Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-04-14

Report on the J wiki meeting of April 14, 2022

Present: Joe Bogner, Chris Burke, Eric Iverson, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

1. J playground, a discussion about the Playground's future path. Joe acknowledged the work that Chris had done on his "2018" version. Decision was made to move on with the "2018" version going forward. Eric suggested that "2018" was not a great name and the J playground would stay. Joe let us know that the mobile experience is an open problem because of memory challenges and he is working on it, looking at doing a mobile stripped down version. Eric asked if Playground snippets can be run in different environments and the answer was that yes they could, although the convenience of being within the browser is a benefit. Joe mentioned that there may be an advantage to having a intermediate step with the url so that if there are changes to the location they can be handled easily. Eric stated that in the past J has been downloaded and often users drift away from the J community. The J wiki and Playground may allow a better community interaction if they are kept together. The J Playground snippets may also be a benefit to the forums as they provide a convenient way to share code. Joe sees a benefit to the Playground staying with the wiki group and the decision is made to keep the two groups together.
2. How to handle information coming into the wiki - the balance of accuracy versus community involvement. Raul suggests that when new information is added we should have a way to flag it so that there can be a focus on updating the information to ensure it is correct. Eric suggests focussing on new information and only going back to clean up old documentation if there is time. Raul has noticed that there is a lot of information that is useful and is only slightly out of date. Both agree that readers have to understand that the information may not be always be accurate. Eric suggests a wiki mission statement that quality information will be promoted on the wiki, but resources are inadequate to do everything. Bob suggests that we use navigation to guide users to the quality information and identify pages that have not yet been reviewed. Also, possibly create different levels of editors, so that reference pages changes would only be done by an administrator after community discussion on the discussion tab. There could also be review by the wiki group before changes are made. Non-reference pages are open to users to contribute without discussion. Joe suggests a GitHub issue at the bottom of every page in addition to the discussion that will allow page specific feedback. This may become the preferred method, since it allows aggregation of comments at a page level which makes curation easier.
3. Raul asks what issues need to be dealt with before the books currently on Jsoftware can go live on the wiki. Finishing off the editing is dependent on feedback and the question is how close are we to bringing information across. Bob asks if it is possible to do by navigation so that new unprocessed information is not highlighted. Raul suggests that the index is useful and would need to be brought up to date, and where are we in that process. Eric suggests that the indices are out of date the day that they were published and perhaps search is the better way to go. Bob suggests finding a way to automatically building indices. Eric suggests that Table of Contents would be preferred and that indices do not have that value. Raul demos code2 Help on the temporary test wiki https://code2.jsoftware.com/mediawiki/index.php/Help Joe mentions that the abbreviations for the book names can be an obstacle to beginners. Tooltips can help with this. Raul reminds us that the changes to the new site will not be reflected in the navigation on JSoftware. Joe suggests that a lot of the information can be found in search and that the information is ready to come across as a result of all of the work that Raul has done.
4. User interface - how friendly should we be - Bob thinks that we should have a gentle learning curve for new users through a friendly interface that may become more terse as you move into pure reference.
5. Joe would like a decision about which of the versions of the Playground we use. Eric suggests that they will configure the repo so that maintenance of the Playground is easier and it has access to the J source. At the end of the meeting Joe gets consensus that the Playground will use the "2018" version as the new foundation and changes will be made to it to achieve the functionality that the prototype currently has with regard to providing snippets of code and viewmat.
6. Bob suggests bringing in as many wiki participants as possible from the community using video, with an target of starting to prepare for more work to be done in the next month. Chris suggests the change to the new version of wikiMedia can be made at any time and the timing will be decided by the J wiki group.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development