[R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up

[Pascal A. Niklaus]

Martin Wegmann wrote:

>Dear R-user,  
> 
>I already received quite a lot of replies to this mail and like to do a
>preliminary sum up. 
> 
>A few were sceptical about the use of such a beginner mailing list.  
>The arguments were that people starting with R will only stay subscribed for
>a short time 
>until they reached the R-help "level" and therefore only beginner will teach
>beginner how to 
>use R.  
> 
>But as far as I can judge, the majority of people who replied to this mail
>are medium to 
>experienced user who like to help beginner but does not call themselves
>highly 
>experienced user as the main "answerers" on the R-help mailing list.  
> 
>Therefore I assume that, even though some answers might be wrong, the threat
> of 
>possibly wrong answers might be minimal, due to various experienced users
>who like to 
>subsribe to this list. 
> 
>The majority of replies were positive about such a list and welcomed the
>idea to 
>encourage new user by providing a basic R mailing list, like the already
>existent 
>corresponding manuals in the contributed documentation at r-project.org. 
> 
>And again, this list shall only provide a basic and smooth introduction into
>R and its 
>capabilities.  
>Questions like; "How do I make my labels in a graphic bigger? - How do I
>change the 
>colour? - etc." are welcome and surely would annoy the majority of R-help
>user because it 
>is mentioned somewhere on the first 10 pages of every manual, but people who
>are used 
>to click on a graphic and change it in a second would not be convinced that
>R can do 
>great graphics. 
> 
>well, I would welcome if there would be more discussion about it or to give
>it a try 
>(perhaps mention it on the r-project web-site) and look how productive this
>mailing list 
>proves to be.  
>The address of the R-beginner mailing list is: 
> 
>https://lists.uni-wuerzburg.de/mailman/listinfo/r-beginner 
> 
>best regards, Martin 
>
Myself being relatively new to R, I'd like to comment on the idea of a 
new list:

- In my experience even *very* basic questions *relating to the R 
language* do get answered on r-help. I'm impressed by how much time some 
members of the R core team spend answering relatively basic questions, 
and by how elaborate their answers generally are. So I cannot see much 
need for a new R mailing list. There are these excellent mailing list 
archives, so why "fragment" this list?

- The kind of questions that generally do not get answered are the ones 
which involve statistical issues ("What is the appropriate model for my 
data?", "what is the difference between lm and aov?", "Is that model 
correct?" etc...). Since many beginners to R are probably also beginners 
in statistics, I could see some need for a list dedicated to statistical 
topics somehow related to R. For example, many people new to R seem to 
have problems adapting some basic mixed-effects models and repeated 
measures analyses they ran in SAS od SPSS. These kind of questions 
generally do not get answered, and some hints on how to adapt some of 
the examples in Pinheiro & Bates could be helpful. But this is unlikely 
to happen on a separate r-beginner list too.

Pascal