Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-02-23

Report of Meeting 2023-02-23

Present: Art Anger, Bryce LeCates, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

1. We were joined by Bryce Lecates, a newcomer to J who is interested in the development of the wiki. Bryce was invited to join the wiki as a user. He indicated that there was a lot of information on the wiki, but some of the information is difficult to find and not always where you would expect. Bob shared the tip that when he finds useful pages he bookmarks them for future reference because there are times where he has found a page once and not been able to find that page again.
2. Bob showed the main page with its category tree https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home and explained that pages are attached to the category tree and there are also opportunities to create content on the category pages. Bob has taken a first pass at categorizing the 2400 wiki pages, https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:AllPages all pages but then found out that this did not include the User pages https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Special:ListUsers, so that there may be several hundred more pages to categorize. These may take a little more time because user pages are not already grouped by topic. Nuvoc https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:NuVoc_R.1 was given as an example where the category page had a link to NuVoc in the content because without that content link, the link to NuVoc would be lost in the multitude of pages that are connected to it.
3. Bryce asked if the Category tree would be available on all the pages, as it takes up quite a bit of space. Bob said that the Category tree will only show up on the Page Map and the Home page, although access would be given through the J Code Search navigation bar https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/J_Code_Search_Bar. Bryce asked if the sidebar will remain the same. Bob said that the sidebar would be losing the link to the prototype wiki, but would retain a link to NuVoc and the Page Map
4. Bryce said in exploring the Category tree he has found things that he had neve seen before, such as Scott Locklin's blog on the community links page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Blogs_C.2 . Bob said that he has discovered a lot in the categorization process. Bob also noted that some of the information is out of date, although could be brought to date by someone who had an interest in the topic and the skills to adapt to the current versions of J.
5. Bryce talked about how when he was exposed to jQt, it took a while to learn that there were edit pages in addition to the terminal pages. Bryce has found jQt very useful, but there may be an opportunity to do a better job of onboarding users in the IDE. Bryce also asked about the forums and the information that is contained in the archives. There may be an opportunity to linking parts of the wiki to specific forum threads. This seems to have happened more often in the past, although there have been some recent examples with the implementation of the thread primitives.
6. Bryce wondered if there was a way to have Category trees retain some information when you are backing out of a search. At this time the page is set to two levels of subcategories opening, which means that you can lose your thread if you were down a few subcategories which close back up after you return, but Bob will look into that.
7. Bob mentioned that he had sent an email to Chris and that Chris had suggested that we were ready to merge our prototype wiki to the current wiki. Bob mentioned that it was more a matter of building structure on the current wiki through categorization and not changing the pages on the current wiki at this stage. Bob had brought across the code for the J code Search Bar and Art's Essay Index are already on the current wiki https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page and just need to be updated with the different essay categories. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Anger/Essays_Index.
8. Help Offline https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Offline is a place that you can get the wiki content in zip format, but does not include images - only pages that link to the image files.

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 March 2nd, 2023.