Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-06-02

Report on the J wiki meeting of June 02, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller, Devon McCormick, Bob Therriault

1. Chris Burke will update the mediaWiki software for the old wiki on the weekend of June 4th.
2. Security for the playground seems to be well sandboxed. The ability to download files may present an issue. Raul points out that javascript has the ability to download files and that web assembly has the same issues as J and web assembly is more popular. The risk may be that downloaded J code could be malicious and later transferred out of the J playground sandbox and onto the host computer, but as Raul points out that is already the case with J add-ons. Bob suggests that security should be kept in mind as we move forward and the risk to the wiki would probably be social engineering. Raul mentions that the changes that he is doing bringing the books and essay across from J software probably presents the biggest risk based on the 700 changes that it involves. The best way to avoid future issues may be to keep backups in case bad code shows up.
3. User access to the playground from the wiki can be done directly or via a landing page. The feeling is that orientation access for newcomers should go through the landing page, but links of examples from Nuvoc would go direct to the J Playground, as the landing page would just get in the way.
4. Raul points out the difference between the tt and code elements in wiki formatting. On the t. page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/tdot he has set some meta code that shows some BNF notation and there may be a need to show this type of meta description that exists outside of tt and code. This could be created using specific CSS for the wiki if a format were decided upon. Raul also showed an example of Rosetta Code which has specific formatting for examples which could be a model for the J wiki https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Metered_concurrency#J
5. Next J wiki meeting will be June 23rd. A discussion of our plan for the summer. Raul hopes to do his transfer to the current wiki soon after Chris has updated the wiki software. The books already exist on the new wiki. Then the focus of wiki development will be on the landing page and building out that network of pages. Can we track that way that people are using it? Raul suggests that we can using the logs of the wiki which can tell us when users moved between wikis which may give clues to the areas that may not be working. This will be something that we may put into place in the summer when more of the landing page network has been established. The measure for when to switch might be use of the new one in preference of the old one, although that is not likely since it depends on knowledge of the new wiki to be at least as common as knowledge of the old wiki. There will also be cases where there are links from the new to the old that would be activated in usual wiki activities and would not indicate dissatisfaction with the new wiki. We may use anecdotal information initially to lead us to the areas that we may want to gather more analytic information, with a possible transfer in September if everyone is happy enough with the result.
6. Raul has built a redirect table for the book pages that have been moved to the J wiki and that is available if in the future the Jsoftware site wishes to set redirects to the J wiki for the books.

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

If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is June 23rd, 2022.