[R] newbie list

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Paul Gilbert <pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca> writes:

> I've sometimes thought it would be useful to have another mail list
> called "no I haven't read the documentation but someone can save me a
> lot of time," or perhaps just "newbie" for short. This can be very
> useful for people just getting started in R and with school starting
> soon I expect the help list may become overwhelmed. Of course, I think
> that people should read all the documentation, but it can still be a
> very difficult to get a quick answer to very simple questions.
> 
> I would suggest that this be advertised as a list where new users can
> help one another and the experts monitoring the help list are (probably)
> not listening. Thus simple/obvious/documented things can be asked
> without fear of being (justifiably) chastised for not reading the
> documentation. A chat room may be a better mechanism, but a mail list
> can be added fairly simply.

Although I appreciate the thought, I see some problems with what you
suggest. In caricature, we could end up with newbies rewriting the
documentation for each other ... incorrectly!  Most of the time where
people get referred to the documentation it is actually because there
is no simple answer, or (at times) no easy way to lead people onto the
fact that computer languages have rules... 

I don't know about what other people do, but I set up mail filtering
rules that send all R-help traffic to a separate folder, so that I can
fairly easily skim it when I have time. Apart from that, I try not to
answer every newbie question but let the semi-experienced group (which
must be growing quite large by now) try their hand first.

One thing that has crossed my mind more than a few times is that the
Tcl crowd use something called a Wiki which is a sort of multiauthor
document (http://mini.net/tcl/) and I've been wondering whether we
might have something similar for R. This structure might be useful at
the development level as well. Not that I don't have other things to
do... 

(A better search mechanism for the mailing list archives might also be
a good idea.)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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