Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-08-04

Report on the J wiki meeting of August 4, 2022

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

1. Bob reviewed the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWqixYyb52Q that he produced to show people places of interest on the current wiki making use of the sidebar to allow access.
2. In categorizing the essays for the new yellow wiki, Bob found that there were essays that exist on the old blue wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page that were not available on the yellow wiki https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page. An example is the 235 problem that Devon had put in in 2008 https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/235Problem. A number of approaches were take to try and update the pages by copying and pasting between the wiki's. Raul noted that the oldest pages of the wiki that were using Moin Moin may need updating. This was originally done with the old wiki by Chris Burke and may not have been done with the pages that were brought in to the new wiki. Since we are using the yellow wiki as a prototype this update is not crucial, but the update would ensure that all of the pages on the blue wiki are available for experimentation on the yellow wiki. An alternative would be to create new pages on the yellow wiki that could be copied from the blue wiki and then have the links adjusted. External links between the yellow and blue wiki could also be used, but this would mean that the blue wiki would receive prototype changes as categories were suggested by users.
3. Bob has created an index page that lists all of the essays https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Categorize in a single column. At this time, asterisks indicate pages that are on the blue wiki but not available on the yellow wiki. Participants can go through this list and click on the link, read the essay, add categories that they believe are appropriate, then return to the index and update the number along side the link. This number would indicate the number of people that had added categories so that the participants would be able to easily spot the links that had not been visited.
4. It was noted that there are links from Essays that have multiplied entries that all refer to the same essay. An example would be the Collatz Conjecture https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Collatz_Conjecture which also is referenced by the link Hailstone Problem, Syracuse Problem and 3n+1 Problem. This increases the number of links without increasing the information available. Devon pointed out that because the essays include the terms, a search would reveal the different terminology. It would require that essays contain the alternate terms, but this should be happening anyway for the user to know why they have been directed to the Collatz Conjecture when they had clicked on the Syracuse Problem.
5. Bob talked about the content of the next video that would explain the process of signing up and then how participants would access the Essays and add their categories. Devon mentioned that we should add an opportunity for the viewer to let us know if there are any areas of interest that they have that we should be working on.
6. Bob estimated the number of essays to be just under 300, Raul came up with 263 and felt that the difference may be in the time between the Eric Site Crawl from November https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Eric_Iverson/Site_Map that Bob is using and the current Essay page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays that Raul is using.
7. Essays may also end up including "50 Shades of J" https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_J and "At Play with J" https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/At_Play_With_J and the categories would be the best way to include this. Devon eventually came up with a count of 233 essays within the Essay section alone.
8. Raul showed the changes that he had made to the J versions from the Release Notes contents https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/ReleaseNotes so that instead of having conflicting links to the versions depending on where you accessed the information. Raul has cleaned up the bag so that all versions are accessed the same way and the J nav has be updated so that it also will allow the user to use navigation between the versions. As new versions come out, they can be added to the stack and then the wiki group could go in and update the navigation links so that they include the added page. Raul also mentioned that it may be a good idea to add Help and Version categories to the individual pages to leverage the use of categories with the version pages.
9. Art suggested that it would be a good idea to include keyword search suggestions at the top of the page that connect with the categories that always show up at the bottom of the page. There was also a question of whether it would be possible to incorporate categories into the search that Chris had put together and potentially intersections of different categories to make the search. Ideally, we would be able to reduce the search area to about 20-30 results. The Math category might include hundreds of pages, put if we add a second category of Number Theory we might reduce the number of hits to a more manageable number.
10. John mentioned that the reference card would be useful to have on the wiki and all agreed. Joh also thought that there should be links to the LAtex origination as that might be very useful to people. It may be worth creating a page in history that would provide background information to the tool itself. John also suggested that the demographics page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Community/Demographics should be added to the Community page on the yellow wiki. This may also be an area that we can encourage new users to participate with.

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 August 11th, 2022.