A few months ago I read a short article about a survey, which compared the encyclopedia britannica with wikipedia. Errors were identified in both. Wikipedia had fixed theirs in weeks, Britannica apparently complained about the survey.

The free software foundation and the gnu GPL permit users to change and modify software to better suit their needs. The Design Science License attempts to do similar for non-program software. The united nations has adopted various copyleft licensing to allow handbooks especially those concerned with development to become more readily available to those who most need them. I also recently discovered a creative commons and science commons, another attempt at copyleft.

All this permits modification to better suit the users needs. So thus far ExelCalcs is asking for depositing calculations, and users to comment on their value. However, one persons preferences and improvements are another persons defects.

So rather than creating an environment in which negative criticism is likely to develop. At present new users are in their few days pestered with todays mission requirements. Those missions require review of what is in the repository for many there is not much positive they can be say about what they find. Since at present there is not much there, and not much activity.

To increase activity, encouraging downloading modifying and uploading maybe a better approach. Don't critise, just the make the changes you consider to be an improvement to the workbook. These can be simple.

One person can place a basic spreadsheet there unformatted, just calcs. Another can format with XLC. Another may add a long list of useful reference books, or website links relevant to the workbook. Another may change it from a single solution to multiple solutions in a table, ripping out XLC formatting. Still another may integrate two workbooks into a single more specific problem solver. The GPL permits this and credit remains with all contributors.

In this way the existing repository becomes the seed for growth of workbooks. Those that get favourable comments, and high download rates remain as most preferred solution, others become obsolete and drop from the repository. So the quality of the workbooks can be self-sustaining.

But it needs to be understood that whilst national standards are created by volunteers, they are published and distributed by businesses who defend their copyright.

An Excel workbook or computer source code or any other document placed in a public forum has the potential to develop into a defacto standard in its own right, developed by volunteers and more up to date, and with potentially fewer errors than published standards. Those involved developing such defacto standards whether intentionally or accidently need to be aware of the risks involved and liabilities for infringing anothers copyright.

Applying the standard doesn't infringe copyright. Publishing and distributing it in another form does. Replicating tables from a standard so that do not need to reference that standard is publishing in another form. From what I perviously read on the Australian Standards website creating such for personal use is acceptable, distributing requires permission. I can no longer find this info on their website.

Since I'm not a lawyer I have no wish to risk infringing such copyright. My workbooks cover some 80% to 90% of code contents. It would take a short time for others to build upto 100%.

I believe therefore that the copyright issue needs to be taken seriously properly investigated and dealt with.

I will hazard that MathCAD has a license to publish Roarks formulae. If this website accumulates too many workbooks covering Roarks, then it becomes an "accidental" publisher of the book.