One of the best things about SPE is our wealth of members with extensive knowledge of every industry discipline. Sharing this knowledge with our colleagues and the next generation of engineers is the cornerstone of SPE membership. Founded by SPE members in 2013 to create an ever-evolving, online information encyclopedia specific to the oil and gas industry, PetroWiki was initially seeded with content from the Petroleum Engineering Handbook (Lake 2007). Over the years, PetroWiki has become a valuable resource for young and developing engineers interested in deepening their technical expertise. The short-form entries of wiki articles enable readers to quickly grasp the necessary information and terms vital to understanding our technology and processes.

One of the best things about SPE is our wealth of members with extensive knowledge of every industry discipline. Sharing this knowledge with our colleagues and the next generation of engineers is the cornerstone of SPE membership. Founded by SPE members in 2013 to create an ever-evolving, online information encyclopedia specific to the oil and gas industry, PetroWiki was initially seeded with content from the Petroleum Engineering Handbook (Lake 2007). Over the years, PetroWiki has become a valuable resource for young and developing engineers interested in deepening their technical expertise. The short-form entries of wiki articles enable readers to quickly grasp the necessary information and terms vital to understanding our technology and processes.

Technology has revolutionized the ways by which we access information and learn about topics that interest us. The emergence of mobile devices, information-sharing platforms, and apps have streamlined the conventional methods of learning and knowledge transfer. One of the most notable changes is the replacement of textbooks and encyclopedias with web-based knowledge-sharing portals such as SPE's PetroWiki--a digital portal for oil- and gas-related technical information. PetroWiki.org is a living, growing knowledge resource for oil and gas professionals, featuring more than 2,000 pages of content. Information about a topic can be easily gathered by entering the keyword in the search box.

Ongoing growth in the volume of raw data generated by digitized oil and gas operations has been widely documented (Spath, 2014). What may be less apparent is that the industry is also authoring dramatically more unstructured content--interpretations, learnings, case studies, etc.--on an annual basis. This is not surprising, as anecdotal evidence suggests that most decisions are taken on the basis of unstructured data (Quaadgras & Beath, 2011) (Garland, 2017) (Palkowsky, 2005) (Haines, Shaughnessy, & Briggs, 2006) (Hollingsworth & Schey, 2017). At the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the number of new papers published annually has followed an exponential growth curve that doubles approximately every 10-11 years, beginning as far back as the early 1950's. Beyond books, journals, and conference papers available through the OnePetro digital library, SPE content comprises articles from print (the Journal of Petroleum Technology), digital-only publications (Oil and Gas Facilities, The Way Ahead and HSE Now), a variety of general-interest web pages, and technical resources (PetroWiki and SPE Connect). Well over 200,000 distinct items--papers or web pages--are available through the SPE's web sites as of May 2018. For oil and gas professionals looking for information from SPE content, the growing volume of information and diversity of sources has made it increasingly hard to find the relevant content quickly.

You must log in to edit PetroWiki. Content of PetroWiki is intended for personal use only and to supplement, not replace, engineering judgment. SPE disclaims any and all liability for your use of such content. In the context of drilling fluid, yield is a measurement applied to clay dealing with the number of barrels of a set viscosity fluid that can be made from a given quantity of clay.