Wiki/Report of Meeting 2024-07-25

Report of Meeting 2024-07-25

Present: Ed Gottsman and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available below on this wiki page.

1) Bob recapped the last meeting that had been held with Skip and Raul https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2024-07-18.

2) Bob showed the additions that he had made to the Contributing to the Wiki page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Contributing_to_the_J_Wiki_W.2. The areas that have been added are an explanation of both the general categories and the specific tree categories. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Contributing_to_the_J_Wiki_W.2#How_do_I_add_category_to_a_page.3F The second addition was concerning how to propose changes that you are not sure about on the talk page with a link put up on the forums that would attract attention and keep things from going stale. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Contributing_to_the_J_Wiki_W.2#What_if_I.27m_not_confident_in_the_change_I_am_proposing. Bob will post to the forum after consulting with Chris. Ed wondered if "Recent Changes" on the sidebar might be posted so that activity would be publicly announced. Bob pointed out that this synopsizes the change and a direct post might provide more useful detail. Ed felt that there could be an advantage of keeping the wiki front and centre on the forums. Bob wondered if that might be included on the "Notes/Announcements" page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Notices_N and then realized that "Recent Changes" is on the sidebar and so a link would be redundant.

3) Ed wondered if there was a way to collect information on the most visited pages on the wiki. This may involve some form of wiki scraping. Ed felt that the log of the web server would have that, but did not seem to be provided by MediaWiki. Ed felt that this would be value in the information on how the wiki is being used, but the "Recent Changes" posted on the forum should be enough to develop engagement with the community. The weekly log could be displayed as a histogram and that would require to work with Chris for access to the information from the web server. This would be good to do prior to the introduction of the categories, as the information would be useful track any changes in user access. Bob will start conversation with Chris on access to the logs and posting of the "Recent Changes" on a weekly basis.

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 J forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC).

Transcript

- Okay.

- So it may not be too long a meeting

for which your time you're probably happy.

Last meeting we had Skip and Raoul

and it was interesting because Raoul referred to

some things that, I'm trying to think of his name,

Hillel Wayne had written about things being hard to find

in APL and that resonated with a lot of the stuff

that Skip has talked about over the time

we've been working with him about how hard it is to try

and get equivalences between different languages

to know where to look for something you wanna do.

The things that came out of that was,

one area was that probably to me fits into the developer arm

of the category tree, because I think that's really

where those things would probably be mostly.

You'd be looking at one language and how do I do it here?

And maybe more of the practical stuff would be in there,

but we haven't expanded that yet,

but it's there if we choose to.

The other thing that came out was the fact that

I haven't really explained how to do anything

with the category tree if you were interested

in doing something with them.

And so I'm just going to, yeah, I think this is it.

I'll share this.

Oh, I'm not gonna share it.

- You are sharing.

- Yeah, I am sharing, but it's interesting.

This is something I'm trying to work out right now.

I'm gonna change, I'm gonna stop sharing

and go back to another page.

Something really weird is happening right now

is that on the page I did the change

with what I think is exactly the same address,

I can see my change.

I go to another page that should be the same

and it doesn't show it.

So I'm gonna go to the one that shows it now.

And I haven't quite figured out why that is,

but I will work on that.

But for our purposes, I think this is the right one.

Yes, this is the right one.

So the two things that came out was categories

and the other thing was reactions or how to know

if you're not sure about putting a page in

or making a change to a page,

how can you communicate that?

So first thing is categories

and in contributing to the JWIKI, I included this,

which basically gives a really quick way

to put in a category.

And that's sort of what we were thinking of

as like the cloud tag kind of categories

that are just, you can just pop them in

and then it might help you to group things

however you like, it's very informal.

- Right.

- And then the other is the category tree hierarchy,

which I was a bit more specific about

and suggested if people wanted to add categories

to the tree that they should meet us

in the JWIKI meetings and we can discuss it.

'Cause I don't think we should be doing changes

to the tree hierarchy lightly,

but I'm happy if people wanted to take existing categories

and paste them to their pages, that's fine.

- Right, right.

- And so that now is the information

on contributing to the WIKI.

And then the second thing or the thing above that

is there was a discussion about if you weren't confident

in the change you're proposing.

And so I put a specific answer in that,

basically saying it is a WIKI, you can roll things back,

but if you're really not sure you can put a note

into the talk page, if you haven't seen any action on that,

you can post to the forums and just direct them

to that note.

And that may get quicker turnaround

'cause my concern was that people might make a change.

They might go to work on a page, not wanna put it in,

put it in the talk page and go several months

without a response because it's not visible to people.

And that would be discouraging.

(laughs)

Yeah, so this is sort of an indication

about how to go about it.

And I'm encouraging people's,

and I will probably do a post to the forums

basically saying this as well.

If you aren't sure about contributing to the WIKI,

you can contribute on the talk page of a page,

whatever changes you'd like to see

and then post to the forum.

So people are aware of what you're doing

because otherwise they may not see it.

- Yeah, I wonder, I'm sorry,

I realized that you're not done yet,

but I did have a thought.

MediaWIKI has a page with a summary of recent changes, right?

- Yep.

- What if that page were posted to the forum weekly?

- Okay.

I could talk to Chris about that.

He kind of controls the forums

and whether he thinks that's, that would be--

- I understand that.

- Yeah, yeah.

But I think that's a good idea.

It also gets around the issue

with recent changes aging out.

- In what sense?

- Well, like say you put a change in

and it was several months,

your change is not gonna show up on recent changes anymore.

- Sure, sure.

- But posting weekly gets around that, yeah.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

We still won't see things that happened months ago

unless there's been no activity in the forum.

What it would mean is I don't have to post to the forum.

My activity will be publicly announced automatically.

And there's also, I think, you see?

- Yeah, I do.

But it'll be announced.

Like if you look at the recent changes,

you're getting a real synopsis of what's going on, right?

That's what I vaguely remember.

- Yeah, I'm just looking to see

whether you're seeing what I'm seeing now.

Yeah.

- I am, recent changes, yeah.

- Yeah.

So I think it still may be worthwhile

to post something directly to the wiki

to let people know what you're looking at.

Well, and an example here is what Cameron's put in,

meaning of the current executing verb.

So he's put in something to his talk page

and has made a suggestion.

So you would see that,

but whether or not it might get more action

if Cameron actually posts something saying,

"This is something I'm currently thinking about."

Give a quick synopsis. - Oh, yeah.

It doesn't hurt if I do that.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But just as a way,

and the other advantage of it is that it keeps the wiki

front and center more or less in people's minds.

It's a newspaper summary of news around the wiki

coming out once a week

or however often will I decide to do it.

And it might attract more talk and more contributions.

- Yep, I agree with that.

And that just triggered something else in my head.

What about if it was also put up with on this page?

- Yeah, I don't have a lot of faith

that people are going to go looking at the wiki

on the off chance that something might have changed

that they're interested in.

- Yeah, and I guess the other thing I'm looking at

is right next to this information is recent changes,

which gives you the information anyway.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So this would be a new channel

for improving wiki activity visibility.

- Yeah.

No, I think that's a good idea.

I'll talk to Chris about that.

- Yeah, just a thought.

I mean, I don't know how much,

I don't have an intuition

about how much activity the wiki gets.

I guess the other thing that might be kind of interesting

and I don't know whether the stats are collected

would be a top 10 wiki pages of this week.

In other words, these were the most frequently visited pages

of the last seven days.

It's not as interesting as changes,

but it could be a very cheap thing

to keep people informed of.

- Yeah, we do have a new pages,

but that probably wouldn't be too busy.

- No, I'm thinking of page visits.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So for example, under recent changes in logs,

there's a logged entry.

What is that?

Back up a little.

- Okay.

- Under recent changes in logs.

- Oh, I think that's the same as the reside bar

recent changes.

- No, but there is the second entry in that section is logs.

What's in there?

- That'll be the log, I guess, of the up to 500 entries.

- These are also Delta.

These are not page loads.

- Yeah, yeah.

- All right, nevermind, that doesn't help us very much.

- What I was wondering about is,

no, high use pages isn't visits.

It's just actual structural,

how many links they have and such.

- Yeah, I guess the,

I'm just wondering where you would go

to find out page visits.

There should be a record somewhere on that,

would there not be?

- There is, I mean, the log of the web server

would tell us that.

It just doesn't seem to be something

that MediaWiki packages up for easy consumption.

- Yeah.

- But yeah, at a minimum, Deltas.

'Cause that could trigger,

that report on a weekly basis

could itself trigger activity in the top pages,

might start conversations, might generate controversy.

There's, I think, some value to that.

- So it gives us the Delta,

but it actually also gives us a link to the page.

- Sure, of course.

- Yeah.

- But what I'm interested in is what would get posted

to the forum on a weekly basis.

And the summary, the change summary,

I think would probably be enough.

We wouldn't need to post individual pages.

- Mm-hmm.

And that would, we could go back

to recent changes for that, right?

- Yeah, and I don't even know

if you necessarily need to talk to Chris Burke.

If you go back to recent changes,

really all you need is to generate an email out of this page.

- Yeah.

- You see what I mean?

- Yeah, well, what I would check is more just for politeness

before I start throwing stuff onto his forum.

I just say, "This is what we're thinking of doing."

Yeah, no, I don't think it's something he'll have to do.

- Definitely.

- It would be something like

the J-Wiki meeting minutes, right?

He's giving me permission to put those up.

- Yes, exactly.

- Yeah, and I can just jump these up as well.

And what might make sense is to do them a couple days apart.

- Yeah, that's true, yeah.

I wonder what else we could put up there.

Well, I do like the idea of most visited pages.

Just as a, what do you call it?

An indication of activity in the J community, right?

So if there's a lot of hits on the window driver pages,

for example, which I would expect.

- Yeah.

- That might be kind of interesting.

- Yeah, or a particular area of New Valk

if something has come in that's either a new change

or something's been added to see how often it was picked up.

- Sure, sure, sure.

- And that's the sort of thing where you could probably

be exhaustive.

It's not like, I don't know, it's interesting

to wonder how much traffic there actually is.

But you could, there might be 100 or 150 pages

that had been visited by multiple people

in the past seven days.

You could produce a histogram in order

that would have every one of those,

that would list every one of those pages.

But again, you'd need access to the log to make that work.

- And I could--

- Okay, I'm sorry, I derailed you.

I apologize.

- No, no, no, no, these are all,

apologize, these are great ideas.

I mean, they're, I think at the stage of analyzing the log,

we would need to talk to Chris about getting access to that.

- Definitely.

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

- But I like the idea of posting the recent changes

just to start with.

I'll check with him on that.

And I can also check with him on what the access

to the logs, if we could generate,

I guess, almost like a weekly heat map on the wiki.

- Yeah, I, that's interesting.

I wonder if there's some use for your color hierarchy

in that regard.

So I've been thinking in terms not of a heat map.

I mean, for a heat map, you really need two dimensions.

And I don't know what they would be necessarily.

See what I mean?

- Yep, yep.

- Along what two dimensions do you map all the wiki pages?

I don't know what the answer to that is.

- No, I guess I was thinking in terms of

what a heat map might show you in a two-dimensional space,

but what we're really looking at

is some kind of a histogram, right?

- I think so.

I think that's closer, a bar chart,

I think is closer to what you're looking at.

- Yeah.

- But I also sort of wonder.

- Whether you could do a heat map

for the categories.

Yeah.

- Yeah, right.

Maybe not even a heat map,

just put a count next to each category node

indicating how many pages in that node were visited.

That might be kind of interesting too, once a week.

But maybe if you're generating a bar chart per page,

that's really all you need.

It would be nice to find a use for the color hierarchy though.

- Yeah, I'm thinking the steps to do it

is one to do the bar chart

and do that prior to switching over

to emphasizing the category tree,

which we haven't done yet,

and see if it changes when we do the,

'cause that's gonna tell us a lot.

If it changes radically when the category is brought in,

that would be good information.

- Yeah.

I think

the category is pretty.

No, pretty's not the right word.

It creates a visibility in the wiki

that has been, I think, missing up until now.

It improves visibility.

And to the extent that we can find an excuse

to put it in front of people on a weekly basis,

I think it's worth doing

with as much supplementary information

as we can get in there.

- Yeah.

Why don't you start a conversation with Chris

about access to the logs?

And maybe once we can look at that data,

it'll become clearer what it is

we wanna indicate about it.

- Yep.

I think so.

And then how we wanna present it.

- Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

- Anyway, those were the things I was working on

and they're done.

Aside from the posts of the forums,

just to say, if you're thinking of doing something

and you're not sure about what you're doing,

you can do it, we can roll it back,

or you can put it on a talk page

and direct a forum to it

and also check with Chris about recent changes.

That's a good idea.

- Yeah.

I'll think about other things

'cause the forum doesn't get a lot of traffic.

If we introduced updates on a weekly or a monthly basis,

I don't think anybody would object.

And keeping the activity of the wiki,

the existence of the wiki,

anything we can show about community interest in the wiki,

I think is of value.

I don't think anybody is going to be objecting.

But yeah, all right, yes.

Talk to Chris, see what he has to say.

He might actually have some thoughts

on what we could show as well.

- And my sense on the current forums

is they're not as busy as they were a year ago.

- Well, there's, yeah,

I don't really have an intuition about that.

You tend to...

You tend to notice activity and not notice a lack of activity

so I don't really have a feeling

for what was happening a year ago.

I remember when wasn't anything happening

is a lot harder than I remember

when there was something happening.

- Yeah, I just tend to,

I was subscribed to all the forums.

And so I do remember a fair amount of traffic on,

not on any one forum.

I couldn't tell you,

well, programming was probably the busiest,

but there was always something coming through on my email.

And now I see it, I might see a,

well, it comes in fits and spurts.

There'll be one.

It's all coming in through on one channel too,

which is why I kind of look at it and go,

there's not as much happening as there used to be.

- Yeah, you may well be right.

- Yeah. - That's true.

- But well, I mean, that's more forum stuff.

I'm not, not my monkeys.

- All right, I don't have anything.

I was gonna ask Roel whether I owed him anything

'cause I don't remember anymore.

I have this vague sense

that I was supposed to give him something,

but I'll just drop him a note.

- Yeah, I don't remember there being anything.

I mean, if it was,

it was probably part of that visualization thing

and I don't remember anything specific.

- Yeah, no, I think that's probably what it was,

but I don't remember anything specific either.

So I'll ping him and see if I need to do something for him.

Okay, I have nothing.

- Next Tuesday, I'm back, so I'll see you Thursday.

- Okay, bye-bye. - Thanks so much.

- No worries. - Take care, Bob.

- Bye-bye.