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

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Sun Apr 23 15:43:07 CEST 2006


I think the most important thing is that if you click on tips in the left
hand pane that you get to the table of contents discussed here
rather than the uninformative one.  It should not be necessary to
read the page at all whether it uses folding or not.

On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > Its too much to expect that people are going to read everything that is
> > there.  They just want to get to where they are going as fast as possible
> > and to read the entire page and then figure out you have to click on the
> > word shorter is subtle, complicated and time consuming.
>
> Not my fault! The start page I proposed was one screen height, with only
> five links (one for each main section in the Wiki), and less that 50
> words in total. So, quick to read, easy to spot where to go, etc. But
> them, many people told me that this starting page was rather
> uninformative and that one needed more about what is inside each
> section... so, this is done! And yes, this necessarily dilutes content.
>
> As a betgter compromize, I intend to rework that start page using folded
> sections that you can unfold by clicking on them. So, the first
> presentation will be similar to my original page, with the possibility
> to get more details right on this starting page.
>
> PhG
>
> > To make it
> > doubly confusing if you do click on tips to the left you get to something
> > so there is no reason to suspect that there is a better alternative.
> >
> > On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> >
> >>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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