[R-wiki] Gelman's comments about R tips vs Wiki

Tony Plate tplate at blackmesacapital.com
Fri Apr 21 17:19:26 CEST 2006


My feeling too is that having more on a single page makes for much 
easier browsing when you don't know exactly what you're looking for, or 
when the terminology is unfamiliar (both of which are likely to be true 
for many users of the Wiki).

However, maybe this can be partially addressed by having larger index 
pages, each one pointing to many different small example pages.  I'm not 
sure how well this could work.  If each example could be concisely 
described in a few words it might work well (then those few words could 
be used on the index page).

-- Tony Plate

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 4/21/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>Although I am ready to consider your point of view, I think I don't
>>understand it very well.
>>
>>1) Rtips is, by definition, a collection of short R code snippets. They
>>are, of course, collected together in a logical way (i.e., sections with
>>tips dealing with similar topics). Now, *why the hell would you like to
>>have a linear presentation of these tips???* (is this what you mean by:
>>"the nonlinearity of hyperlinks just adds confusion." ?) The best way to
>>access these tips is by looking at keywords (the search box) and reading
>>the tips related to your particular problem.
> 
> 
> The best way is to browse, not search, since its hard to know exactly
> what one wants.  If its all on one page or a small number of pages then its
> easy to do but if one has to search for it it makes it much harder. I
> would therefore agree with the posters who indicated that the original
> one page Rtips was a superior organization.
> 
> One idea is to have it on one or a small number of Wiki pages and have a program
> that collects them altogether in a document that can be downloaded.  That
> program could be run periodically to provide a snapshot, e.g. once a week
> or once a month.
> 
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