I think that we should soon release the Wiki publicly. We need more help from others and it makes no sence to keep it private any more.

The public release date will be on Sunday, November 20, 2005. This will give us two weeks to finalise the things that we want to finish before the release. Personally I will focus on getting the adminsitrative sections like style-guidelines, content policies, licensing etc. finished.

I will also soon send out an email to all registered authors to inform about the planned release date and urge everyone to try to add as much as possible within the next two weeks before the public release. As you might have noticed we are already almost 100 registered authors so we are a fairly large group of editors. If everyone joins forces we should be able to do some significant progress.

What do you think about these plans. Do they sound reasonable?

The default layout of the Wiki is now integrated with the rest of CFD Online and shares the same menu-bar at the top. Once released publicly the menu-bar will also include a Wiki sub-menu with direct links into key sections of the Wiki. This should increase the visibility of the Wiki significantly.

About the license issue that we discussed previously. I have thought about this and I think that we should use the same license as WikiPedia - the Gnu Free Document License (GFDL). This is a free license which allows anyone to use and modify the material as long as proper credits are given and the derived material is released under the same free license. Remeber that each author keeps the copyrights to his own contributions so that you can also, for example, publish your own works in books or journals under a commercial license. Also note that this license allows commercial use of the material. I know that this can be a bit sensitive and that some of you prefered to have a non-commercial use only license. But restricting the use to non-commercial things only creates a lot of difficult questions on what is allowed and what is not. Also, having the material under the GFDL license ensures that the information can be used and made available in the future irrespective of what happens whith CFD Online or this Wiki. In a worst-case scenario where CFD Online is closed or something it would be possible for anyone else to start a new Wiki and publish the material there instead. The material could also be added to WikiPedia since we use the same license. With the GFDL we would also be able to use material from WikiPedia when we want. Unless there is a strong opinion against using this free GFDL license I'll go with that and I'll add information about it to the proper Wiki sections soon.

I agree with all. Thank You very much for Your work and Your personal time.

But I have one question.

Why do You think that CFD-online can be closed? I dare to suggest that Your site possibly is the one in the world.

Why You are afraid of something (someone)? I suppose You haven't enemies. Besides You are promoting the comercial products, so they should be only grateful to You.

I don't see any reason why CFD Online would be closed. It was just a worst-case scenario and even if this happens it would be possible for someone else to use the Wiki material on another site.

thats great, i hope to add few more things, but last one and half months life hasn't given me time to do anything. Lets see.