Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-07-14

Report on the J wiki meeting of July 14, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Bob Therriault

1. Bob reported that he had set up a page for new developments in the new wiki. Currently it has content of Raul's index work and some work that Bob has done on creating navigation bars that would supply breadcrumb navigation on each page.
2. The breadcrumb navigation does have a challenge because it does not actually track the user's movement but only the position of the user within the wiki. Bob has also been working on a map of the wiki that will expand and collapse to create a kind of a site map. In discussion with Art it may be that it is easier to create the tree structure with pages in the new wiki and then have the site map crated directly from the tree structure itself. This will mean that there will be a lot of reorganization of the new wiki including the updating of internal links. This might be done with redirection of pages, but it seems to Bob that this would be harder to maintain in the long run. It may be better to have short term pain with a much more supportable wiki in the long run.
3. The real challenge in building a wiki this way is that changing the whole structure of the wiki is very difficult, adding a page may be less difficult and changing content on a given page is easy. Bob's feeling is that the structure of the wiki would not change much over time, new pages could be accommodated and most of the change is in the content.
4. Manual creation of navigation requires a lot more attention to the wiki on a day to day basis and since this could be handled programmatically if the structure is set more permanently, that becomes an argument for a restructuring of the wiki. The big question for the community is whether anyone has arguments to support that it is more important that the wiki structure is fluid and allow movement of branches to different positions.
5. Bob possibly to create a video this week to draw attention to access to the new wiki and the new development page.

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

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