Wiki/Report of Meeting 2024-05-16

Report of Meeting 2024-05-16

Present: Art Anger, Ed Gottsman and Bob Therriault

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

1) Bob reviewed the work that he and Ed had done on the template page to put a better version of the category tree in the footer of each page. He began with the Reference page, which duplicates the subcategories shown at the bottom of the page. Of course the full template shows all of the categories in the tree, not just the sub-categories. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Reference_R Unfortunately, the template is displayed above the generated pages on the sub-category page instead of below. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Essays_R.3 This is a problem that needs to be overcome, perhaps through use of CSS. The content pages do not have this issue, as the template displays below the content and this seems to be working well with that.

2) Ed wondered whether it was possible to show three levels with the content of the page at the top, followed by pages that share the content page's categories, followed by the category tree template. There are challenges with this because a content page can be in more than one category and so have multiple hits on the category tree. It would be difficult to find all of the categories associated with all of the pages without scraping the wiki. It may be possible to just highlight the categories on the category pages and this may be useful for the navigation on the category pages. It may be possible that there are options on Mediawiki that provide this information. We reflected on the advances that we had made with the us of colours to separate the sub-categories and using the alpha channel to separate the levels within the category.

3) Ed has been experimenting with ChatGPT as a way to capture information from the wiki. There has been a lot of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and this seems to be worthwhile as an area to stay engaged with. Bob took a look at Phind as a web based expert that cites its sources and seems to pull up good information https://www.phind.com/search?home=true. The accuracy is suspect, but the fact that it is citing sources beyond the wiki that are relevant is interesting. It is possible that it might be useful for providing raw text that could be material to be edited. The rest of the time was spent talking about how fast AI was advancing.

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

There we go.

Ah, so you saw some of the stuff I'd been doing

with the template.

- All that you told me about, yeah.

- Yeah.

Couple things, just feedback.

You mentioned, can we make everything bolder?

Everything already was bolder.

(laughing)

I kind of went, oh, I don't think I can make it more bolder,

but okay.

- Yeah, all right.

- I think I did increase the font size just a bit,

but I mean, it comes down to a sort of,

you're trying to balance between making sure

you can see some differences more clearly

and that there is an actual range of font sizes

that display better.

Let me see here.

So what I did was, go back and I'll just share the screen.

Share display, share.

- Ooh.

- So what this is currently here

was this is the reference page.

And so this right now is actually duplication

because these are not pages that are associated with,

these are actually categories.

Of course, I'd get rid of these,

but then that shows up below.

The challenge I've found now is,

I mean, that looks pretty good

and I'd be pretty happy with that.

But, and this is where the challenge is,

if I go to essays,

okay, so what I've done here is I've actually,

I've actually changed it back.

What happens here is if I insert that bottom screen

with the categories on it, it goes above this.

This is all generated after the fact.

So I don't have access to that

until the page is already put together.

So I can't move it up higher on the page.

And that means- - What if it's lower?

- Well, what it means if it's lower

is the first thing you see is that whole category page,

which if I go to this one,

it works well for pages that are just content

'cause you see this at the bottom

and then here's your stuff at the top.

But if I go back to this one,

wrong one.

If I go back there to this one,

what you're gonna see here

is you see that whole display up here

and it pretty much fills your screen

and then below it, you see the pages that are attached.

- Right.

- And to me, that really,

it means that the category menu gets in your way.

- Yeah.

- I can- - I'll go along with that.

- All I need, I can go in and adjust this to show you

'cause what I ended up doing was putting this here

and what I would probably do

is instead of starting this with essays,

I'd start that with home.

So this would be your entire category tree

and your pages would show up here for these category pages.

But if you actually go to the pages in essays,

you would end up with something like this

with the information at the top

and the category stuff at the bottom.

The downside of that is you end up with-

- No.

- Yeah, go ahead.

- Go ahead, sorry.

No, go ahead, please.

The downside of that is?

- Well, the downside of that is you've got two different ways

of displaying the category tree, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

- You got this way and you got that way, yeah.

- Yeah, I don't think that works.

I think you need a way.

- Yeah.

So, and I haven't tried this yet, but you might know.

Is there a way with CSS?

Like I know the name of this thing

on the page when it's finished.

Is there a way with CSS to make,

to do like an after on that category?

- That's beyond my skill level, I'm afraid, Bob, I'm sorry.

- Yeah, 'cause that's the only thing I could think of

is if, and I'm not even sure it would work

because of course this is generated

after the page is generated.

So the CSS I would think would be generated

before it would know.

Yeah, go ahead.

- Do you have access to this information?

Do you know what pages are in category essays?

Could you generate something yourself

rather than relying on this canned template

that MediaWiki provides?

- I think at that point, the way to do it

would be to go back to some type of a crawler

that would generate that information

because otherwise, no, I could generate it once,

but then as soon as somebody adds something new

to the category, it's not gonna keep up.

So, like I don't have, like other than a crawler,

I don't have a way, that's the frustrating part about this.

When I got to this point, I thought,

oh, this is gonna work great, bang.

This part, it can generate,

but the access I have to it afterwards is,

you know, after it's generated, let's see if I do,

what is it, I go to developer.

Inspector.

When I look at this thing,

the footer is here, this navigator shows up after,

oh no, no, it is within the body.

I take it back, it's within the body.

So I should be able to do something with that.

No, I should be able to do that.

I was thinking it was sitting below the body

for some reason, they were popping it in later.

But this information here is all,

oh, some information to look at there, interesting.

Oh, that's up in the logo, that's what they're working with.

Oh, maybe what I should do is go look at what this is.

Okay, here we are down here.

So there's the MW pages.

And then that's where all that information is generated,

but it's still within the body.

I should be able to get down to that somehow.

- All right.

- Yeah, okay, so I should be able to move that around.

That's--

- You could drop the hierarchy on the right.

- Yeah, I could do something in the,

I'll have to look at it, but I,

'cause it's within the body, I should be able to go into CSS.

Now, the only thing is the CSS will be in the template,

but maybe I just have to change the CSS on the page itself.

And then I should be able to do an after or something

so that it pops in after the MW pages has been generated.

Yeah, that's probably the way to approach it.

Anyway, if I can do that, then that's what I should do.

Then that would be good because that means

that the whole thing will be consistently looking like this

and this page would show up with this, without this,

and then the same information would be down below here.

So you'd see the pages that are associated with it,

and then your whole category map would be down here.

- Right, and I guess the question is,

(silence)

I wonder if it would make sense if you're gonna have,

let's take this page, essays, pages and category essays.

- What, this one?

Okay, so this page.

- Pages, you're gonna have the full

colorful category layout.

- Yeah, down below it.

- Okay, right.

So above it, really, you should have whatever page

was selected from the pages and category essays list.

You see what I mean?

- Yeah, so what you're saying is if I have the,

so for instance, well, so the question is,

are you saying, so how I got here to this page?

- No, not how you got there.

I'm suggesting a sort of reverse hierarchy navigation,

where at the bottom of the page,

you've got your colorful hierarchy layout

and picking a category shows you a list of pages

above the colorful category layout,

which as I understand it is where you're gonna try to go.

And then picking a page from the category pages layout

shows you above that, the actual page in question.

So at any given time, not at any given time,

if you're looking at a page,

you're looking at a page from the top of the screen

and then-

- Yep, I'm listening to you.

- Immediately below that,

the entire colorful category hierarchy.

Does that make sense or did you lose me?

- No, I got you.

I'm just not sure whether I can do that.

- Oh, well, implementation issues.

I can't help you with that, Bob.

- Yeah, no, I think I know what you're saying

is that when we go, so for instance,

if I go to this as an example,

so we can see what it looks like,

I would have this lower half,

which is the category tree.

And then above that,

I would have the pages associated with what?

- Whatever category was currently selected

from the category tree.

- But there might not be any category page

selected from the category tree.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

So in other words-

- Well, then all you see is the colorful category hierarchy.

- Right, right.

But I guess what I'm saying is if,

say in this case, essays about,

I think SIS sat in within language concepts.

I'd have to go back and check.

Let's see.

Here it was

in category essays, language concepts.

No, this is actually pages.

Okay, so yeah.

I'll go back to here.

So essays about would actually have this highlighted

'cause there are pages associated

actually with that category.

- Yeah, so there's a missing middle here.

- Yeah.

Now- - I guess.

- Yeah, and I may be able to do that.

And the way I would do it is I'd have to look

at any categories that this page had.

And then I could use that as a variable.

And I could highlight this,

like put a circle around it or something

that says you're in essays.

Now the trick is, let's see if there's,

okay, so in this case, I'm only seeing essays R3.

But there are other pages

that would have multiple categories.

So there might be more than one thing show up here

if you pull that off the page

because it has more than one category that it says.

- Yeah, yeah, good point.

- Yeah, but I don't think that's a downside.

- But I don't think that's a problem.

- No, no. - Yeah, right.

- I think actually that's a feature

because if you know it shows up in more than one place,

that starts to indicate

you might wanna be looking someplace else.

- Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, I'll have to look in

'cause the challenge that I would have in doing that,

the implementation is pulling the category off the page

so that when it goes to the template,

I'll have to look at that.

- I wonder whether you have to worry

about multiply categorized pages

'cause you're going in,

starting with a category,

going to a list of pages and then picking a page.

It doesn't matter, it need not matter.

I suggest that it need not matter

that there's another path you could take

to get to that same page,

a different category and then a page.

I don't know if you need to worry about the fact

that some pages are multiply categorized

is all I'm saying.

- Well, I think it's actually easier

to show multiple categories

than it is to show the one you came from.

- All right, fair enough.

- Because when you go to the page itself,

that's when you would send the information to the template.

- I see.

- And otherwise you're using the past page

to go to a future page and then fill in that information.

That starts to get kind of tricky.

- That's harder.

- I think so, yeah.

- Okay.

- Yeah. - Yeah, that makes sense.

- But I still need to be able

to pull the category off this page

and send that as an ID back to the template.

But I know I can send IDs to the template.

I should be able to send multiple IDs to the template.

And then the remaining question is,

can I scrape this category information off the page?

And there should be a way to do that.

Anyway, so what you're saying is

you would have this page up here,

which is a content page,

and then down here, this essays would be circled

or highlighted somehow, probably a circle around it.

And then that would just tell you,

this is sitting within the essays category.

- No, I'm suggesting something more ambitious than that.

- Okay.

- Which is that at the top of the page,

you've got the essays page.

In the below it, you've got,

well, okay, hang on.

So this is essays about, which is not a category,

it's a page.

- It is a page, it's a content page.

- From the essays category.

- Correct.

- So in addition to what we're seeing here in the middle,

that is between the essays about content on the one hand

and the colorful category hierarchy or outline

on the other hand, you would have all the pages,

all the page names in the essays category.

- Okay, so then what you would be doing,

if I click here and go back, you would have these pages.

- Yes, exactly.

- Or what would be shown up here.

- These page names.

- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, exactly.

And then the page, which is presumably

your point of focus at the moment is at the top,

it's the most prominent thing,

but you can immediately get context

one of the other pages in this category.

And if you scroll down a little further,

you can get all the categories.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, again, the implementation challenge there is again,

I'm going from one page that has this information,

it's been generated to a new page,

which does not have this information,

which has been generated.

- Right, right.

- And if it can survive that transit.

- Yeah, I recognize that it may not be feasible to do that,

but I think it would be, for want of a better word, cool.

- It would be cool.

I'm just trying to think of,

I guess in some ways I'm trying to think of reasons

I can't do it more than anything else.

One of the challenges there would be,

I would need to know,

I would be coming from this page to go to that about page,

which would be fine if I was clicking on any of these,

but if I got to this about page some other way,

then that previous page doesn't exist.

- Right.

- I think I'm back to the crawling thing.

Well, because you see what I'm looking for is

what other pages share this category?

- Yeah.

- I could take a look and see what they provide

in MediaWiki.

I mean, there's been a few things that they throw in there

that I didn't expect, and so you never know.

It might be something that can do something

along those lines or provide the information.

- Yeah.

- But if I can get the pages back up in this content area,

the way the content would be,

because that's like, as I just clicked on,

once I click on this down here, the essays page,

eventually any of these clicked on

would take me back to the pages,

would take me back to the media page,

which currently just has these pages.

- Right.

- It just doesn't have anything else with it.

And it doesn't even have the category tree on the side yet.

- Right.

- Oh, okay.

Give that some thought.

- All right.

- Yeah.

Thank you for the feedback on this, though.

I really like this a lot better than where I started from.

- Oh, sure, sure.

No, I think that's wonderful.

- Yeah, yeah.

- As I think I mentioned, I was a little surprised

by how well the dedicated color

for each of the immediate child nodes works.

That's nice.

That calls out immediately that, gosh, reference is huge

and community is relatively small

in terms of number of categories.

I think that works very well.

So nicely done.

- And the other suggestion you had that worked perfectly

was I was playing around with hues and stuff

to separate the different levels.

And you were absolutely right.

Just use the alpha channel to scale it down a little bit

and you end up with the same hue and slightly less alpha.

Or slightly more alpha, slightly less hue in each.

Keeping the consistency there.

That looks a lot nicer.

- I think it does.

- Yeah, no, I was looking at it saying,

there's gotta be a way that I can differentiate.

It looks like I'm not throwing some patchwork quilt at it.

And this was the way to do it, for sure.

'Cause otherwise it's just like, okay,

well, that's a different red, I guess.

Why would you do that?

Yeah.

(laughs)

Yeah, exactly.

Well, good.

All right.

Yeah, I wish I would be...

I'll take another run with chat GPT

at trying to come up with a category hierarchy.

But I don't...

Something weird is going on.

I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to overcome it.

I'm sure if it were a human being, I could.

I actually got to the point where it seemed to cycle around

and was giving me a sort of polite brush off.

Like, okay, you're...

- I'm doing my hair tonight.

Don't call me again.

- I can't help you anymore.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, I don't know.

I'll have to come up with something clever.

- And I haven't gone and played a lot with the AIs,

but there are the different ones

and that they seem to be evolving

at slightly different rates in different areas.

And some of them seem to be focusing

a bit more on the rag stuff, right?

Where you feed it the information you want

and then you can limit the answer that way.

At least some of the ones I've heard about.

- Yeah, I've heard...

Yeah, I think you can do rag with all of them

or many of them, the big ones anyway.

I fooled around with that a little bit

trying to get it to do something reasonable

with knowledge of J,

knowledge of the programming language.

And I was limited by not really knowing what I was doing,

just sort of following recipes that I read about.

And I couldn't get a lot of sense out of the...

I think I tried with Olama

and I couldn't get a lot of sense out of it

in terms of understanding of J.

But the evolution of these things

is measured in weeks, not years.

It's really quite remarkable

what they're capable of doing.

- I just went back to...

I'm just going back to find, which is P-H-I-N-D.

Remember find?

I think I showed it once before.

Okay.

It's a web-based thing.

Okay, so I'll go back to sharing my screen again

'cause I wasn't sure it was still working,

but it is, so that's cool.

And...

Let's see, share screen.

Okay, so I just went to find, which is find.com.

And I said, "Can you explain Rankin J?"

And this is what it fired back at me,

which I haven't even looked to see how smart it is.

It was pretty smart before.

But what was really cool about it

was it would cite the sources down the side here.

So it's telling you where it's getting

that information from.

- So I can't read this, unfortunately.

- Okay, let me see if I can blow up a bit.

- Does this explanation make any sense?

'Cause I actually tried this with the llama.

- Does that make it bigger?

- And the rank explanation was quite poor.

- Yeah, I'm not saying it's the best

in terms of rank explanation, but...

- Ah, much better.

- Yeah, it's kind of got the gist of what's going on

with the way the ranks are displayed,

but it's not really that. - But it's not really.

- Yeah, not really.

I mean, what I was looking at at one point

was whether you could pull that out

and you could essentially edit it into something usable,

'cause you know what it should be saying.

And turn the creation more into more of an editing process.

But the thing that I did think was cool about it

was that it does limit its sources to here

and then cites them.

And in some cases I don't see it here.

Oh no, there's two, so let's see.

Yeah, so this one here.

- Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah.

- Yeah, it's gone to a blog, it looks like.

- Yeah, how interesting.

- Yeah, yeah.

- It's outside the universe.

- Yeah, no, it's jumped outside of Jay

and it actually, a couple of times it cited other people's,

other Jay people that I've seen have blogs and stuff

and it cites some of their information on blogs,

which I thought was pretty cool.

Is this not, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And you're right, it's...

It's evolving very quickly.

- Yeah.