Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below.
On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. >> Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. >> >> TL;DR >> ===== >> >> Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to >> StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it). > > > I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. > > 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. > As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download > and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as > long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are > archived in several places. > It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/?cb=1 "All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. " And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. > 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list > interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once > someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the > people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away. > The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the SE Q&A web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists). Opinions? Liviu ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.