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

[Philippe Grosjean]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 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.

How many times do I need to tell that the left pane displays, by 
default, the complete index of all wiki pages, but this will be replaced 
by more useful 'sidebars'. We haven't done these sidebars yet. So, this 
part of the site must still be considered as work in progress.

Now, here is what happens when you navigate through pages:
1) You enter in http://wiki.r-project.org, right?

2) You read this page (considering you are visiting the site the first 
time... otherwise, you would have bookmarked 'tips:tips', I suppose) and 
see:

...

Tips & Tricks

A large compendium of _shorter pages_ describing details of how 
particular commands can be used and giving examples of useful code.
...

with "shorter pages" being a link pointing to that 'tips:tips' page. So, 
what simpler can I do?

PhG


> 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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>>>>>
>>>>>--
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
> 
>