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/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Cat%C3%A9gories ( 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?