Welcome to the Cyon Research Wiki!
Contribute to our MCAE History and MCAE Glossary! Just click on the appropriate link and edit the page.
We hope to provide a resource for the engineering software community to have the kinds of discussions to which wikis are unusually well-suited.
You may be wondering - how does a wiki differ from a forum or a blog? The simple answer: A wiki (from Hawaiian "wiki wiki," meaning "quick") is non-hierarchical, and can be edited by anyone.
The best-known wiki is Wikipedia - a communal encyclopedia. First you are amazed at how good it is. After a long period of use, some of the weaknesses that inhere in the wiki process emerge - as in some recent revelations about biased entries. For structural engineers and the AEC community there is also Structural Wiki, which currently contains glossary of engineering terms and is also used to supplement the AEC software database.
But a wiki allows for a kind of conversation that doesn't happen elsewhere. The fact that we can actually go in and alter each other's entries is a voluntary vulnerability that induces intimacy. People are strange.
A key element of wikis is the ease with which links are created. In ours (powered by DotNetNuke), you generate a link by using ConcatenatedCapitalizedWords or enclosing any text in double square brackets (see legend below the entry edit box). If the page to which your link refers doesn't exist, the wiki creates it right away.
You can also insert html in your text.
Note 1: You can't use your browser's "Back" button to navigate backward; this is a peculiarity of DotNetNuke. Use the icon below the entry labeled, "Back links."
Note 2: You must be logged in in order to edit a page. The login button is in the upper right corner of the page.
Personally, it took me a while to warm to wikis. Too unstructured; too scary, in a way. It's like suddenly being told to color outside the lines...
Here's a couple of pages we put up to get us started:
Wiki on!