Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-05-12

Report on the J wiki meeting of May 12, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

1. First focus was some formatting work on Art's Array Manipulation page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Array_Manipulation
2. A discussion on the possibility of having a second wiki meeting to accommodate other time zones. We will see what interest there is. Also, issues with participation with zoom for those who are FOSS adherents, suggestions were to use a browser based Zoom client on a FOSS browser may be a solution.
3. Preparation for the wiki transfer. Raghu suggested previously that there should be a checklist of projects. This is a very good idea, but may be best used when people have identified their areas of interest. The feeling is that we should leverage the interests of people to increase the motivation that is required to create useful wiki pages.
4. Bob has still not discussed the mechanism of wiki transfer with Chris.(at time of writing this has been resolved and changes will be made on the prototype wiki, yellow J. https://code2.jsoftware.com/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page)
5. Discussion of whether is there is any use of indices, if a way of quick maintenance could be found. Indices are important for search engines and that is why they probably should be included in some form. Categories may be the way to begin to generate the raw material of indices. Wiki has five index categories. Books Essays Guides Links and Nuvoc. Of these Links seems the least useful. Essays is automatically created, Guides is curated, Links is just a list of links. It may make the most sense to have the indices at a high level so that the provide a navigation feature without dropping down too many levels.
6. Then we discussed ways to track changes in the wiki so that indices can remain up to date. This is an area of continuing investigation. Ideally changes on the wiki might be tracked by a robot that could modify the index as an integrity check. There is also a training aspect to teach people to check the pages that link to the changed page which may include indices and the instigator of the change would need to to ensure that the index is correct.
7. In order to generate more community interest, Bob feels that leveraging the interest of participants is important to motivation. Raul points out that this can create too many idiosyncratic wiki pages that develop into a non uniform level of information across the wiki. Bob suggests that his focus will be on communicating the tools of navigation and curation so that pages are created and placed in positions where they are most useful. Where would Art's Array Manipulation fit in? Perhaps as a link on a Resources index page. Pages could be further categorized to provide links across the indices.
8. Bookmarks could be a good way to self index and if individual posted their lists of book marks on their user page, that may be a way to share links and expertise. Perhaps it would be good to find a way that bookmarking a page would add to an index on the user page. This would keep the links within the wiki and would encourage people to use the user pages more. Communicating this is the first step to seeing how useful it is for the community.
9. Playground is moving along with a focus on internal issues, we may see whether there are more people who are interested in the interface. Perhaps Raghu would be interested in interface development as he worked on the BQN interface.

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

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