I don't think that pdpedia is a replacement or substitute for
interactive help patches. But mediawiki is a great tool for getting
lots of bits of information from a lot of people. So I think that
pdpedia could be used as a place to orgnanize content, like reference
info, links to related algorithms, links to related video tutorials,
etc. That material could then be filtering into the help patches
themselves.
A pd-help file wiki would be great, but until then, I think pdpedia
could be useful.
.hc
On Apr 8, 2009, at 10:35 PM, dmotd wrote:
hi folks,
i am somewhat interested in investing some time in pdpedia, but i
have a few concerns with mediawiki as a container for pd related
data.
obviously mediawiki is an excellent versioning platform and has a
strong following for many technical wiki's in the open-source
community. i think its an excellent format for plain text
information, which takes the form of tutorials/howto/guide, but as
an object reference it has a limited scope.
this is especially the case when attempting to pull that information
into another format (ie.. not html). anything pulled off the server
using the api needs to be parsed to be made useful in another
context, and in many cases reparsed to pick out the
meta-references, and this is without getting to the content which
is often categorised in an entirely different format.
i have previously invested a fair chunk of time in refencing objects
in a sql database, while my work was not designed with versioning
in mind, it was designed to be utilised by pd (dd was the projected
environment) or pd libs internally, or in other formats like a
postscript reference or generating pddp formatted helpfiles. i have
recently started picking up the pieces of this project (which i had
ceased with the initial announcement of pdpedia).
anyhow, what i am beginning to see a need for is an infrastructure
like mediawiki which stores pd files rather than plain-text. think
of it like a categorised + tagged svn. this would be a place where
people can upload files relating to pd use, examples of usage,
methods of interfacing and anything else that gets passed around on
this mailing list. keeping with the same wiki format of edits by
anyone, and versioning each subsequent edit. then in a similar
method to mediawiki api calls, pd internally could request a list
of articles (pd-patches) and dynamically retrieve requested
articles from the pdwiki. thus making the system much more usable
within the pd environment.
i think the benefit of this would be quite obvious to pd-users, as
it has been stated many times by numerous people that a plain text
wiki reference doesn't really make much sense without the
interactive characteristics of an actual patch.
this is something i would happily put energies into development, and
in many ways have already started. i will likely end up building
something that works in this way anyway, so please throw in
suggestions, before i get carried away ;)
ciao,
dmotd
On Thursday 09 April 2009 07:25:06 Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
There are lots of good ideas worth trying. We've talked about it
a lot, we just need someone to take charge of it. I am just too
overloaded to handle pdpedia on top of everything else. Who
wants to own it?
.hc
On Apr 1, 2009, at 11:21 AM, Jean-Noël Montagné wrote:
It would be good to have
standards on how articles should be formatted and what kind of
information should be presented.
yes I agree. At the origin in 2006..., I have suggested to some
french PDers the following features:
---------------------------------------------------------------
----------
* a lexicon-dictionary about objects/externals/abstractions (
Done)
* a category search portal ( one of the most important feature
for pd newbies ), like in Wikipedia portal
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Catégories ( to do)
Example of category search:
PD==>Graphics==>Video==>Live==>Effects==>Blending==> pix_add /
pix_subtract /pix_diff /pix_composite/ pix_multiply/ PDP_blend
( fiction...)
* multilingual structure as Wikipedia ( very important for
educational uses in the world where people will stay with
commercial software just for this reason ( France for example))
(Done)
future options, when the database will be completed enough:
* tools or wiki tags for visualizing patches ( parsing of the
patch code to create an image of the patch, server side) and
downloading text patches from PDpedia
* Pdpedia database embedded with PD extended ( when completed)
for offline consulting
* in PD: a contextual help with access to the related pdpedia
page (in PD itself or online)
---------------------------------------------------------------
----------
About the formatting of one page, I have suggested the
rubriques:
---------------------
(from the body of the page)
Nature of the element (object/external/abstraction/
Short Definition
Generalities (long definition)
Compatibility ( wich versions of pd)
*
Inlets
Outlets
Arguments
Messages
*
Warnings and incompatibilities
Tricks and alternative ways to do it
Examples ( expanded help file+ other examples with pictures),
links to video examples
Tutorials on this element, links to videos
Associated objects, related objects
Equivalents in similar open source softwares
*
Author(s) of the object, links
Contributors of this page.
----------
(from the infobox)
name
ultra short description
abbreviation
library
author
developer
release version
release date
dependencies
license
website
programming language
platform (i.e Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux)
operating system (i.e. Windows XP, Windows 2000, Mac OS X 10.3,
Debian, etc.)
language
data type
distribution (i.e. Pd-vanilla, pd-extended, pure:dyne, etc)
link to the code
---------------------------------------------------------------
----------
about the work to do on the PDpedia, I have suggested to
organize PDpedia Parties:
It's a on day or two days fiesta gathering, where PDers decide:
-first : how many objects they will document, and wich objects
( 5 per person during 3 hours for example)
-then they document individually, in a fiesta atmosphère,
during a limited amount of time.
-then, they create collective(s) performance(s) in a complete
fiesta atmosphere
I have also suggested that all PD teachers should give time in
their workshops for the students to document on PDpedia the
object they are discovering.
-----------------
Of course, PDpedia is a long term project. There are also many
initiatives like the great FLOSSmanuals, or videopedia to
produce tutorials.
Because of the 2500 objects/elements, the PDpedia is more on
the encyclopedic aspect.
2500 objects and more could be completed in many languages in
five years, if the community understand how politically
important is to help newbies to use such tools with
documentation facilities. Documenting is not sometimes very
sexy, that's why I suggest to organise PDpedia parties.
-----------------
and yes, I agree, there is a need for some maintainers ( I can
not do it at this time), for an antispam system with a captcha
or similar stuff.
JN
2009/3/31 Alexandre Porres <porresgmail.com>:
so we need :someone" to manage the system, ok, but then I
see
that this
problem is kinda well solved, right?
But how do you all see the writting of articles? Is it
growing
out well? I
believe "someone" could also direct how things are going,
and
that a main
team could work on it by fomenting its development and
all... right?
Something like a WikiProject on wikipedia? It would be good to
have standards on how articles should be formatted and what
kind of information should be presented. I see there has been
some effort to generate a standard layout for an article on an
object, with inlets, outlets, arguments and messages as
separate sections; but I can't find
a good article to serve as an example for how all articles
should look. The best I can find is:
http://wiki.puredata.info/en/dac~
http://wiki.puredata.info/en/metro
If more articles looked like this, I think pdpedia would be
much more useful.
Do we want pdpedia to just be a reference manual of objects,
or do we also want to include design patterns such as the
[pack 0 0 0 0 0]/[unpack 0 0 0 0 0] idiom mentioned
elsethread, tutorials, good practices and suchlike?
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