[R] Wikibooks

[Adaikalavan Ramasamy]

I think sometime ago someone suggested that we append a 
comments/discussion/wiki section to the end of every R functions' help 
page that is editable by everyday users.

In other words, every R function help page has a fixed component that 
has met R-core's approval and a clearly marked and more flexible 
components by everyday users.

The comments section on every function could contain suggestions, 
warnings (e.g. the use of "c" versus as.vector thread that was discussed 
today), examples, do's and don'ts, suggestion for clarification in 
documents.

I think starting from function-level is an interesting idea to 
complement Paul Johnson's "R tips".

This comments could perhaps be cleaned up and integrated for future 
releases if the R-core agrees on its usefulness. Think of as a Bayesian 
approach for maintaining information.

Regards, Adai



Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> Ben Bolker wrote:
>> Alberto Monteiro <albmont <at> centroin.com.br> writes:
>>
>>> As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about 
>>> R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming
>>>
>>> Alberto Monteiro
>>>
>>   Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php --
>> although it is not as active as I'd like.  (We got stuck halfway through
>> porting Paul Johnson's "R Tips" to it ...)   Please contribute!
>>   Most of the (considerable) effort people expend in answering
>> questions about R goes to the mailing lists -- I personally would like it if some
>> tiny fraction of that energy could be redirected toward the wiki, where
>> information can be presented in a nicer format and (ideally) polished
>> over time -- rather than having to dig back through multiple threads on the
>> mailing lists to get answers.  (After that we have to get people
>> to look for the answers on the wiki.)
> 
> I would like to strongly second Ben.  In some ways, R experts are too 
> nice.  Continuing to answer the same questions over and over does not 
> lead to a better way using R wiki.  I would rather see the work go into 
> enhancing the wiki and refactoring information, and responses to many 
> r-help please for help be "see wiki topic x".  While doing this let's 
> consider putting a little more burden on new users to look for good 
> answers already provided.
> 
> Frank
> 
>>   Just my two cents -- and I've been delinquent in my 
>> wiki'ing recently too ...
>>
>>   Ben Bolker
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
> 
>