[R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)

Law, Jason Jason.Law at portlandoregon.gov
Tue Feb 4 19:53:04 CET 2014 

Clint and Liviu,

Stackoverflow also has rss feeds available, if you prefer being pushed the information that way.  For the R tagged questions it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/r.  Since some e-mail clients double as feed readers, you may be able to read the feed from your e-mail client.  Otherwise, it does mean another application.

Regards,

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Liviu Andronic
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 11:24 PM
To: Clint Bowman
Cc: r-help at r-project.org; Bert Gunter
Subject: Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)

Dear Clint,


On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman <clint at ecy.wa.gov> wrote:
> Liviu,
>
> Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE.
> However, there is a significant fraction of the population that
> prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to
> pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well.
>
It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r
- The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, "push-like")
- The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon)
- You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice

Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive.

Regards,
Liviu


>
> Clint
>
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> On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote:
>
>> Dear Don and Bert,
>> Allow me to address some of your concerns below.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I
>>> wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being
>>> subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings
>>> competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better.
>>>
>> On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer.
>> *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can
>> answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here:
>> http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize:
>> - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really
>> relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user
>> restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively)
>> - if you're interested only in seeking  help, then all thresholds are
>> irrelevant really
>>
>> All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in
>> contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating
>> this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality
>> of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock
>> upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so.
>>
>>
>>> I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the
>>> masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when
>>> they decide that R-help should go.
>>>
>> The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad
>> lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel,
>> and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The
>> scope of r-help could be redefined.
>>
>>
>>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don <macqueen1 at llnl.gov>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things
>>>> such as "votes", the number of views, the elapsed time since
>>>> something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh,
>>>> and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in
>>>> a link in one of the emails below
>>>> (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these
>>>> shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.
>>>
>>>
>> Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail
>> or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do.
>> (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad
>> on
>> SE.)
>>
>> As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of
>> this Q&A interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often
>> asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best
>> answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted
>> answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has
>> worked for the OP. Very useful stuff.
>>
>> Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes
>> (<100), and professional helpers (>1k; think of Brian, David or, as
>> it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on
>> r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be
>> rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The
>> SE Q&A web interface---or similar---naturally handles this.
>>
>>
>>
>>>> - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have
>>>> too many usernames and passwords as it is.
>>>
>>>
>> Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies
>> around and whenever you close the browser and reopen SE, it
>> identifies the cookie and auto-logs you in.
>>
>>
>>>> Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can
>>>> see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And
>>>> that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In
>>>> contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at
>>>> most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my
>>>> screen. The "From" column in my email client shows the names of
>>>> several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser
>>>> interface does not. In the email client, I can move through
>>>> messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a
>>>> browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much
>>>> less efficient.
>>>>
>> Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is
>> irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to sort
>> and filter the messages is using time. If a question wasn't answered
>> in 24h (or, to be generous, a week), chances tend to zero that this
>> question will ever be addressed. On SE it is absolutely normal for a
>> question to be answered, with a high-quality input, 3 months or 2
>> years later.
>>
>> It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're
>> interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those tags,
>> and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only  guess
>> from the subject line what the question could possibly be about.
>>
>> The Q&A interface also allows easily to redirect users to similar
>> questions that were already answered (goodbye "PLEASE do read the
>> posting guide"), thus identifying duplicate questions. It also makes
>> it much easier to search for topics of interest that were already
>> addressed in the past; much easier than scouring the mountains of
>> untriaged r-help content.
>>
>> And do not underestimate the soft incentives induced by the voting
>> system. Users seek upvotes (you can set bounties, get moderator
>> privileges and so on), thus making them interested in giving
>> high-quality answers and asking high-quality questions. Very well
>> thought-out stuff.
>>
>>
>>>> As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up
>>>> a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's
>>>> new at any time.
>>>>
>> Agreed. I understand the frustration from using a different medium.
>>
>>
>>>> True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a
>>>> username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have
>>>> to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet
>>>> another username and password.
>>>>
>> Mostly same happens with SE, the way they set it up.
>>
>>
>>>> What "...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)"?
>>>> I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at
>>>> all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup,
>>>> i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my
>>>> email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking
>>>> on the correct mailbox.
>>>>
>> Do you follow r-sig-gui or r-sig-teaching or r-sig-finance or
>> r-sig-robust? Does Brian follow them all? Probably not. People who
>> are seeking specialized help have a hugely reduced chance of getting
>> useful help.
>>
>> On SE however, the efforts are not fragmented; all questions are
>> asked and answered in the same place. If a question pertains to
>> 'plyr' and 'finance', either a finance type or a plyr enthusiast are
>> as likely to answer. For the r-sig-* MLs, one would need to subscribe
>> to all MLs and monitor them all; few do so.
>>
>>
>>>> In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing
>>>> list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing
>>>> list system for any alternative.
>>>
>>>
>> I'm not an SE  evangelist, and only truly discovered it about a month
>> ago or so (even though it seems that I had registered more than a
>> year ago), and initially I was quite very skeptical of this "fancy forum".
>> But when I actually realized how _efficient_ this Q&A interface is, I
>> quickly decided that r-help and associated r-sig-* were good to go
>> the way of the usenet. Long story short, the Q&A interface is
>> impressive in terms of economic efficiency, i.e. matching up supply
>> and demand; the ML is quite inefficient in comparison.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Liviu
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> -Don
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Don MacQueen
>>>>
>>>> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627
>>>> Livermore, CA 94550
>>>> 925-423-1062
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, "Liviu Andronic" <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Dear Duncan,
>>>>> I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and
>>>>> mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange.  Please read below.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch
>>>>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no.
>>>>>>> Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> TL;DR
>>>>>>> =====
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be
>>>>>>> moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it).
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I would generally agree with you, except for a few points.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1.  I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the
>>>>>> compilation.
>>>>>> As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone
>>>>>> to download and duplicate all postings about R.  So a posting
>>>>>> there is only available as long as they choose to make it
>>>>>> available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several
>>>>>> places.
>>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated
>>>>> content for download/mirroring:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-h
>>>>> osted-by
>>>>> -the-internet-archive/?cb=1
>>>>>
>>>>> "All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed
>>>>> under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. " And it is
>>>>> currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive:
>>>>> https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
>>>>>
>>>>> So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to:
>>>>> - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an
>>>>> r.stackexchange.com at
>>>>> http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a
>>>>> SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/
>>>>> - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary.
>>>>> This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu:
>>>>> http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ub
>>>>> untu
>>>>> - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is
>>>>> produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep
>>>>> the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on
>>>>> Internet Archive would still hold.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> 2.  I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the
>>>>>> mailing list interface, and will eventually win out.  R-help
>>>>>> needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like
>>>>>> StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good
>>>>>> answers, R-help will just fade away.
>>>>>>
>>>>> The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to
>>>>> efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to
>>>>> appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would
>>>>> only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a
>>>>> setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging
>>>>> system of the SE Q&A web interface (for example, all posts
>>>>> appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no
>>>>> need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists).
>>>>>
>>>>> Opinions?
>>>>>
>>>>> Liviu
>>>>>
>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>> R-help at r-project.org 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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>> R-help at r-project.org 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Do you know how to read?
>> http://www.alienetworks.com/srtest.cfm
>> http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-dict#speed-reader
>> Do you know how to write?
>> http://garbl.home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/e.htm#e-mail
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org 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.
>>
>



--
Do you know how to read?
http://www.alienetworks.com/srtest.cfm
http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-dict#speed-reader
Do you know how to write?
http://garbl.home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/e.htm#e-mail

______________________________________________
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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