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

[Gavin Simpson]

On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 06:35 -0400, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Each tip should be one (or a small number of lines) for the description
> and one line (or a small number of lines) for the answer -- not pages.

The Rtips web page I looked at (original) has a table of contents which
are hyperlinks to the actual tips in the same page - which is many
screen-heights on my monitor. I would approach this by scanning the ToC
for things that sounded like they might help me with a problem, and
click on the links one at a time, clicking Back to return to the list so
I could easily choose the next tip I wanted to look at (rather than
scrolling through the page to find the actual tips I wanted).

I don't see how the Wiki is any different here? Except that the
individual tips are stored as separate pages to which the ToC links
point to rather than to anchors within the same page. My approach to
this resource would be no different from the original RTips. I don't
think that many people would scroll through the entirety of Paul's RTips
page in a single sitting , do you?

Given the additional benefits of having version control on the revisions
and other advantages of having individual pages for each tip, I don't
think the minor change in format is too great a problem. YMMV.

> Look at Paul Johnson's original organization and its quite clear its
> superior for both browsing and searching.

In your opinion. It is difficult to compare the two resources as not all
of the tips have been placed in the wiki yet, but I don't see what the
difference is unless you like sitting down in front of your machine and
reading page after page of tips.

My main issue with all this is that to get to the wiki version of RTips,
I had to choose tips in the index, then tips again. Not the easiest in
navigation! If this section is meant to be separate because it is to
become a wikified version of Paul's RTips, then why is it listed as tips
> tips? Shouldn't there be one tips section with various sub-headings,
and Paul's RTips tips listed alongside other user-supplied tips within
those sub-headings? Each tip from RTips could have a small note at the
top to say this is from RTips by Paul Johnson (link to his page) etc. to
denote the provenance.

Maybe the authors of the separate R web resources didn't want this to
happen, but it doesn't make sense to have lots of <insert_name>Tips
sections in the wiki, there should be one for this kind of tip/snippet.

G

> 
> On 4/23/06, Gavin Simpson <gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 05:57 -0400, 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 i
> ndex, 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.
> >
> > Gabor
> >
> > /you/ might learn R best that way, but I doubt many people will. From my
> > own experience and from teaching R to colleagues and with students on
> > short courses is that they like a reasonable grounding in the basics to
> > allow them to get started, and then when they started doing their own
> > thing they want to ask "how do I do x?" Scanning a list of tips allows
> > them to drill down to the few items that sound like they might answer
> > their question. People don't want to read page after page of code -
> > especially on a screen - just to find the one sentence or line of code
> > that will help them solve their immediate problem.
> >
> > G
> >
> > >
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Gavin Simpson                     [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
ECRC                              [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565
UCL Department of Geography
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