[PD] puredocumentation

[marius schebella]

hi,
this is the start for the puredocumentation wiki.
for all who didn't follow the discussions during the pdconv, here is the 
latest:
some people agreed on building a media wiki for all documentation beyond 
the pd help patches. some time ago there was the puredatabase, but that 
is quite dead now.
so the idea is, to reanimate something similar, but with the possibility 
for everyone to commit to it. maybe not everyone but if 5-10% of users 
help contributing, then I think the project will be successful.
one of the reasons why this should be done, is that very often pd users 
look for a certain feature or object, but don't know the name exactly 
and need a good search engine.
so... the puredocumentation (in planning state) will cover externals and 
"stable" abstractions. (abstractions that are maintained kind of like 
externals)
additionally to the "wiki for objects" there will be the section for the 
tutorials, manuals and faq, and hopefully you will be able to type in 
your search string after "How do I: " and get the right objects, 
examples and tutorials.
My estimation is, that there are more than 3000 objects atm. so for the 
beginning the tricky part is to build all the basic object pages from 
the existing documentation (mainly help patches).
here is, what I think should be the content of every object page:
*objectname* the string name (for example "plus" for "+") of the 
object/external
*opt other name* = abbreviation, +,..
*helpfilename* (can be different than object name),
*description* = short description
*libraryinfo* purepd,GEM,cyclone... + author + licence
*arguments*
*inlets/outlets*
*examples* what this object is for... that's where you can be creative!
*see also* / similar objects
*tags* like audio/dsp, math, MIDI, something like a categorization.
I want to use python to extract as much information as possible from the 
help-patches into one big textfile (csv style) from which we can create 
the wikipages. I hope to get the developers involved in correcting the 
cvs-textfile before the basic pages are created). this has to be done 
per library, and I am still trying to figure out, how to do this in 
detail. for example some help patches have some description in the top 
letmost corner. so a python script should be able to find that 
information and put it into the "description" field.
there will be an irc session on sep 11 with all the people working on 
the project. so maybe if you want to join or have suggestions on how to 
get this done, feel free to respond.
addtitional documentation work that probably will also be done:
improving help patches by switching to a nice pddp format.
creating online video tutorials, or recordings of workshops.
one last point: If you know of a school/university or teaching center 
that would like to get involved (for example by putting pd classes on 
their schedule or paying people do some documentation work) that would 
also help the project to be successful...
so far. thanks for reading through that all!
marius.
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