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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Yes, possibly with some elaboration in certain cases.  By the way,
that is not the page you get if you click on tips after going to
wiki.r-project.org and clicking on tips to the left.

On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > In thinking about this some more perhaps one possibliity would be to have
> > an index which incluldes the answer.  That would allow one to browse the
> > key code and also see an expanded wiki discussion.
> >
> > e.g.
> >
> > 1.1 Bring raw numbers into R: scan(myfile)
> > 1.2 Basic notation on data access: iris[1,2]
> > 1.3 Exchange data between R and Excel/other progs: read.xls(excelfile)
> >  [also robdc, foreign and Hmisc packages]
> > 1.4 Merge data frames: merge(ds1, ds1, by = c("city", "x1"),all=TRUE)
>
> Hum, hum... you mean, something like:
> http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:tips
>
> :-)
>
> PhG
>
>
> > On 4/23/06, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> 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.
> >>Look at Paul Johnson's original organization and its quite clear its
> >>superior for both browsing and searching.
> >>
> >>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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