[R] Wikis for R

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "PhGr" == Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org>
>>>>>     on Wed, 04 Jan 2006 20:35:17 +0100 writes:

    PhGr> David Forrest wrote:
    >> [...]
    >> Any volunteers?

    PhGr> Yes, me (well, partly...)! Here is what I propose: this is a very 
    PhGr> lengthy thread in R-Help, with many interesting ideas and suggestions. I 
    PhGr> fear that, as it happens too often, those nice ideas will be lost 
    PhGr> because of the support used: email! By nature, emails are read and then 
    PhGr> deleted (well, there is the R-Help archive, but anyway, threads in a 
    PhGr> mailing list is not at all the best tool to make collaborative documents 
    PhGr> like those tutorials and co).

    PhGr> I just cooked a little Wiki *dedicated to R beginners* (meaning they can 
    PhGr> contribute too, and are very welcome to discuss their problems -possibly 
    PhGr> trivial for others-). It is available at 
    PhGr> http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/wiki. 

I you google for "R Wiki" you get (on the first page of hits)
- the japanase R Wiki "RjpWiki" [which has been in existence for
  quite a while, but that's all I know about it].

- the  Wikipedia entry for R
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language

    (which is quite good, but probably could benefit from more volunteer input)

 If you go to the bottom of that wikipedia page,
 you see that there is an "R Wiki" -- and has been for several
 years now (!) at a Hamburg (De) university.
 http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome

- Simon Urbanek's "R Wiki" mainly (but not exclusively) aimed at
  R for Mac OSX.

So, are you sure that another R Wiki is desirable, rather than
have people who "believe in Wiki's for R" use the existing
one(s)?   I believe the main challenge will (similar as for
an "R-beginners" mailing list) to have well-qualified "editors"
to be willing to review and amend what others have written.

I think it's an experiment that should be tried; but it has been
started already a while ago, and instead of restarting it, one
should try to agree on some cooperation with existing (Wiki)
approaches.

Hopefully some agreement on this is reached quickly, and we
could also add a link to the R wiki {or maybe several ones?}
from www.r-project.org.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich