Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-08-25

Report of Meeting 2022-08-25

Present: Art Anger, Chris Burke, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

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

1. Bob talked about the recent increase in requests for wiki id's as a result of the recent videos. Also, note that the two wikis require separate request for id's for those who were not users when the yellow wiki was created. This will be mentioned in the next wiki update video. There are also issues with the confirmation emails being delivered consistently and at the time of of this writing Chris has cleared up the issue, which should reduce the barrier to new users.
2. A discussion of APLcart https://aplcart.info/ a specific search of 'how to' answers to solve common problems in APL https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APLcart. APLCart was developed by Adám Brudzewsky to alleviate the number of questions that he was asked and it is currently hooked to the workspaces of Dyalog, the APLwiki https://aplwiki.com/wiki/ and the RIDE online interface at tryAPL.org As people have trouble finding answers Adám updates the keywords to make APLCart more easily searchable. This may be a direction that Phrases may take on the wiki. BQN has already borrowed the concept with BQNcrate https://mlochbaum.github.io/bqncrate/
3. A discussion of the structure of add-ons. Raul reiterated Chris' observation from the previous meeting that it is important to have a well organized structure, so that new to the system can navigate easily and more experienced users have good access to add-ons that may be more specialized. Bob suggested that the analogy that he thinks of is a library. It has sections that are specific and it has sections that are general, such as reference sections. Within each section the texts are categorized by section then indexed within the section by a Dewey decimal system and can also be accessed through a general index. It allows wandering into a section and browsing within a category. This may be a useful model to consider when organizing the addons. Raul also suggested that it would be a good idea to have some sort of a template for add-on documentation, but it is also important that the template not lead to imprecise documentation.
4. Curated bookmarks still are intriguing as way for users to share their knowledge of the wiki structure through the bookmarks that they find useful. This will involve a lot of education of how to use bookmarks effectively with the wiki and then organize them in a way that is valuable to other users.
5. Bob mentioned that the J Add-on Library (JAL) https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/JAL/User_Guide is probably the best route for getting education how to work with the add-ons, while the vocabulary seems to have the best description of each add-on https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/Libraries, and Pacman is the menu that gives access to the addons that are installed through JAL. Github can also be used to supply addons, but if not in within the JAL the add-ons have to be done on an individual basis as they do not show up in the Pacman interface. Raul thought that there should be increased support for non JAL addons, so that private GitHub addons that had been used in the past would be able to updated easily through Pacman. Private add-ons would still need to be initially discovered outside of Pacman.
6. Bob has put the J reference card https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/NuVoc developed by Viktor Grigorov on the top of the Nuvoc page and in the ancillary pages as well https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Guides/GettingStartedSerious. The format of the file is shown by the extension A4 or USLETTER
7. Raul mentioned that when the categories have been done on the yellow wiki that a bot could be used to transfer the categories to the blue wiki.

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

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