2021-11-18 Minutes

Meeting on Improving the J Wiki

Bob Therriault gave his introduction, others followed: Chris Burke wants to improve and modernize the J experience; Henry Rich started working doing assembly language at IBM but was captivated by APL there - he likes Hileah in DC, a tapas place; Art Anger was introduced to APL by Ken, worked at computing department of MIT doing APL, started using J after he retired in 2004; John Baker has been using J since the early '90s, uses it all the time (sometimes clandestinely), wrote a lot of the ODBC parts of it; Will Gajate recommends Sripraphai, lives in Forest Hills, native NYer from the LES, he is interested in finance and the tool-of-thought aspect of J for modeling things in his head. Both Will and Bob see this as a good time for array languages.

Raul Miller learned APL from Vin Grinell, does text work in J, has a favorite Japanese restaurant or Sbarro's; Michal Wallace (TangentStorm) took up J to be a beginner again, got work at 1010 Data doing K, likes Bengali food in particular.

Ian Clarke did not attend but wants to participate. He made the point that orphaned pages may be valuable so we need to be careful about pruning.

Raul mentioned that one problem with wiki is that it cannot search for J tokens but have to use words. Chris says that MediaWiki's search engine ignores a lot of characters, but there is a second search engine in the wiki that is more capable (written in PHP calling J).

The wiki is stored in a SQL DB (MySQL) which can be dumped as text. The wiki is programmable, allowing repetitive tasks to be automated. The wiki allows multiple categories per page to be specified which helps searching. "Special pages" has interesting information about the wiki. "Category:Wiki" specifies a "Wiki" category which allows generalized linking. See bottom of this page for example.

My NYCJUG meeting notes are single pages - how would categories work for a multi-use page like this? Use multiple categories relevant to what's on the page.

How would we give people incentive to do small amounts of work? Could we gamify it by giving points or something for edits? It would be helpful to have a list of needed work.

Could we archive pages without deleting them by putting them in a less visible part of the wiki which would require a special search to find.

For the coming week: perhaps go into an area of the wiki in which you are interested and add some categories. Henry suggested making known the existing categories to help people choose good ones.

Bob is suggesting tagging pages with the category of our own initials if we think it should be deleted. This will allow oversight of the deletion process. We should also think about what pages should be updated.

It would be useful to analyze searches to get an idea of what searches are failing to give us ideas about how to make it easier to find things. Chris will look into what logging is available to do this with consideration of maintaining user anonymity.

BT added - Bob will provide a update post for the Programming forum and find to the status of deleted pages when wiki is rebooted.

This coming week see how well we can exchange information about the wiki using the wiki.Development of the J Wiki W.3