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

[Damian Betebenner]

It's interesting how idiosyncratic people's browsing techniques are.
My tendencies follow two distinct patterns:

1. I go to the website and use a search function to find what I want (note: for websites built on a single
page, that manifests itself by doing a wordsearch within the browser)

2. I take advantage of any "directory structure" that the website has to push/aid me toward what I'm looking
for (and perhaps find the critical key word that I can use for a search).

The Wiki, for me, seems to perform better than the single page on both accounts. 

But the biggest advantage of the Wiki, for me, is that is radically simplifies sharing and
does so in a fashion that allows one to have a lots of "tricks" (math syntax, syntax highlighting,
command hyperlinks,  figures, ...)

Just my $.02

Damian


 |  On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:19:26 -0600
 |  Tony Plate <tplate at blackmesacapital.com> wrote:
>>>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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