[R] Wikibooks

[hadley wickham]

On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro <albmont at centroin.com.br> wrote:
> 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 :-)

Good documentation is hard to write, usually much harder than writing
the code it documents.  I think coming up with good documentation for
a package is on the order of difficulty of a large refereed paper (or
a book!), and yet you never get any recognition for it, only
complaints when it is inadequate.  Journals like JSS are an attempt to
allow software to recieve academic credit, but only provide
recognition for a specific form of documentation, the expanded
tutorial.  http://tinyurl.com/l7ufz has a good description of the
multiple types of documentation that are needed.

Many of the functions in R can not be properly used without the
appropriate statistical background and it is impossible to provide
this in the documentation. Many R functions are very well documented,
by experts in the field, in conjunction with a book that provides the
statistical background.  Unfortunately all the best things in life are
NOT free, unless you happen to be attached to a good academic library.

The r wiki is a technical solution to a sociological problem.

Hadley