Nice summary of the session.

I agree with your point that everyone wants something that is most similar to Word. I think that the Latex solution is more similar to Word, because what you get is a document, rather than an interconnected Wiki-thing. Though the process to get to the document in latex is pretty unfriendly to non-programmer folks. As you mentioned it is very community based. Since I'm a bioinformatics student, most of the people around me can program, so that writing their wet-lab experiments up in latex doesn't require learning anything particularly complicated to them. I do think that wikis are quite nice in the case where you have multiple folks editing the same document together though. I'm just not sure you want your entire lab editing the same thing. Maybe the entire lab should have a wiki or a blog for press-release and big-idea/direction type stuff, but then individuals have their own individual word document, latex document or blog.

The problem with using the wiki history is that it can be pretty challenging to recreate how you got from A to B by digging through the history. In a publication, we throw away the process of how we got from A to B, and we tell the story of how we should've gotten from A to B if we had known how to do it already. I think we should try and leave the sloppy, windy real-process of scientific discovery unadulterated in our lab notebooks.