Difference between revisions of "News/Tutorial Wiki and Relation To This Site"

Latest revision as of 13:04, 22 October 2016

At the 4th ESI-OpenFOAM Conference a Wiki with tutorials was presented. This is not seen as a competition to this site.

See the full article for details

Date: 2016/10/12 Location: Cologne, Germany

At the 4th ESI-OpenFOAM Conference a Wiki with tutorials was presented. At the presentation (where the janitor of this Wiki was present. In the rest of the text he will be referred to as "I") the question "But we already have a Wiki" was raised and I'd like to clear that: I don't see that Wiki as a competition to this site and I don't have the feeling that this offering (the ESI-Wiki) tries to make this site (you're currently reading) obsolete.

The reason for this is that the scope of these two sites is different: tutorial Wiki focuses on already finished documentation that is currated by an Editorial Board (which also acts as a gatekeeper). This site on the other hand has a more free-form approach. The two main editorial decisions I do are

• accept new users. This is done manually and people who can demonstrate a knowledge what OpenFOAM is are accepted (you wouldn't believe how many "web developers" and "community builders" who obviously have no idea what OpenFOAM or CFD is apply for an account.
• remove obvious spam and nonsense. Since I'm manually checking the new users and no more "community builders" are accepted I hardly have to do that anymore
• sometimes I move articles to more appropriate places (OK. That's 3 points. I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition)

One of the main differences to the other Wiki is that here "work in progress" is encouraged. There are several projects that use this Wiki as their site of documentation. There are also informations that would never be long enough to be called "tutorial" or things that are in constant flux like the hugely popular (according to the server-logs) installation recipies (mainly maintained by Bruno Santos). Sometimes pages here grow to a certain size and then move elsewhere or become something else. An example for this would be the video tutorials by Jozef Nagy where the Idea for the other Wiki started. That is fine by me ("Sometimes the kids have to leave the house to grow up")

Another thing is that I try to keep this Wiki as neutral as possible (I have my opinions but I try not to let them influence any of the decisions that concern accepting users for this Wiki or editing the articles others write on this Wiki. One example is that through a special page everybody who supplies services based on OpenFOAM can add a link to his company to the front page of this Wiki). This is possible because my employer HFD Research allows me to do that. Although ESI currently take a very open approach towards the community (my opinion) there are people that don't see it this way and therefor will not even attempt to contribute to the other Wiki. It is my hope that this site and of course the OpenFOAM forums at CFD-online are seen as acceptable platforms to exchange information on OpenFOAM/FOAM for everybody

--Bgschaid (talk) 15:04, 22 October 2016 (CEST)