Hi,
 I used XWiki for my diploma thesis. I mean, my teacher was checking my progress in xwiki. I used following schema.
Every chapter was one wiki page. There was one page, where were all links to chapters. Some sort of main page.

When the chapter is in one page, makes comments is easy. You know the context, so it clear what you want comment.

What I missed, was the transfer to LaTex. I had to do this manually. But i think it is better to keep the text in wiki syntax. My point is, you can convert it to LaTex when you want. Why make it incompatible to rest of xwiki?

During my work, i realize that will be great to have special tags like first draw, finished, commented, errors and so on. So you have the summary of your work. These tags will show on the page next to links.

So i think that xwiki is  ready for collaboration on the diploma thesis right now. One thesis one space. Maybe first page will be special with some code, but rest of them will be normal xwiki pages.  With Latex export and tags you will have what you need. It is my personal opinion, but that is what i missed when i used xwiki for diploma thesis.

Jan

On Feb 6, 2008 2:54 PM, Tim Chippington Derrick <tim@chippingtonderrick.co.uk> wrote:

Sounds like a great project. We are a small (2 person) company working
in mathematical optimisation, and we would like to be able to use XWiki
for requirements capture, logging issues, developing documentation and
similar. We often need to include equations and the like in our
documents. I love LaTeX, but nobody else I know really gets it, so we
end up using (yuk!) MS Word and (ugh!) Sharepoint. Would love to be able
to contribute to the project, but at present the workload is about 6+
days per week due to overlapping projects... so we have *no* time to
spare just now. Maybe later in the year I could help.

Tim

Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in
> academic environments, requesting features such as support for
> mathematical equations or support for LaTeX.
>
> We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing
> scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some "would
> be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at
> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send
> comment on the mailing list).
>
> Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold, and
> that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment,
> the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why
> we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this product,
> and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us.
>
> If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the
> sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a
> teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We
> can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements,
> question answering, code review, etc.
>
> Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others
> require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments in a
> dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from
> bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy
> systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm based
> on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of
> this, too.
>
> If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and
> mark the product as active.
>
> Regards,
> The XWiki dev team