[Rd] No RTFM?

[Spencer Graves]

  Hello, All:


       I think there is a logic to Gabor's perspective, especially 
regarding unintended consequences.


       For example, if the as a result of changing policy, our most 
creative and substantive contributors decide to reduce their level of 
contribution and are not effectively replaced by others, then it would 
be a great loss for humanity.


       This group, especially the R Core team and the R-devel community 
more generally, has been incredibly productive.  The result is a 
substantive contribution to humanity.  It would be a loss if any change 
reduced that.  However, if rudeness is driving away potential 
contributors as was claimed, then this community might be more 
productive with a "no RTFM" policy.


       I accept that the experience of the Ubuntu Forums and 
LinuxQuestions.org may not be perfectly relevant to R, but I think they 
could provide some insight:  I would expect them to have some of the 
same "rationing" problems as experienced on the R help lists.


       The exchange that generated my original comment on this was a 
question from "r.ookie" to R-Help.  I don't know why this person chose 
to hide their real identity, but I was subsequently informed off line 
that the RTFM comment I saw was a response to an apparently rude reply 
by "r.ookie" to a previous suggestion by a regular contributor.  I still 
think a better response is not to escalate:  Either ignore the post or 
say something like, "I don't understand your question.  Please provide a 
self-contained minimal example as suggested in the Posting Guide ... ."


       Best Wishes,
       Spencer


On 8/21/2010 2:08 AM, Simone Giannerini wrote:
> Dear Gabor,
>
> I do not agree with your claim
>
> "In the case of the R list there is a
> larger potential demand for free help than resources to answer and
> without the usual monetary economics to allocate resources I believe
> that the functional purpose of rudeness here is to ration those
> resources and minimize duplication of questions"
>
> In fact, apart from the fact that rudeness should never be justified,  I was
> amazed at the amount of time dedicated by some people to give unhelpful
> replies to dumb (and less dumb) questions (at least on R-devel). In my
> opinion this behaviour causes some damages to the whole R project for at
> least two reasons:
>
> 1. On the bug report side if you want to have a good percentage of true
> positive reports you should allow for a high percentage of false positive
> reports.  But if people are scared to post you will lose the true positive
> together with false ones.
> 2. People that are potentially willing to contribute are discouraged to do
> it.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Simone
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Gabor Grothendieck<ggrothendieck at gmail.com
>> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Paul Johnson<pauljohn32 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Spencer Graves
>>> <spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com>  wrote:
>>>>   What do you think about adding a "No RTFM" policy to the R mailing
>> lists?
>>>> Per, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM":
>>>>
>>> I think this is a great suggestion.
>>>
>>> I notice the R mailing list already has a gesture in this direction:
>>> "Rudeness and ad hominem comments are not acceptable. Brevity is OK."
>>>
>>> But the people who behave badly don't care about policies like this
>>> and they will keep doing what they do.
>> Although it may seem hard to justify rudeness its often the case that
>> even the most bizarre behavior makes sense if you view it from the
>> perspective of that person.   In the case of the R list there is a
>> larger potential demand for free help than resources to answer and
>> without the usual monetary economics to allocate resources I believe
>> that the functional purpose of rudeness here is to ration those
>> resources and minimize duplication of questions.  If that is correct
>> one can predict that if civility were to become the norm on this list
>> then other rationing mechanisms would arise to replace it.
>>
>> For example, it might become the norm that most questions are not
>> answered or are answered less thoroughly or the list might be replaced
>> as the de facto goto medium for R questions by some other list or web
>> site so we have to be careful about unintended consequences.
>>
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