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?

@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)

more than pros and cons:

• Seems like a new generation is starting with PD now. 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 science, in the sense of writing down what others did, can not be the very base of art.
  Yes, PD is ideal for designing a kick-drum and although it's 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 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.