The development of CFD-Wiki has stalled a bit in 2006. I think that all of us worked a bit too hard on it before the launch. Then came Christmas and New Year and we kind of never got up to speed again after that. I was away on a long vacation in January and February and since then I've been at home on paternity leave with our little 1 year old son. And he hates it when I sit down at the computer , so it hasn't been easy to do serious work on CFD-Wiki.

However, with some joint effort I'm sure that we can get CFD-Wiki going again. After the launch we have had a steady stream of new users - we are now more than 1,200 registered authors. I've also managed to get little Erik (my 1 year old son) hooked on Builder Bob and a few other cartoons. So soon I might be able to sneak in an hour or two every day on working on CFD-Wiki ;-)

The question is how do we do this CFD-Wiki restart best? Should we all just chip in and start editing or do we need any special event or promotion to get it going again? A 48hour CFD-Wiki hacking weekend on Hawaii would be nice if we had the funds for it Have you got any other ideas? Perhaps an email to all 1,200 registered authors would be good, or would that be too close to spamming?

In my case, additional work/research responsibilities killed off the spare time that I had been using on the Wiki. I have been meaning to spend a couple of hours on a weekend getting a few things fixed up (to restart my involvement), but just never got around to it. I'll have more free time relatively soon, but it might help to have some sort of goal to prevent more "not getting around to it" or the like. But what goal? I'm not sure - a hacking weekend sounds like a good idea to me (remote, since there are multiple continents involved - could use IRC or something). Or maybe those geographically close together could do a non-remote hackfest. Here in the US, semesters will be ending soon, so travel will be easier for some of us.

I would not think that emailing everyone once in a while would be spam, especially if it is an announcement.

Yea, we could try to arrange some sort of online event and use IRC or similar to chat on while we work. I'm not sure if it is possible to get people to devote a weekend or so on CFD-Wiki though, unless of course we invite everyone to a free weekend on Hawaii I think that most contributors work when they have some spare time and when that occurs is difficult to coordinate.

Another idea could be to focus on one specific area per week or month. Say that we next week (or month) all focus on improving the turbulence modeling section, and I send out an email in advance to all registered users that we will focus on this area next week. I could also try to summarize a few suggestions in the email on what should be improved.

Next week or month we focus on another area and I send out another email... this is getting close to too many emails, but with more than 1,200 registered authors it is sure tempting to email them once in a while to remind everyone about CFD-Wiki.

What do you guys think?

I had hoped that someone else would respond before me. I guess people are really busy right now (me included). I like your idea of a focus area. One of the issues that we have with the "public" is the perceived smallness of the Wiki. I think the wiki is OK sizewise, but some areas are a bit thin (the FAQ's, for example). Concentrating on particular areas would fix the "thin" issue, and then size would take care of itself. I'm not sure that a week is long enough, I would think a month is better. That would allow a little more time.

Perhaps a more important topic is participation. I have wondered for a while about seeming large number of registered users who have never made any edits. I don't know how often the statistics get updated, but the edits/user number has to have plummeted. Perhaps getting a new round of edits going will get people involved and discussing stuff (both on the talk pages and in the forum). The focus area idea might do that.

Jason

I have been very very busy for last few months, I hope will be little free after 25 may. And will start to write some texts to wiki articles. Lets see.

Okay, lets try this "focus area" approach then. I agree with you that a week is probably too short. A month is better - long enough to get something done and still short enough not to make people loose momentum.

Remains to decide what areas we should focus on then. Anyone have any suggestions? What should we start with?

Here is some brainstorming ideas:

o Turbulence modeling

o Discretization schemes

o One "special topic" like aeroacoustics, combustion, ... etc.

o Validation cases

We can take one area each month.

I'll send out an email soon to all registered CFD-Wiki users to notify them of the area we select as focus area for May.

Yea, I've missed your contributions, you did a faboulous job when we launched the Wiki. I hope that you are not having any problems accessing CFD-Wiki now, if you do please let me know and I'll look into it again.

I'm fine with starting with your list - starting with turbulence modeling is a good idea. I was thinking that we might make quicker improvement if there are specifics about what needs work. Otherwise, we might get more articles before the ones we have get better. From reading your recent posts, I would guess that "implementation advice" is on your priority list, so my brainstorming addition is:

* Turbulence modeling

-- Implementation details/advice on models

-- FAQ's

-- Better introductory material

-- Simple example calculations (maybe just for the simple models, and maybe this belongs in Validation Case)

I'm sure that there are other things as well, I just can't think of any more off the top of my head, and the last one is pretty weak.

Jason

Good ideas, I'll try to summarize this in an email which I'll send out tomorrow to all registered CFD-Wiki users. Lets hope we can engage some new authors with this new approach.

So turbulence modeling is the focus area of May then. I've changed the featured article to be a turbulence model (the baldwin-lomax model, which has a fairly complete description) and I've also added a sentence to the intro text on he main page with a link to a page with some suggestions on what could be improved in the turbulence modeling section. Please add your own suggestions there.

I'll wait with the mass email until tomorrow. Need to sleep now.

Hey guys!

It's been a long time, hein!

I've been quite involved with some research etc... But CFD-Wiki was always on mind

I like your ideas about focusing on topics. I have a small suggestion though: I beleive it would be easier for us if we divide ourselves into teams, and then each team takes on a different task. This would work if we have a minimum number of editors per team (say two or three). Two editors would focus on turbulence, two other would focus on cleaning up the discretization methods etc... And of course, i wish we had some kind of marketing team that advertises the Wiki.

I was thinking of working on a banner that we can put on our personal websites as well as the websites of our graduate institutions/groups. I don't think that our former advisors would mind doing that, provided we were good GRA's

This is exam week for me - Keep me updated with your decisions.

Thanks

Hi guys,

I felt guilty yesterday! lol

I created a banner and i would like to get your feedback. Tell me if you hate it.

It's in SWF format. I still have to add the link to the Wiki site.

http://students.utsi.edu/tsaad/cfdwikitest.htm

well, actually, the link is already there!

Hi Tony! Long time no see I missed your great work on CFD-Wiki!

About your suggestion to create different groups that focus on different areas. I think that this would be excellent once we have a large group of active authors. However, for the moment most contributions to CFD-Wiki have kind of stalled so I'm afrad that if we at this stage divide our remaining forces too much we might not be able to create the momentum necesseary to keep people engaged.

I don't think that the two ideas are exclusive though - we could have a monthly focus area, which we change every month and invite all registered users to help with while we at the same time also create smaller groups that are "responsible" for certain topics. It is of course okay to work on areas that are not the monthly focus area.

A marketing team would also be great. So far it is only me and CFD Online that has done most of the marketing. Your banner looks great, good work! I have a few minor suggestions though: We have called the Wiki "CFD-Wiki" everywhere else, perhaps for consitency it would be better to use that on the banner also. The link displayed on the banner shows the link ...cfd-online.com/wiki. It should be ...cfd-online.com/Wiki. Would it be possible to convert the banner to an animated gif instead? Many CFD users are on platforms where there are no flash-plugins available so you would reach more people with an animated gif instead.

On the marketing issue: how reliable are traffic stats (like the ones from Alexa) in determining relative "importance?" If one can believe in the #'s, then I'd say the important thing is maintaining the current position. Are there other CFD related sites like CFD-Online? There are some similar sites, but... I just did a Google search on "CFD", and CFD-Online comes up number 1 (Ask.com -> 2, Yahoo -> 1 &3).

I like the banner, but it would also be nice to have smaller buttons. Not that I have time to make one.

i fixed the CFD-Wiki name and the link.

Regarding the animated GIF, I was trying to figure out a way that will produce a small sized gif from the swf movie - unfortunately, since the swf movie is complicated, the gif size turned out to be super large (1 MB) which is unreasonable.

To do the small size gif, the animation has to be simple - which can be done. Therefore, I suggest working on several banners of different sizes (some swf, some gif) as well as buttons as jason suggested. Then, we'll put these banners online and people can pick the one they mostly like to put on their website.

If you guys are okay with this, i shall proceed as suggested.

Best

I don't think that the issue is to market CFD-Wiki in order to compete with other CFD sites. CFD Online is already the most well known CFD site and CFD-Wiki's position in that respect can't become much better. According to Alexa CFD Online is 10 times larger than any other CFD site in terms of reach and traffic and CFD-Wiki has the "top spot" on CFD Online's front-page. Alexa is fairly reliable for larger sites (top 100k sites), but the numbers for the smaller CFD sites are a bit uncertain since they simply don't have enough users to give good statistics.

The issue is to get CFD-Wiki known among the CFD people who do not spend a lot of time surfing the net. My estimate is that only about 10% of all CFD users vist CFD Online regularly, perhaps 50% visit it a few times per year and 50% never visit it. And they rarely visit any other CFD sites either. If all CFD users became aware of CFD-Wiki and the information available in it they would probably use it more often and refer to it whenever they need some CFD reference. Hopefully this would also engage more people to also contribute.

So the issue I think is to get CFD-Wiki known among non-surfing (or perhaps rarely-surfing) CFD people.

I tried to register (login) myself but I did not succeed. Do you have a suggestion?

hi folks, accept compliments for the great job you are all doing to widen the scope of cfd-wiki. Jonas, i was just wondering if we could make the information easily accesible by grouping the models according to the number of equations AND ALSO according to compressible or incompressible flows. just looking throuh the list you suggested for the subsequent months, i noticed, as is the case with many cfd resources, that transition modelling was not going to come up soon. could you, maybe foresee that for some time later? i am a beginner in the field and i appreciate the wealth of experience you all share here. regards, ben.

About incompressible vs. compressible turbulence models. Most turbulence models were developed for incompressible flows. However, they can still be used for many compressible flows. Compressibility effects on turbulence are normally small for flows below the hypersonic regime. Perhaps someone should write an article about this and what extra terms that occur for compressible flows. Some guidance can be found in this CFD-Wiki article:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Favre...okes_equations

About tranistion modeling. This is an interesting topic. I hope someone would write something about it. Personally I'm only familiar with the basic concepts of the more common approaches. I think that I emailed a bit with someone who was going to write about transition modeling, but so far I haven't seen any articles about it. I agree with you that it would be valuable to have in CFD-Wiki.