C T wrote: The big advantage that working with a project like this, hosted by the Wikimedia foundation (or some other 3rd party), is that even when you move on to bigger and better things in your career, the items that you work on here will still be around. I have been involved with too many university or college projects that are really quite neat, but because of changes in administration policy, students graduating, or professors retiring, the servers that host these projects get turned off and the information from the project lost. The "Big Picture" of what I'm trying to do with Wikistandards is to provide resources that you don't have to pay extra money for just to be able to "peek" into how something works. From my experience, the more open and publicized a standard becomes, and the easier that a company or group of individuals has to be able to find and implement that standard, the more likely it will be used. Unfortunately there are a number of people who for various reasons want to shut down the spreading of knowledge, particularly hard-won engineering knowledge that is often supplied in standards documentation. It is also seldom, because of NDAs and quite expensive standards documents, that these propritary documents will make it into an educational setting. From the prespective of an instructor, it would still be useful to create specifications and standards documents in a classroom setting for projects that the class is working on. By having a resource like this where these standards are archived, students from other classs, or even other universities, could look at these ideas and build upon them. In some cases, perhaps you want to simplify a specification for a classroom setting to make it easier to implement, or to emphasis a particular design approach. Besides, there are many situations even in private industry where you are struggling to find and define standards for a project similar to what you are working on. Even if the standards document is poorly designed, it at least gives a starting point to start arguing what changes should be made and what things to improve. There is nothing worse than having a totally blank piece of paper and no previous experience to draw upon. I hope this is the "something larger" that you were looking for. I see a huge need for this as a commercial application engineer, and while my employers were willing to pay for ISO standards, it was still a major hassle to go through the red tape to get them purchased, especially since they were often viewed as a "capital expense" like paying for new compilers or design tools. While I see the industrial applications on a project like this, I can also see huge benefits from having educational institutions participate as well. I also want to point out that most of the early RFCs that form the foundation of the internet were written by college students, including undergraduates as well as grad students. Wouldn't it be neat if we could help become a catalyst for something else like the internet? -- Robert Scott Horning