[Rd] vignettes present in 2 folders or won't work

[Spencer Graves]

	  CRAN policies say, "neither data nor documentation should exceed 5MB 
(which covers several books). A CRAN package is not an appropriate way 
to distribute course notes, and authors will be asked to trim their 
documentation to a maximum of 5MB."[1]


	  I post R Markdown vignettes as companions to Wikiversity articles. 
For example, the Wikiversity article on "Forecasting nuclear 
proliferation" is a tech report on the indicated topic with two R 
Markdown vignettes as part of an appendix.[2]


	  Wikiversity is similar to Wikipedia but supports teaching materials 
and original research, which are forbidden on Wikipedia.  Both are 
projects of the Wikimedia Foundation and have very similar rules and 
management.  For both, almost anybody can change almost anything.  What 
stays tends to be written from a neutral point of view citing credible 
sources.  If you don't do that, your work may be speedily deleted or 
reverted.  Shi et al (2017) "The wisdom of polarized crowds" did a 
content analysis of all edits to English Wikipedia articles relating to 
politics, social issues and science from its start to December 1, 2016. 
This included almost 233,000 articles representing approximately 5 
percent of the English Wikipedia.  They found that the best articles had 
a large number of editors with a very diverse views.  They said that 95% 
of articles could benefit from greater conflict;  the conflict became 
counterproductive in only about 5% of articles.[3]


	  Spencer Graves


[1]
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html


[2]
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Forecasting_nuclear_proliferation#Appendix._Companion_R_Markdown_vignettes


[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Articles_on_contentious_issue


On 2020-11-01 13:35, Ben Bolker wrote:
>    I take Duncan's point but would second the motion to have WRE clarify 
> how static vignettes are supposed to work; it's a topic I am repeatedly 
> confused about despite being an experienced package maintainer. If 
> knowledgeable outsiders compiled a documentation patch would it be 
> likely to be considered ...??
> 
> On 11/1/20 2:29 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 01/11/2020 1:02 p.m., Alexandre Courtiol wrote:
>>> Noted Duncan and TRUE...
>>>
>>> I cannot do more immediately unfortunately, that is always the issue 
>>> of asking a last minute panic attack question before teaching a 
>>> course involving the package...
>>> I do have /doc in my .Rbuildignore for reasons I can no longer 
>>> remember... I will dig and create a MRE/reprex.
>>> The students will download heavy packages, but they probably won't 
>>> notice.
>>> *Apologies*
>>>
>>> In the meantime, perhaps my question was clear enough to get clarity on:
>>> 1) whether having vignettes twice in foders inst/doc and vignettes is 
>>> normal or not when vignettes are static.
>>> 2) where could anyone find a complete documentation on R vignettes 
>>> since it is a recurring issue in this list and elsewhere.
>>
>> The Writing R Extensions manual describes vignette support in R, but R 
>> allows contributed packages (like knitr, rmarkdown, R.rsp) to handle 
>> vignettes.  WRE explains enough to write such a package, but it's up 
>> to their authors to document how to use them, so "complete 
>> documentation" is spread out all over the place.  As with any 
>> documentation, there are probably errors and omissions.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
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