Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-01-26

Report of Meeting 2023-01-26

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

1. We began with a discussion of whether there should be a way to launch J from the wiki. Bob mentioned that the J Playground would the way to do this. Any other way would require J to be downloaded and Raul pointed out that with multiple potential versions of J that it might not be obvious which one should be started up. The concern was for add-ons that the J Playground might not be able to load, but that should not be too high a priority according to Art.
2. This led to a discussion about how GitHub was used by J. First, for add-ons that are available through the Package Manager and second through installing from an individual link. We are not sure that this could be available to J playground other than copy and paste into the edit window.
3. Bob showed his use of the tree categories and the fact that the sub-categories can be ordered arbitrarily, which means that the category name does not have start with an ordering prefix. Inserting into the category tree becomes much easier because of the reordering flexibility. However, to keep the category names unique a hierarchical label could be a suffix where it is not so noticeable. The category references would begin with a letter referring to the main subtrees. N - Newcomers, D - Developers, R - Reference, C - Community, P - J Playground. The subsequent identifiers would be separated by '.'s N.1.1 would be the first grandchild of the first child of the subtree N which is Newcomers.
4. Bob pointed out that categorizing becomes a way to view the wiki. Newcomers, Developers and Reference would be general views of the wiki that would be useful for larger audiences, but there is nothing stopping us from narrowing those views down by restricting to new subtrees. As an example, the information in the wiki could be repurposed into a subtree for Machine Learning and then that category tree could be given as a link for those who want to see the wiki in that way. The category trees allow a context for users without changing the existing pages, because the context is contained in the category tree. NuVoc could have a tree driven search in addition to the current table driven search.
5. Subsequently, Bob has begun to create the category trees in the current wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Page_Map These category trees can be built without changing the current information in the wiki and getting in the way of user access. At the point that the categories are populated the Home page category https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home can become the redirect for the Main page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page. Once the category trees are established then there is further work to make the trees more comprehensive and this can occur over time through curation.
6. We also found that we can access categories with the advanced tab of the Wiki Search, which means that we should be able to include categories in our searches, which is another way to access grouped information under category names.
7. Bob will be working on the general categories and further development on the curation, but is not planning to do specialty categories outside of the areas of his interest, although he will put together information about how to construct these trees. Also, looking whether it makes sense to store selected videos like the J promo on the wiki to avoid the advertising on free Youtube accounts.

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 February 2nd, 2023.