[R-wiki] R Wiki structure - level 1 & start page

[Roger Bivand]

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