[R-wiki] Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced indicator

[Philippe Grosjean]

Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>>"PatBurns" == Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com>
>>>>>>    on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:17:39 +0000 writes:
> 
> 
>     PatBurns> I think having some identifier is a very good idea.
>     PatBurns> I'm not convinced that the wiki should be dedicated to
>     PatBurns> beginners only.  In my vision subjects would have a
>     PatBurns> layered set of pages -- the main page would be at the
>     PatBurns> beginner level.  That page would have links to several
>     PatBurns> intermediate topics, which might each have links to
>     PatBurns> advanced topics.
> 
> I think this is a very good suggestion, 
> which you should strongly consider as one main guiding principle
> of the R-wiki design.

OK, I add it in the start page right now.

> (BTW, at the moment, the Wiki prototype does not look at all
>  like it was for beginners; mainly because it shows so much
>  about the Wiki structure from the start;
>  but I'm sure you are aware of this, and it's probably on
>  purpose for this phase where you are looking for many
>  contributors...)

Martin, this is true: we rapidly moved towards a R Wiki dedicated to 
*any* R user, not only beginners (and this is why we currently discuss 
mechanisms to separate topics for beginners, intermediate and advanced 
users). It is probably not realistic to consider people will only 
contribute pages useful for beginners... there will be certainly some 
material requiring higher skills added to the site!

By nature, a Wiki tends to be a rather unsorted collection of pages. 
Despite we work on a logical initial structure, I think it will be hard 
to keep everything organized, since people can freely add pages everywhere!

The solution here is to consider a second level of organization by means 
of manual *table of contents* implemented as sidebars (in place of the 
index, at left). Here is the mechanism:

- A series of authors contribute Wiki pages on various topics... It does 
not matter if they are not well organized, providing they all follow a 
limited set of "writting rules" to be reasonably homogeneous in their 
presentation.

- Given the license (copyleft), another person can compile a "document" 
targetting beginners, or perhaps, specific users (like econometrists, 
biologists, ..), or whatever topic. He just builds a table of content, 
collecting together the pages of interest for that topic, picking up the 
most relevant pages in the whole Wiki, and perhaps implementing missing 
ones.

At the end of the process, the actual Wiki organization becomes of a 
secondary importance: just select the TOC of your choice and be guided 
by the propositions there...

One example: although we plan to put the whole series of R man pages on 
the Wiki, I think it should be nice to build an index with a limited 
number of entries, pointing only on pages most useful for beginners.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

>  [...]