[R-wiki] R Wiki: What do you want me to do now about tips?

[Philippe Grosjean]

Hello all,

First, I would like to answer to Paul Johnson. The decision to separate 
Rtips into sections and have one page per tip is motivated both by 
technical reasons (already discussed, a wiki is more efficient with 
separate small pages than a big one), and for practical reasons. When 
Rtips remains rather small and managed by one people, like your current 
version of it, it is much easier to handle in one big page. Now, imagine 
that the R Wiki tips section gains popularity and that (just imagine!) 
hundreds of authors write thousands of tips. How would you manage a 
single web page containing these thousands of tips? How do you find tips 
related to, say, handling of data frames, in this big page? How will 
someone with a low-speed Internet connexion get the last tip that he is 
interested in, from this long page (he has to download all the rest first)?

I think that both presentations (several little page versus a single 
large one) have pros and cons. The suggestion to make a digest of the 
tips in the R Wiki, as an alternate presentation, makes much sense in 
this context. Romain François proposed a script for that. A good 
starting basis to automate the creation of that "Rtips digest". Would 
you be happy with this solution?

Regarding the progress made with the R Wiki. This was also a very busy 
time for me. I did my best to finish the Wiki engine for the UseR!2006 
workshop. I still have a couple of aspects to finalize (presentation 
with the sidebar, the Rdconv --wiki is *almost* done, plus a couple of 
other details).

Anyway, whatever where we are now, we should officially launch the R 
Wiki next week at the UseR!2006 workshop. A presentation is planned on 
thursday (see 
http://www.r-project.org/useR-2006/Abstracts/Grosjean.pdf). It would be 
also an occasion to recruit other volunteers to help in migrating 
material to the Wiki. I think that the priority is to write some initial 
material for the empty sections, like "getting-started:what-is-r", 
"getting-started:faq" (this is rather easy: it is the wiki version of 
the various official FAQ documents, but with the possibility to append 
comments for the wiki users), "getting-started:case-studies", 
"guides:books". Another priority is to migrate material from the first R 
Wiki by Detlef Steuer.

Thank you to all wiki authors or "migrators". The progress is slower 
than expected, but we have already achieved a pretty good result, I think.

Best,

Philippe

..............................................<°}))><........
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Pentagone (3D08)
( ( ( ( (    Academie Universitaire Wallonie-Bruxelles
  ) ) ) ) )   8, av du Champ de Mars, 7000 Mons, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
  ) ) ) ) )   phone: + 32.65.37.34.97, fax: + 32.65.37.30.54
( ( ( ( (    email: Philippe.Grosjean at umh.ac.be
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    web:   http://www.umh.ac.be/~econum
  ) ) ) ) )          http://www.sciviews.org
( ( ( ( (
..............................................................

Nick Drew wrote:
> Like others, I've been busy and not made the kind of progress 
> of converting Rtips to the R Wiki that I've wanted to. I had hoped to have 
> section 1 (Data input/output) done by now, but there is still
> 1.5 - 1.7 left on that section.
> 
> I'm willing to continue to help with this. I will finish section 1 
> by  the end of next week. However, I don't see me making
> much progress during our warm summer months here in Oregon.
> 
> Perhaps we could generate a list of which sections of 
> Rtips have been converted. Then others would know where to 
> continue if they desire.
> 
> ~Nick
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-sig-wiki-bounces at r-project.org
> [mailto:r-sig-wiki-bounces at r-project.org]On Behalf Of Ben Bolker
> Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 4:02 AM
> To: Paul Johnson
> Cc: r-sig-wiki at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R-wiki] R Wiki: What do you want me to do now about tips?
> 
> 
>    Having seen no answer thus far:
> 
>     Parts but not all of Rtips have been migrated to the R wiki
> (I'd make a wild guess of about 30-50%.)  My personal preference
> would be migration.  Apparently DocuWiki doesn't have a "single
> page" view, but there was some discussion on the list about how
> to run a script etc. to take a snapshot -- see the April archives
> and Romain Francois' code at
> http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:misc:alltips .
> If you were willing (once the migration is complete) to run
> this as a script on your server (say daily) and post the results ...
> 
>     Work on the Wiki has slowed down once again (perhaps inevitable
> since so many people are busy).  I'd really like to encourage
> list-readers to keep at it -- would people be willing to make
> some kind of nominal deadline for at least getting the rest
> of R-tips moved over/volunteer for sections?
> 
>    cheers
>      Ben Bolker
> 
> 
> Paul Johnson wrote:
> 
>>I have this gmail account but can't manage it very well.  Too many
>>messages, too many lists, blah, blah...
>>
>>Anyway, I just noticed several messages in this list debating the
>>question of whether I should maintain Rtips or try to migrate the rest
>>of the content into the R Wiki.  What is that status now?
>>
>>My opinion is that some of the things in Rtips are quite seriously
>>useful, especially "how to save graphs" and "use predict with
>>regression" but many of the things are tidbits that I accumulated for
>>one use and never used again.
>>
>>I do think it is good if users can just view all the tips on a single
>>page, as some readers suggested.  The one who said I should keep
>>separate content on Rtips seemed to think the big drawback of the Wiki
>>was the sub-compartmentlization of information into little pages, and
>>there is some truth in that.  But I've seen other Wiki programs that
>>could just display all content in a single www post.
>>
>>I'm sorry I've not been paying attention, but now it is summer and I
>>have some time while preparing to teach stats again in the fall, and
>>so if you (all) tell me what needs to be done, I will do it.
>>
> 
> 
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