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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

In rereading this one idea occurred to me.  What if the entire R help
system were turned into a wiki?   That is,

?whatever

would take you to the help page, but not on your computer --
rather to the same page on the wiki.  You would then find the
docs as they exist now plus the experiences of other people
with that command all at the same place.   You could similarly
add your own experience to the page.

--- 
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:53:59 -0500 (EST) 
From: Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at myway.com>
To: <feh3k at spamcop.net>, <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> 
Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up 

 
 


I agree that

- wikis (see the successful one for the lua programming
language at: http://lua-users.org/wiki/ )
- forums

are nice. Actually someone did set up an R wiki some time 
ago at:

http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome

yet no one really used it. Some critical mass of use is needed
to get such a project off the ground.

Other ways of communicating include:

- a moderated list

- a blog/summary such as this one for the Python language:
http://www.pythonware.com/daily/index.htm
or this one for the Ruby language:
http://www.rubygarden.org/rurl/html/index.html

Unfortunately these last two require a sustained effort on 
someone's part and I suspect no one would be willing to 
commit to this.

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Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:29:11 -0500 
From: Frank E Harrell Jr <feh3k at spamcop.net>
[ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ] 
To: rhelp <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> 
Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up 



My opinion is that separate lists are not needed (and I'm not clear on how
the person with the original idea summarized opinions in a way that
led to the conclusion that a new list is needed), but that a different
medium may be needed. The problem with e-mail is that to many users,
especially those who don't search the archives, e-mail is "memoryless",
and that individual e-mail messages become cumulative rather than being
corrected or updated. How many times have we seen almost identical
questions posed only days apart? A well-organized discussion board (e.g.
http://www.knoppix.net/forum) or wiki (e.g. using methods provided by
twiki.org - see http://web.brandeis.edu/pages/view/ITS for a nice example;
other users will know of better examples)
is worth considering. It would be especially nice if before pressing the
"Submit New Message" button a user had to check a few boxes acknowledging
that she had consulted various sources of information, and besides the
checkboxes would be links to those sources. Topics and subtopics would
have to be created by an administrator but users could add sub sub topics
and, optimally, edit other users' responses. This approach would IMHO get
better participation by both novices and experts than would having two
lists.

---
Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University