WikiStandard aims to be a collaborative effort on promoting open, professional, and high-quality industry standards, and good standardization practices.
Standard is what guarantees the quality of products. Standards sets the minimum limit, and promote for quality improvement. Food and medicine standards ensures the health of people around the world, however recent example shows that behind closed doors, the unavailability of the text of these standards creates black-boxes in food production and supervision, as well as axiety in consumers. The author(s) of this manifesto believe that knowledge of the content of these standards, like the fundamental humen right to information are undeprivable.
Although the author(s) of this manifesto doesn't involve in the food and medicine industry, he nontheless find urgency in lowering the entry barrier to access the contents of standards.
The initial activities of WikiStandard will be on the information technology industry, where traditional standardization practices are not catching up to the needs of technological development.
In the ancient time, standards mainly focused on the quantity of goods - the size dimensions of goods, the weights. Ancient Qin dynasty of China developed "Du Liang Heng", standardizing lengths, volume, and mass. More recently, the SI system of units - the 7 base units and vastly many derived units enabled evaluation of quality of goods on aspects never imagined before.
What we've discussed so far are "performance" characteristics, not the "techniques" used to achieve those performance characterstics. For traditional goods, that's fine, but for IT systems, we need more than that.
IT systems communicates with each other, so we need the digital communication languages to agree, and unlike human language, these don't allow for ambiguities. The system designers need to know, beyond how to communicate, why they should communicate like that, thus we need Rationales.
The designers of the communicating systems are often also designers of the communication languages, they know all too well how to do something, why it's the best way to do it, and when that technique is not available, what are the alternatives. Thus we also need Recommendations.
The designers of the communicating systems MUST NOT monopoly to their advantage. The communicating systems need agility, and multiple vendors need to produce interoperable products. Imagine a world where you buy a 4K TV set, just to find out it doesn't have an HDMI port - you had to buy a set-top box from the very same vendor, and subscribe to the pre-censored content they lock you in. Closed standards are simply Unacceptable.
The author(s) of this manifesto aims to set standard in writing standards. The first thing that is considered, is to provide usage and implementation guidance on existing IT industry standards. Just to make it clear, we're not pirates, we never will be - we're merchants, just like those existing publishers of standards. Our content will be novel, and most importantly contain insights not present in published standards.
Published standards are good for conformance testers, but we aim to be helpful to implementers and users. Beyond just listing the mandated features of a standard, we draw from third party researches, explaining
Beyond existing standards, we develop a few standards of our own. It's like opening a barber's shop at the ground floor and helping out your neighbor - we're well aware we're not a global chain brand, but we have the ambition to be one.
We hope one day, standard developers at established institutes will consult us as well as our community members for opinion. And maybe perhaps, just perhaps, they'll accept the wordsmithing of ours.
The author of this manifesto would like to invite mutual recognition of Next Generation Arithmetic on improving the accessibility of high quality computer science knowledge.