Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-03-16

Report of Meeting 2023-03-16

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

1. Ed started things off with a presentation his revamped wiki interface, which includes faster access to the web pages and a more economical approach to displaying the map. Well worth watching this video, both for seeing what may be possible and the way Ed has incorporated earlier suggestions into his prototyping process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-wvZG7uHC8
2. Following the presentation Ed asked what the biggest challenges facing the wiki were and where is the work currently required. Bob said that creating the content in the category trees and being a bit more discerning on the categories so that they are more balanced are the two areas that are currently labour intensive. Ed wondered if the trees really needed to be balanced. Bob's concern was in very unbalanced trees that small categories might flood the search space and would make searching less efficient. Categorization would need to be a focus going forward.
3. Ed was still looking for something to do, so Bob asked if there might be a version of his prototype that we could begin working with. Ed said that the current version is not ready to used as a tool in general, but Bob was thinking more of refining the prototype through use as it progresses toward general use.
4. The current prototype is running under jQt and Bob wondered whether there was a way to incorporate his editing process into the search page. Ed thought the more productive approach would be to have the prototype work along side a browser window. The prototype would allow access and then cutting and pasting into a wiki page that is being edited in the browser.
5. Bob wondered if it were possible to have users create their own categories. Ed said that he had been thinking about retaining the pages that the user had clicked on. He did not think that he would want to create categories within his prototype. Ed is currently using the folder hierarchy as his categorization. The starred categories in the prototype are based on the category trees. Bob pointed out that there are previous categories that are attached to the pages that are not part of the category tree. Bob wondered if there was way to track these user assigned categories and further that if users could assign their own categories of their initials, then the prototype might be able to track pages that the user had marked with their initials. Ed an Raul both felt that this would not scale well. Ed felt that tracking the pages that had been clicked would provide that functionality because these pages would be separated into categories so that the sheer number would not be overwhelming.
6. Art asked if there were a way of sharing these personal page lists. Ed thought that we could do that, but that it would be difficult to do an export automatically. Bob thought that it would not need to be done that way as long as there was a way to cut and paste from your personal prototype view onto your personal User page. That could be further edited to curate the links to be more useful. Dave asked if the links would be private until added to the User page and Bob said that they would only be public when put onto a User page.
7. Ed suggested that we could also incorporate forum content into this prototype which would be incredibly powerful. Ed said he was using SQLite search to find the topic titles. Raul thought that Chris' J Code Search might be a good search to use since it was just doing an extension to the URL as a way to select information. Bob wondered if jd might be an option instead of SQLite.
8. Ed wondered how current his tool would need to be for it to be useful for Bob. He suggested a button that would allow the tool to be updated. Bob suggested the zip file that includes the entire wiki information aside from images. Bob would send the link for this to Ed. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Help/Offline

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 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is March 23rd, 2023.