Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-01-12

Report of Meeting 2023-01-12

Present: Art Anger, Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

1. The meeting began a bit later than usual with Bob showing some of the things that he had discovered about the category trees. There are two types of ways to add categories. One is to add a category to a page which allows you to group pages and the other way is to have other categories added to category pages which have a prefix of Category: prior to their name and this creates a hierarchy of categories that results in a category tree. A category page describes each category and lists all the categories and pages that share the category. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home This information is shown at the bottom of the category page, but above it the content can be like any other content page. These category trees become navigation to the entire wiki right down to the level of individual pages based on the categories that have been assigned. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:1)_Newcomers
2. Bob also showed the way that category trees automatically produce effective page maps through the category tree hierarchy. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Page_Map The ordering of the pages is alphabetic by their name and those names can include numbers and unicode. If the name of each page begins with a numbering scheme then the name space can be kept clean and set in a specific order. This structure would make it easy to add additional categories at the end of any level of the tree. It would be slightly harder to insert an category in the middle of the tree. As a result, the plan will be to work on getting the category tree structure into a form that reflects the wiki accurately. The remaining work is to assign pages the appropriate categories within the category tree. Pages can be attached to a variety of positions in the tree allowing wiki pages to be used in different contexts.
3. As an example of how a category page could be used Bob showed an example of how the Newcomers view of NuVoc might include more foundational material to allow a better context for the Newcomer when they see NuVoc. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:D)_Nuvoc This will result in more work curating the information to be used in the structure. Ed asked what was meant by curation and Bob suggested that curation was the difference between a pile of books and an organized library that included librarians that could pass along their knowledge of the structure of information within the library.
4. A discussion of the content that should be in the Developer and the Newcomer areas. Ed asked if there was a general agreement on the challenges of introducing the J language to Newcomers and Developers. His experience was that it was very difficult to introduce the language and employers reacted negatively to attempts to introduce J to enterprise. Bob felt that the reaction that Ed experienced is typical and that there is a good podcast episode of CoRecursive about introducing the new technologies. https://corecursive.com/040-tech-evangelism-with-gabriel-gonzalez/ The trick seems to be to introduce new technology in areas that it is ideally suited so that the disruption is minimal for the gain and expand from that initial gain.
5. Ed showed the flashcards that he has made that allow people to learn the lore of J based on the phrases of J. He used NuVoc as his source with one side a description of the problem in English and the second a phrase in J that would be a solution and the third side was references for further study. He has done about 250 flash cards. Ed then looked at APLcart that Adám Brudzewsky had developed https://aplcart.info/ and felt that APLcart could be the foundation of many ways to access the information either as flash cards, keyword search, or examples for further study. Ed wanted to take the temperature of the meeting to see if there was interest in crowdsourcing the information that would go into the J version of APLcart. Within the meeting it was felt this would be a good project to work on. Bob mentioned that Adám had offered the use of the APLcart framework for J. Raul said that keywords might be a good way to generate keywords for particular disciplines. An electrical engineer might use the same phrase as a mathematician for very different reasons.
6. Raul pointed out that the Vocabulary was originally an appendix of the J Dictionary and with NuVoc we seem to have reversed that order and sometimes the context that existed with the Dictionary is harder to recapture.

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

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