[R] Wikibooks

[Alberto Monteiro]

Philippe Grosjean wrote:
> 
> As other have pointed out, the main reason for the lack of success 
> of the R Wiki is that the mailing lists, particularly R-Help, are 
> sooo successful. However, I continue to consider that the mailing 
> list is suboptimal in two cases: (1) when text is not enough to 
> express the idea, and (2) for frequent questions that would 
> certainly deserve a good compilation on a wiki page and a 
> redirection to it everytime the question is asked.
> 
I think there's one case where the mailing list is non-optimal:
finding examples. This is where a wiki would be great.

Say I don't know (and I can't understand the help) how to
use the rnorm function. If I do RSiteSearch("rnorm"), I
will get too much useless information. OTOH, an ideal wikipedia
would have a page http://www.r-wiki.org/rnorm, where I could
find examples, learn the theory, browse the source code, and 
have links to similar functions. OK, maybe that's too much, I
would be happy just to have some examples :-)

Also, RSiteSearching is dangerous, because if someone replies
in an ignorant or malicous way (let's be creative: someone asks
"how can I open the file CONFIG.SYS", and an evil person replies 
with file.remove("CONFIG.SYS")), then this wrong answer may
be accessed by newbies. A wikipedia _may_ have wrong answers,
but these are (hopefully) ephemeral.

BTW, is it too hard to include the wiki in RSiteSearch?

Alberto Monteiro