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

[Patrick Burns]

Rolf Turner wrote:

>Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>
>  
>
>>My personal view on this is that there is need for a friendly
>>list with a more "customer service" attitude than r-help.
>>    
>>
>
>God save us from a ``"customer service" attitude'' --- bland,
>fatuous, feel-good useless twaddle!  If you want a ``custome
>service'' attitude go and use Microsoft's crap!  
>
I imagine Gabor meant _real_ customer service.  

>The subscribers to
>this list are not customers, they are participants in a collective
>endeavour.  Those who come in with an ``I'm a customer; service me''
>(;-)) attitude should look elsewhere.  If they are such wimps that
>they collapse from being told a few brusque home truths, they
>shouldn't be doing statistical computing in the first place.  
>
I wish that I shared Rolf's idealism here, but there are lots of people
who should be doing statistical computing who either aren't doing it
at all, or are using decidedly inferior tools (see point 1 above).  The
easier we can make their introduction to R (and statistics), the better.

Comments about a second mailing list are a little off the mark, since
there are already 3 mailing lists: R-help, R-devel, R-core.  R-beginner
would just be another layer.

But it is definitely useful to wonder what the best medium is.  Given
that the list is populated by statisticians, experimenting seems like a
natural choice.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")