Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-03-24

Report on the J wiki meeting of March 24, 2022

Present: Art Anger, Raul Miller, Bob Therriault

1. The meeting began with a short discussion about the J playground https://jsoftware.github.io/j-playground/bin/html/emj.html which continues to improve as bugs are reported and removed. Since none of the J playground workers were present, we decided to defer the discussion about whether it should have an independent development path. The consensus among those present was that independence would be beneficial, since the J Playground's developers did not need to be concerned with many of the challenges faced by the wiki.
2. Next, we discussed Raul's porting of the J help information from Jsoftware to the wiki https://code2.jsoftware.com/mediawiki/index.php/Help . Raul reported that Chris Burke would prefer that the vocabulary document remain on the Jsoftware site, as it is a legacy document. Bob suggested that for the legacy purposes help components could remain on the Jsoftware site, but that the information that they contained should be ported to the wiki because it would be of most use on the wiki where it could be updated https://code2.jsoftware.com/mediawiki/index.php/Help/Phrases/Phrases_Contents . Raul also mentioned that the Release Notes pages had been organized by their associated versions which made navigation and selection of the information much easier. Also, he had been able to create a template so that pages were more consistent in their ported state. Bob suggested also including categories of the review state of the page would be useful to track verification of the ported pages. Bob also mentioned a template would be useful for establishing categories during the construction of new wiki pages and Raul said that if a checklist could be developed that he would take a run at incorporating it into the prototype wiki pages that he had developed. Raul concluded with the notice that these tests were being done with the prototype wiki because each time that the pages were ported they overwrote the previous pages and that this would overwriting could be dangerous on the working wiki. This means that, although members are encouraged to explore the prototype wiki, any changes made there should be considered temporary. Lasting changes should only be made on the current working wiki.
3. Bob discussed the recent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_f7wUILcoc promoting the J playground and noted that it had already generated some positive response and some valuable comments. The next video would highlight the work that Raul had done on the porting of the help system as many of those pages are not well known, but contain valuable information that may be organized in more effective ways on the wiki.
4. Then a discussion about ways of attracting more people to the project was undertaken. As it is, the group working on the wiki have a great deal of influence in its development, but because the wiki is to be of use to a more general audience, greater diversity would result in a better fit to that audience. This evolved into a discussion of how to increase the appeal of J on a wider scale. Raul suggested some type of support for teachers who may want to use J for their students. Bob pointed out that, although this would be a very good approach in delivering J to a wider audience, it would probably need a separate development team, not unlike the one proposed for the J Playground. Ian Clark in correspondence had suggested that using a generalist committee to direct specialist tasks would be one approach for the J Wiki group, the other one being a (benevolent) dictator. The committee approach would take longer to get started, but should be able to function better in the long run. The current slow growth and the rapid progress that the specialists have made in porting the help section and the J playground suggests we are on the generalist committee path and that we should keep working to attract members from diverse backgrounds. If you are interested, please consider letting us know on the general forum, so that we can link you into future meetings.
5. The meeting ended with a discussion initiated by Art asking about whether there was any ability to include a back button on the wiki navigation. Raul suggested that the browser back button was the best option because otherwise a history of wiki browsing would have to be provided dynamically. Bob suggested a bread crumb list that would be static and could guide the user into the structure of the wiki. An alternative is to have the links activate new tabs at certain key points in the search, allowing you to jump back to a previous section and restart the search from there. There are many choices in the way to do wiki navigation and as we move towards a method it will also be important to provide instruction so that users can make better use of the wiki tools.

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