[R] Wikis for R

[David Forrest]

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Detlef Steuer wrote:
...
> Back to operating wikis:The wiki spamming is a serious problem,
> especially because I HATE to login to read or edit anything. So the
> choice is: take the wiki as seriously as work and have a look every
> other day to remove the spam (or better: form a group of volunteers).
> That hurts or at least is no fun. Or put restrictions on it. That hurts
> even more. Perhaps I do not understand Philippe`s "loggable". What does
> a logfile with IPs help? The spammers are strangers selling ******; I
> don`t want to find them :-)

Sometimes you can mark the spammer's IP's as spammers and then ban editing
by them.  For my own UseMod wiki, I avoid spam by rejecting edits that
change more than 3 URLS.  But this is getting off of the R help topic.

> To sum it up:There is a very simple way to proceed:Philippe uses his
> Docuwiki install as official, _general_ Rwiki and I close down mine. The
> beginners will find their niche in there, if there is a real demand. I
> wouldnÂ´t mind to give up "my" wiki, because I have to admit it failed
> to achieve what I would have liked.

I like wikis too, and contributed a few pages to your wiki.  The low
use-rate and high wiki spamming content makes it not a place I frequent.

> So, Philippe, if you like, you can take over. I would replace my wiki
> with a notice where to find yours and the community gets a second chance
> :-)

http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl does have some
useful content.  Maybe it would be good to wade through it and figure out
how to patch the standard R documentation to include those contributions.

An advantage of a wiki is the low barrier to adding correctable
documentation.  The email list also provides low-barrier-to-entry
documentation, and its success demonstrates the clear need for additional
documentation.

Considering that, maybe there would be a benefit in rolling references to
good email threads into the documentation in some sort of an automatic
method.  Perhaps if an email question leads to a clarification or good
example of a feature, someone could post a message to the thread that
tags it for inclusion by reference to relevant documentation in the next
release cycle.

If this wishful thinking would come to pass, then the standard
documentation could point people towards using the mail archive in a more
directly useful manner, and we'd retain the peer-reviewed answer quality
of the email list.

Dave
-- 
 Dr. David Forrest
 drf at vims.edu                                    (804)684-7900w
 drf5n at maplepark.com                             (804)642-0662h
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