Folks:
 
I would like to propose a new R list, tentatively labeled r-contents. I wish
to briefly explain the purpose and format here and solicit public comments,
pro or con, so feel free to criticize or suggest a better name and other
improvements or alternatives.
 
R presently consists of a suite of about a dozen core recommended packages
and several hundred contributed packages comprising thousands -- perhaps
tens of thousands -- of functions. Hopefully, this will continue to grow
rapidly. No one can possibly keep track of all of this, and it is therefore
a daunting task for someone seeking specific functionality to find it,
especially when they are relatively new to R. 
 
Of course, R and CRAN (and Google and ...)  have various search capabilities
that help, but these are essentially keyword-based and so require the
searcher to guess search terms that are at least reasonably close to
function names and keywords. A lot of the time this works, but it can be
tedious; some of the time one guesses wrong, and it doesn't work.
 
S-Plus and much other software addresses this by providing a
semantically-based Contents Index (or something like it) in their Help
functionality. I find this quite useful, but creating and maintaining such
an index seems to me to be extremely labor intensive, fraught with its own
issues (what heading should I look under?), and, I think, not a good fit to
the spirit and dynamics of R anyway.
 
Not surprisingly, as a result, many of the questions addressed to r-help are
of the form: "I want to do such and such. How do I do it?" While this
certainly gives answers, I think the breadth of r-help and its etiquette and
posting conventions result in an abruptness to many of our replies ("Read
the posting guide! Read the Help files and do what they say!") that
discourages many users -- especially casual ones -- from posting questions,
and thus may thus discourage use of R. Clearly, if true, this is not a good
thing; on the other hand, I think that given r-help's purpose and practices,
many of these abrupt replies may well be appropriate (I'm a curmudgeon at
heart!).
 
Hence, there is a mismatch between user needs and r-help services. To
address this mismatch, I would like to propose a new list, r-contents, to
essentially serve the same purpose as the S-Plus Contents index. Hence, it
would serve as a place for users to post queries ** only ** of the form: "I
want to do such and such. How do I do it?" and receive answers that would
all be **single phrases ** of the form "package suchandsuch" or
"?suchandsuchfunction." No further explanations regarding usage would be
provided, though users would be free to follow up answers with private
questions to the responder, although there should be no expectation of any
response. Queries could be framed with as much or as little supporting
detail as desired, with the obvious consequence that a more clearly framed
question would be more likely to get a (better) response. No other posting
conventions (aside from the usual ones regarding civility and adherence to
topic) would be expected.
 
My hope is that such a list would both reduce unnecessary traffic on r-help
and satisfy a genuine need in a less threatening way. I can certainly see
downsides (I often learn a lot from "How can I do this?" queries), but I
think, on balance, this approach might be useful. So I would like to subject
the idea to public scrutiny and criticism, as well as the opportunity for
improvement from suggested modifications or alternatives. If it's useful,
this will be recognized; if it's not and/or no one is interested, that, too,
will be made manifest. I would be especially grateful for the opinions of
casual users or newbies, either publicly or privately.
 
Cheers,
 
-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box
 
 

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