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@gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Spencer Graves
> > <spencer.graves@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.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



-- 
______________________________________________________

Simone Giannerini
Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche "Paolo Fortunati"
Universita' di Bologna
Via delle belle arti 41 - 40126  Bologna,  ITALY
Tel: +39 051 2098262  Fax: +39 051 232153
http://www2.stat.unibo.it/giannerini/
______________________________________________________

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