[Foundation-l] Wikistandards (was Requests for new Wiki projects)

[Robert Scott Horning]

C T wrote:

>I am finding the real trick is to getting people involved. I have over a
>year left in this academic program, and a lot can be accomplished in that
>time frame. Especially with a classroom of participants.
>
>Besides this class and several others are in serious need of an educational
>tool. To be apart of creating such a resource would have tremendous
>benefits.
>
>If we build it, can it be integrated with something larger?
>
>Thanks,
>Craig
>
>  
>
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