I have started to work a bit on the turbulence section that Michail and others worked on some time ago. As before I base it on the turbulence book written by Prof. W. K. George. Prof. George has allowed us to use this book. I will continue this work later. The structure in the turbulence sections needs to be improved and wikified and it needs a lot of other additions also, like uploads of images etc. A pdf copy of the book can be found on http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~wkgeorge...electurenotes/

I have started to add different types of navigational tools in the turbulence section. There is an overal menu system in the top right corner and at the bottom of each page I will put links to go "Up", "Back" and "Forward" to the neigbouring articles. What do you think of this? Should I add something else or change something? Any other suggestions?

Here is an example of how it might look:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Ensem..._in_turbulence

It looks ok to me. In the Meshing articles, I have included something similar (but at both the bottom and top of each page). I like that form better, but either way gets the same thing done. Incidentally, I am away from fast Internet access for a while, so I won't be doing much editing for a bit.

Jason

I like the way you used the links at the bottom of the meshing pages. I might copy that idea. Good suggestion!

I assume that the time away from a fast intertnet means a long summer vacation I hope you have a nice summer! I will be working a bit on CFD-Wiki for a few more weeks but then I'll also be away for a month or so with only a laptop and a mobile phone connection.

By the way. I have taken a short break in the marketing of CFD-Wiki now. I can't continue to harass all CFD Online users about CFD-Wiki all the time. I will try something new in a couple of weeks. I'm still a bit concerned that we are so few dedicated authors.

I'm glad you like it. I borrowed the look from one of the better wikibooks, so I won't take credit for it. I had initially wondered if the navigation links would clash with the templated table of contents - it doesn't seem to, but having navigation links at both the top and bottom might be overkill.

My vacation is not as long as I would like - but then when is a vacation ever long enough? My internet access is slow enough that forum posting and email will be it. I was working on a test of a tabular format for the codes page - I forgot to post it, so I might do it offline and then post it later for feedback.

On the marketing thing, it is probably better to do it off and on rather than continuously. People tend to tune out "routine" emails and the like. Keeping it irregular or low frequency will probably work better (and be easier on you, too).

Jason

When you mentioned wikibooks I realised that it might not be that good to base everything in turbulence on just this book that we are using. A better approach is probably to enter this book as a separate CFD-Wiki text-book. I have started to experiment with that, calling it "An introduction to turbulence". I also added a chapter navigation template which is quite new at wikibooks and which improved the navigation a bit. It looks a bit similar to your suggestion. You can see an example here:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/An_in..._of_turbulence

What to you think about this? Should we separate textbooks in this way or is it better to keep everyting unbookified so to say?

I took a look, and it looks good. On the issue of "bookifying" - I think that this material is a natural for "book" form. Much of the rest of the material we have is probably best left in standard wiki form. For example, your turbomachinery article is good as a single page - no clicking around to find stuff, and it stands on its own.

On the other hand, bookifying some of the other material would really help with our notation problem (mentioned previously on the forum), since unified notation throughout is really a requirement for a book. Two candidates for that type of thing would be the numerical methods stuff and the turbulence modeling stuff. I'll have to think on this some more, but one of those might be a good project for me to start on later this summer - I wanted to work some more on the codes page first.

Even if we do create "books", as long as we create good "chapter" articles the overall wiki quality should only be improved (since a good article is a good article no matter how it is organized or linked).

Jason

I'm glad that you like the idea. The problem is to keep a good balance between what we make books and what we keep as normal CFD-Wiki articles. The book feature with slashed links between chapters (Book1/Chapter1, Book1/Chapter1/SubChapter1, Book1/Chapter2, ...) is active now so it is possible to create books with chapters and get automatic back links etc. in CFD-Wiki.

However, the experience from Wikipedia is that this type of book feature with a tree-structure is confusing in the long run. It is very difficult to choose which book a certain subject belongs to. Most subjects can belong to different books. Wikipedia has therefore disabled the book feature and instead moved all books to wikibooks. They had the book feature active a few years ago but it created a mess with the same articles belonging to different books.

I think that a book should be fairly independent and self-supporting, probably written by a few dedicated authors. One classification is to make educational books, like for example the "introduction to turbulence" book we talked about, but try to keep specific and more independent subjects that do not belong in an educational textbook as normal CFD-Wiki articles.

I think that we will have to test our way through this. There is no correct way to organize CFD-Wiki and as I said Wikipedia's experience is that that the book feature, although nice in theory, often leads to problems.