Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-11-03

Report of Meeting 2022-11-03

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller and Bob Therriault

1. Bob apologizes for another meeting miss last week due to connectivity issues.
2. Raul mentions updating an undocumented foreign and suggests that he will continue to make updates to foreigns as he spots them. Bob mentions that he knows of another foreign that involves text output during a session. Raul expresses concern about the size of the Foreigns page and possible difficulties in updating specific areas. We will keep an eye on this to see if it starts to create issues. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/Foreigns
3. Bob demonstrates the changes that he has made to the nav bars on his new wiki area using CSS and HTML https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/J_Code_Search instead of tables https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Nav/Newcomers/Learn, which were used for Chris Burke's nav bars. Bob finds that changing these is easier because the table formatting is condensed, but is harder to find the edit areas. Raul points out that there are combinations of | and LF in the wiki which will allow for easier formatting of table code. Bob was not aware of this and will problem revert to tables since there are tricks that must be used with HTML and CSS in order to display properly. CSS can be used to remove breadcrumbs which allows the nav bars to remain in position at the top of the page. Bob has also expanded the J code search bar to include a site map and Nuvoc. This will be displayed on each path. Raul suggests that we rename Site Map to Page Map because Site Map https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/J_Code_Search suggests that the whole site is up to date and that is an issue because new pages would need to be curated before they were put into position. Page Map would just be the pages that are at the top levels of the wiki that would have nav bars. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Site_Map
4. Art talked about assigning levels of expertise to the essays as a way to further categorize levels.https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Newcomers He suggests doing a decimal point for differentiating within difficulty levels. Bob says he could use the Essay difficulty to show only levels 1 and 2 to newcomers and all Essays would show up on the Reference area. Art would like to do this with pretty fine gradation and this could be a complicated process if there were essays that had simple J and complicated math and Art says the result would be a complex number! Raul points out that complex numbers can be sorted although Ceiling and Floor are outside of the domain. Bob learns something! We decide that decimal point designations may be difficult but a five point scale would be useful.
5. A discussion about how to transition to updating the wiki. Bob thinks that nav bars can be added and then attached fairly quickly. The CSS to remove bread crumbs could be added by a bot. The work becomes getting the right pages to attach to the nav bars and finally to do a forward from the existing main page to the new main page. We may need to look out for redirect limits, but this may be able to be controlled by jumping back a redirect to reduce the number of redirects in a path using short circuits. In the next few weeks we will be opening up to feedback on the structure of the wiki in advance to making these changes.
6. When the J Playground url is made permanent we can be begin to crowdsource people to enter links in NuVoc to provide clickable examples.

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 24:00 (UTC) Next meeting is November 10th, 2022.