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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> >
> >>Tony Plate wrote:
> >> > [...] (see hereunder for full post)
> >> > However, maybe this can be partially addressed by having larger index
> >> > pages, each one pointing to many different small example pages. [...]
> >>
> >>Exactly! Speaking about "browsing" the tips, the key is not to have all
> >>tips on one page, but an index, table of content, summary, or
> >>whatever-you-call-it page. You browse that page and click on the links
> >>you want. This is more effective than browsing tens of thousands of
> >>lines to discover that the tips you are looking for is the forelast one,
> >>that is, the 9,999th one!
> >>
> >
> >
> > You want to browse the code itself, not just an index.  The way
> > you learn R is to look at a lot of code and not by having to waste
> > time jumping to dozens or hundreds of different pages.
>
> So, are you telling me that you put somehow the whole code of R in a
> *single* file and that you are happy browsing it that way??? Stop
> kidding, please :-O
>

At least for tips, yes.  I think a single file, with thousands of lines if
need be, is best.

Although this may be too much work, what would be attractive from
the viewpoint of someone trying to use it is that, assuming
the tips are one per page, would be to have a program that reorganizes
them all into a single document.  I am not sure if this implies storing
them in a database or what the technical solution would be.