life easier so having a resource available for common tools would be invaluable.
I’ve got lots of ideas, like a list of papers that one should read to understand what each faculty is up too.