[R-wiki] R Wiki structure - level 1 & start page
Roger Bivand
Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
Thu Feb 2 14:24:49 CET 2006
On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
> Roger Bivand wrote:
> > On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
> >
> >
> >>OK, let's proceed step-by-step.
> >>
> >>Do we agree with the top level structure of the wiki:
> >>
> >>- beginners: collects together material for first time R users (and for
> >>curious people wanting to discover what R is). Subsections must still be
> >>defined.
> >
> >
> > Is it at all possible to use the CRAN Task Views to "view" packages and
> > functionalities. I feel that Task Views are a potentially useful way of
> > reflecting emerging clustering, and do - even for beginners - give a view
> > of discipline or thematic groupings of functionality? Beginners in Finance
> > arguably can benefit from a different view than say Ecology?
> >
> > Just a thought.
> >
> > Roger
>
> Such a structure (by subject-area, but indeed, it could reflect CRAN
> Task Views) is suggested for the 'tutorials' section. It is not
> implemented yet as proposed, but I will do this as soon as possible. I
> will make sure to respect current task views in this structure.
>
> For 'beginners', we haven't discussed much what should go there. My own
> feeling is that it should be restricted to material useful only in very
> early learning, encouraging to switch to the other sections as soon as
> possible (in particular, 'tutorials'). If you propose too much there and
> if people feel they can do what they need with just those basic stuff,
> they tend to never move to the next step.
>
> This is something I notice with R commander. R commander provides indeed
> a good set of statistical tests and a couple of models + some
> multivariate stat and a few data manipulation. This looks like enough
> for some biologists and many of my students clearly decide not to move
> to the scripts for that reason. If R Commander was less rich, they would
> be forced to do the jump!
>
> So, for me, the 'beginners' section should contains what is required to
> install R and additional R packages, to start working with R, to import
> simple datasets, to produce basic analyses and graphs, and perhaps, to
> use a couple of GUIs, but that's it. Thus, not enough to justify a
> splitting of the material into subject-areas (this is pretty common
> stuff among all kinds of users).
Yes, that sounds logical. Not a lot of detail, just a note that more
discipline-focussed *extra* information is <link> somewhere early.
Real beginners will have to have enough R on board first.
Roger
> Best,
>
> Philippe Grosjean
>
> >> [...]
>
--
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
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