[R] a proposal regarding documentation

[Gabor Grothendieck]

In PHP and also in MySQL the manual has a wiki capability
so that users can add notes at the end of each page, e.g.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/update.html

That would combine documentation and wiki into one. Here it would
involve copying the R help pages into the wiki in a readonly mode with the
writeable wiki portion at the end of each such page.  It would also be
necessary to be able to update the help pages in the wiki when new versions
became available.

No explicit email group or coordination would be needed.  It would also address
the organization problem as they could be organized as they are now, i.e. into
packages: base, stats, utils, ...

It would require the development of a program to initially copy the help pages
and to update them while keeping the notes in place whenever a new version
of R came out.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Peter
Flom<peterflomconsulting at mindspring.com> wrote:
> I certainly don't have anything against the WIKI, but I think that the documentation
> is where the action is, especially for newbies.  It's the  natural first step
> when you want to learn about a function or when you  get an error message you
> don't understand.
>
> Peter
>
> Peter L. Flom, PhD
> Statistical Consultant
> www DOT peterflomconsulting DOT com
>
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