[R] Wikis etc.

[Detlef Steuer]

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 13:51:24 -0500
Jonathan Baron <baron at psych.upenn.edu> wrote:

> On 01/07/06 12:25, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > So my $0.02 would be to a) go for it, if possible but b) make it
> > visible, and closely tied to R Core / CRAN / R News / ....  Which
> > poses the chicken/egg problem of people running out of spare time to
> > setup, admin, monitor, hand-hold the wiki, its database, watch out
> > for spammers, etc.  Volunteers to do this, and maybe help Jon Baron
> > on a first run using TWiki?
> 
> Great.  I agree.  But there are now at least 3 proposals floating
> around.  Mine was to base the wiki on (I think) the individual
> help pages, each file in the help or html subdirectory of each
> package would be a wiki page.  Since there are about 17000 of
> these at last count - oh, my, could that really be true? - this
> must be automated.  It should be fairly easy, but I just haven't
> done it yet.  What this would amount to is an extended help
> system.
> 
> Then there is the decision about what happens with updates.  I'm
> beginning to think that there is just no other way to handle this
> than to INCLUDE the latest version of each help file in the wicki
> page, have the comments come AFTER it, and just don't worry about
> it if the comments become out of date.  Eventually, someone will
> edit them if it is important.

Here I strongly disagree. Nothing is worse than searching for help and
stumble upon wrong hintsight. It is better to find nothing, than to
_think_ to have found an answer only to find it not working.

I was just bitten by outdated docu after updating qemu. Did cost some
time and frustration.

Think of the beginner left with useless, or worse, wrong advise.

Detlef


> 
> But I'm not at all sure this is the best way to go.  Given that
> all the functions in each package are related, it might be better 
> to have one wiki page per package.  In this case, there is less
> difference between my proposal and the other existing wikis.
> 
> It is possible that too many wikis is bad.  On the other hand, it 
> is possible that too few is bad.

May be true.

Have a nice sunday,
Detlef

> 
> > Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish
> > something.
> >                                                   -- Thomas A.
> >                                                   Edison
> 
> I love this.
> 
> Jon
> -- 
> Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
> Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
> 
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