Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-01-19

Report of Meeting 2023-01-19

Present: Art Anger, John Baker, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

1. The meeting began with John speaking about his habits of using the wiki and the thing that he often checks is the recent changes. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?hidebots=1&limit=100&days=30&enhanced=1&urlversion=2 This means that he has two wikis to check and wonders about the differences in the changes he is seeing. Raul explains that the prototype (yellow icon) wiki https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page is really just for experimentation and we are not trying to duplicate all of the changes that occur in the current (blue icon) wiki. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page John wonders when the changes that he sees in prototype wiki will appear in the current wiki. Bob says that is an excellent question and currently he is looking at building a category tree in the current wiki that will not affect the content, but will serve as a navigation aide. Currently he is working on confirming the tree structure. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Site_Map That should be complete in the next two weeks and then the category tree should be operational by the end of February with links to the pages in the current wiki. After that there will be more work to do on the content as out of date pages might be brought up to date or examples in NuVoc might be attached to the J Playground when there is a permanent URL for it. https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html2/
2. Bob then had a hitch as he could not share his screen, but used chat links to show what he had done with the category trees. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home Category pages can also contain content which allows them to provide content to the pages that are attached to those categories. The category trees would include sections for developers as well as newcomers, references, community and the J Playground
3. Bob then reviews the draft he has created of the category hierarchy. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Site_Map This list is in bullet point but would actually be in 1.2.1.3 format which would indicate the first section as Newcomers with the second category of Newcomers at the next level. Raul points out that the Dewey Decimal system does this without the '.'s, but the dots avoid ordering conflicts since the number identification is included in the name of the category. Raul asks how newcomers would know which sections to look for. Bob misinterprets this as adding to the wiki and suggests that at that point the wiki committee would be involved to suggest where pages might be linked to the category tree.
4. Changes to the category tree were then discussed. If a new category was to be added, the new category could easily be added to an end of a subcategory. If a new category were to be inserted into a level then that could be accommodated by changing the numbering of the categories at that level, which be a little more work, but manageable. The real challenge would be if subcategories were moved to a different part of the tree as that would involve renaming a very large number of downstream categories. Ideally new information would be added to an existing category and in fact a page could be attached to a number of categories, with the category perhaps providing a different context for the information.
5. As an example, Bob showed the home page that he has put together in the prototype. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home From there we explored the newcomer area and the way that the hierarchy trees would look on the home page. The category tree would only appear on the home page, the page map on the side bar, and the J code search bar that also includes a link to NuVoc. Raul mentioned the help link in the page notices space above content. The feeling is that that could be removed as it is not useful for the way that we are using categories. Subtrees below the home page would not have a category tree displayed but would have access to the side bar and the J code search bar. John had seen the trees appear over the past weeks and felt that the navigation was an improvement. He did express that if it created too much work to maintain that should be avoided. The feeling was that once the trees were in place the maintenance would be adding the categories to new pages which would be expected to be done by the page creator.
6. John suggested that it might be a good thing to have pages rated by users and using those ratings to identify the most useful pages. He also mentioned that chatGPT might be something that could be used in the future. ChatGPT would need to be trained on the J wiki to be a source of credible information. Bob mentioned the idea that bookmarks might be curated by users and available to others. Initially, it might be done manually and if effective might be possible to be done with a bot and a hot button to create a link. This also brought in a discussion about the use of User pages https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:ListUsers . For feedback on pages the Talk page can be used and would show up on recent changes and John said he would try that on the prototype wiki for a bit to see if that behaviour takes off. Art wondered if it could be done automatically by the number of visits to a page. This might involve a log and php and might be explored.
7. Art talked about the confusion between libraries, repositories and add-ons. Every library is a repository, but not vice versa. Another challenge was navigating gitHub and not having the resources to understand it gets in the way of learning J. Since it looks as if J will continue to be using gitHub, the solution may be more content explaining it in the areas that it interacts with J. John pointed out that with a link to gitHub you can quickly look at the raw code. Raul pointed out that by using packages you can build from multiple files which makes gitHub useful with projects.

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

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