Not really Off Topic but anyway...
Is it time for a real, neat, fully functioning Pure Data Wiki ?
It could be useful to have a place to collect patches or links to Pure Data examples, use them to illustrate different synthesis techniques, or applications of PD and so on. Some of the threads on this forum provide a good overview of subjects like reverb, granular synthesis or handling midi polyphony and it would be great to be able to summarize what's been worked out here and put it into a neat form somewhere.
Does this exist already somewhere? Would people be interested in contributing to something like this? Would it be useful?

@whale-av I agree that the forum has a wealth of useful information and is almost as good as a wiki but I don't find the search as effective as all that. Try searching for 'bass drum' to give a pretty random example; the forum search results don't throw up anything very useful as far as I can see, even though with google I see there are threads like https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/3532/bass-drum-synth to be found.

It's true that with a bit of googling you can usually find what you need. I just think a wiki would reduce the needless repetition of research and also have the advantage of offering up things you might not have thought of searching for.

As for the idea of no "absolute truth" with PD I don't see that as presenting a problem for a wiki - it wouldn't be a question of finding the definitive approach to a given technique or whatever, more like a scrapbook of the different ways people have tackled something.

@EEight I see the patchrepo and the Patch Storage resources as really useful but they tend to be a way of sharing 'creations' rather than simple solutions as far as I can see.

I'm happy to contribute to a resource list here or on another thread. Perhaps I can sketch out this wiki/scrapbook idea in some way (a google document or something) to give a better idea of what I mean...

@beem, I do not think PureData has the community to support such a thing, almost none of the users of this forum contribute to the abstraction/patch/tutorials, they just pass through to check for good ideas once in awhile. Most questions are answered by only a handful of people and most posters only seem to be active on the forum long enough to get over those first few hurdles and then are never heard of again. We need an active user base to maintain the wiki before there is any point in having a wiki.

@EEight I see the patchrepo and the Patch Storage resources as really useful but they tend to be a way of sharing 'creations' rather than simple solutions as far as I can see.

That is exactly what the abstractions forum is for, solutions instead of creations.

@oid I second that. Nothing worse than an unmaintained Wiki.

@oid it is certainly a bit frustrating to have such a lot of activity on the forum that seems to be just answering very similar beginner problems. I thought a wiki might go some way to answering questions that would otherwise be posted here.

It seems to me that there is a pretty active community - there is a lot going on over on the PD discord server for example and it is a shame not to have somewhere to share the results of all the research and good ideas there. There's also the mailing lists and the IRC chat - I don't know how busy they are.

Maybe the term Wiki summons up a negative idea for a lot of people; certainly the pdinfo wiki is not the kind of thing I am thinking of and I'm not imagining a sprawling documentation of every object. I guess I imagined just a kind of shared scrapbook - if I find an obscure web page that has some interesting pd reverb abstractions for example it would be nice to just stick a link in a PD Reverb page somewhere, and with a few people joining in it could be a useful resource.

@beem All of those basic questions are answered in many places, the manual, the help files, over and over on this forum and mailing list, on youtube tutorials, the floss manual, various books and many other places, it is all just a search away with the search engine of your choice. Why do you think they would go to the wiki instead of just asking here when they already have ignored so many other sources? We also need all the activity we can get, not to mention I often learn something from the resulting conversations.

IRC is fairly dead, mostly announcements regarding people on the telegraph group which I know nothing about. Mailing list is about the same as the forum.

Just to give an idea of the kind of resource I'm talking about; here is a rough version of the kind of entry that I can put together just using my bookmarks. Nothing too technical, just a collection of useful stuff put together in one place.

Reverb

Reverberation (or reverb) is the effect generated by many copies of a sound with different delays summing together due to reflections off the boundaries of a space. In contrast to echo, the individual copies are not distinguishable but overall effect typically makes the sound richer or fuller.

Pure Data Vanilla comes with three reverb examples in the extras; in Help>Browser they should appear under ‘Externals’.

freeverb~ is a PD external offering ‘studio-quality Schroeder/Moorer reverb’
https://puredata.info/downloads/freeverb
(example usage: https://guitarextended.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/reverb-effect-in-pure-data/)

Examples:

• Tom Erbe’s reverb patches
  (allpass, Schroeder, Moorer, Moore, Gerzon/Stautner/Puckett, Dattorro)
  http://tre.ucsd.edu/wordpress/?p=625
• Choucroute FX by coloscope
  https://patchstorage.com/la_choucroute_fx/
  Tremolo/reverb effect : “harmonic tremolo” found in early 1960s amps.
• 282~ reverb (Ursa Major SST-282) by acreil / whale-av
  https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/uploads/files/1516212572597-working.zip
• Freeverb Vanilla
  https://github.com/derekxkwan/pd-vfreeverb
  Derekxkwan’s cleanup of Katja Vetter's Pd-vanilla freeverb abstraction
• ELSE library
  https://github.com/porres/pd-else
  Contains [mono.rev~], [stereo.rev~], [echo.rev~], [giga.rev~], [free.rev~]

PD Forum discussion of the subject: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11622/reverberation

Further reading:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/springs-plates-buckets-physical-modelling
Sound on Sound ‘Synth Secrets’ article on Reverb

See also: Delay/Echo, Resonators, Convolution

github/gitlab is actually well suited for something like this. You could simply create a readme like this: https://github.com/olilarkin/awesome-musicdsp or this: https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-linuxaudio. Others can contribute, create issues etc.

and I could easily embed (using a iframe) the wiki in the forum (adding a icon in the menu opening the page, something like what we did for: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/dataflow)

some thoughts

• A wiki could be another democratic resource.
• There are already many different resources to learn PD, easy to find, online and offline.
• PD has nothing to do with consumerism, imho. This is neither Eurorack nor VST. It is more about ideas than downloading existing tools. PD is a development environment, something like a blank paper. Very individual. Apart from learning the language, there is no right or wrong.
• You can do much more apart from DSP with it. Many users are artists, not musicians. An encyclopedia would never be complete and feels like a strange perspective because archiving, in the sense of writing down what others did, might not be the very base of creation.
  Yes, PD is ideal for designing a kick-drum and although its purpose is free, PD and many power users are more in the tradition of IRCAM and similar.
• As the PD community is small and methods and techniques aren't PD specific, a wiki on DSP in general with sub-forums and sub-sections or tags in each article for code examples in pseudocode, C, Python, Matlab, PD, Max, SC, VCV ect. could connect many more people and would make more sense imho.
• There is already the big Wikipedia with DSP and software programming, too. Rewriting everything would be pointless. But links to examples in different coding-languages are rare.
• It might make more sense to use a wiki as some kind of meta resource of weblinks.
• For example, your list of reverb techniques is lacking a lot and the introduction is misinformation, as it describes vaguely only one specific way of many in creating a reverb.
  If this would be a wiki page, it would require many more contributions for becoming more useful than an online search. And as others said before, I doubt this is going to happen if PD only.
• Much more important to me would be making a backup of this forum.
  It is an important resource and it would be pity if it would be gone. This happened to many forums for different reasons before and all their information will be gone forever.
  Even a frozen mirror of the current state, saved on some free and independent server would be better than nothing. Even plain .txt and .pd files could help, if it's not trivial to run the forum as a backup.
  It would be much harder to learn PD without this forum. For example, I guess almost everyone trips over the [$0-in_a_message_is_not_working( and such things.

@lacuna said:

• Much more important to me would be making a backup of this forum.

We have backup, but yes I agree that we need to mirror it (what if I die). Like I said it would be a good time to upgrade the solution (nodebb) - there is a bug with this forum (eating all the cpu). I wish I had more time, very difficult these days.

@beem The idea to have everything organized in a more advance fashion is good, but to be honest the cost of maintaining such a system is time consuming and needs a very active community. A lot of users who are new to PD just want quick access to hard work material that takes huge amount of time and knowledge to make, without spending time to learn it. So by making the process of getting various patches more easy will not encourage learning. This trend of having everything "at you fingernail" without work, reading or curiosity is like a modern fancy software interface that looks good but lacks serious software engineering principles. I also think that a serious backup of this forum is a smart move in order to keep years of hard work intact. The material of this forum contains years of hard work, devotion, passion, shared by very special people and it will be a great lost if we don't preserve it in a form or another.

@Boran-Robert Something will always be available: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/

@ingox Good.

It seems to me that part of the issue is how disconnected all the various PD communities are.

There's the mailing-list which has its regulars,
There's the Discord and the community there.
There's this site.
There's all the users who put their stuff on puredata.info.
There's the subreddit.
I didn't even know there was an IRC.

I haunt all of those places (except the IRC), and while I know there are others who also spend time in each, I also know that there are folks who really just stick to one or two.

I think there are more than enough PD users to make and maintain a wiki, but I don't think there are enough PD users in any one single place to actually achieve it. This strikes me as being one of the major things that holds PD back.

Take, for example, the Monome community over at lines. That community is small in terms of raw users, its centered around really esoteric and expensive gear, but its also absolutely thriving because they're not dispersed across 6 different platforms.

I don't know. I guess I wish the PD community had a more obvious center to it. And a wiki would work only if it were located at/near that center. But damn, I really want it. I think it's an amazing idea and it would solve some serious shortcomings.

@lordgreekfolder Here is an overview: https://puredata.info/community.

Isn't puredata.info already a wiki?

@ingox thanks, I didn't know about that page.

I guess what I meant though is that compared to something like SuperCollider or Monome, PD seems to be fractured into many distinct communities. It's great that that page exists with all those resources, and it's also great to have so many different options for people's different preferences. But I sometimes wonder what could happen if, for example, everyone on the PD mailing list also hung out on this forum. When you have a community dispersed into so many smaller pieces, I think there are bad side effects. Like, for example, certain knowledge or sets of expertise that are well-represented in one area, like the Discord server, but not in another, like the IRC.

It seems like, especially if you're new to PD, that this can be a major hindrance.

@lordgreekfolder Ok, if you start a wiki i provide some patches or something

@ingox So, how is it going to work?
Someone needs to work out a hierarchy and format with appropriate page titles.
Permissions will be needed to keep it under control.
I think it will need to be quite constrained or it will just become a parallel of this forum.
It will need to be kept very tight.
References at the bottom for useful follow-up like in Wikepedia, but restricted concise information for each page or it will run out of control.
Any links will have to lead to a concise sensible page too......... not a discussion.

I would suggest starting with all known Pd objects, especially as the documentation is already mostly done in their help files.... that currently you only get to see once you have created the object....... that you might not know exists.
So maybe the same hierarchy as Pd..... math, audio, audio math, gui, ..... as in help-intro.pd... ?
But the elephant in the room is the tilde~. A wiki which doesn't use it as a Boolean operator?
David.

Hi,
I'm studying PD from about 1 month. I'm projecting a part of my new live setup with PD, therefore I think i will stay here for a long time

I was just thinking how could be useful to have a wiki for pure data, so I'm pleasantly surprised to find this thread!
I must say that, to find information, I have found myself confused several times with the various platforms of Pure Data!
So I think a wiki can be a great connector and glue.

Each person will be able to contribute, and I believe that a structure of this kind has a great potential.

For example, in these days I felt the need to have a manual for the entire external librarys, to be able to easily browse what's inside all that. Currently it seems to me that there is none of this on the web. Also here, the wiki could be very powerful (for a section dedicated to externals/deken, I would be happy to work on it).

I think that initially it is good to leave registrations open to contribute, to encourage people to help (but certainly in the future, you can always change). I have seen many wikis work fine with open registrations.

So, does anyone have an idea for a server that we could use and try to start?
I believe this pandemic period could be perfect for starting this project!

p.s. there are other PD communities not mentioned by @lordgreekfolder , like Facebook (really big) and Telegram.

Thanks for all the replies to this. It's taken me a while to understand the various responses I got to this idea but it's gradually become a bit clearer. It seems that there are actually several possible Pd wikis that could be made or combined:

A wiki of Pd objects - a sort of in-depth illustrated help with tips and examples for every object and external

A wiki of Pd methods and applications - how to use Pd; e.g. handling midi, random functions, FFT, etc

A wiki of Pd resources, links, and examples - a guide to what is available online, Pd tutorials, instruments - a kind of collective annotated bookmarks collection

The last one is what I personally had in mind initially and I have my own version here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tzS2KU8x31JXoUxmkEr5WikJvxcrgHa4C0vM8LBw49Q/edit?usp=sharing

which anyone is welcome to join in on. It's currently a bit of a mess and not sorted into any real system. I understand from certain replies that some people don't think it's a good idea to make access to other people's work too easy but I think the more fun you have with Pd, without having to learn everything the hard way, the better.