Ironically, this function is present since the beginning, although a
little buggy. If you try this in R on a computer that is connected to
the Internet:
wikihelp <- function(topic)
browseURL(paste("http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/rhelp.php?id=";,
topic, sep = ""))
wikihelp("barplot")
You got the help page of ?barplot in wiki format (with a few
presentation bugs, but everything is there, basically)... plus a Wiki
discussion section where people can add more material, links, etc.
The help page is not physically contained in the wiki page, but it is a
file stored elsewhere on the R Wiki server, and that is supposed to be
updated regularly (but it is not the case for the moment). In the wiki
page you see, there is only a ~~RDOC~~ marker indicating where to
include the help page.
I have a problem with the R Wiki cache: until someone adds comments to
such a page, the content is not refreshed, but you just see ~~RDOC~~.
Try, for instance:
wikihelp("chisq.test")
If the engine thinks 'topic' is ambiguous, it displays a list of
possibilities (i.e., our wikihelp() function is somehow a mix of help()
and of apropos()). For instance:
wikihelp("help")
This should not be ambiguous, but it is considered as it currently by
rhelp.php (a minor bug probably easy to correct).
Finally, all wiki pages are spelled with lowercase. It is the same for
help pages. So,
wikihelp("RSiteSearch")
wikihelp("rsitesearch")
lead to the same rdoc:utils:rsitesearch wiki page. I have no solutions
for that!
So, to conclude, most of the required mechanism is already installed on
R Wiki. It just needs a little bit of debugging and fine-tuning to
become completely operational. A little help here would be very appreciated!
... and, of course, a refined version of the wikihelp() function must be
made widely available to "reveal" this function. One could even consider
to write a pager that displays local help page and warns if there are
comments on this topic posted on the wiki... or that link to a personal
wiki engine where everybody could add its own comments to the help
pages, with full-text search ability!
Best,
Philippe Grosjean
..............................................<°}))><........
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Prof. Philippe Grosjean
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
..............................................................
Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
In PHP and also in MySQL the manual has a wiki capability
so that users can add notes at the end of each page, e.g.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.variable-functions.php
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/update.html
That would combine documentation and wiki into one. Here it would
involve copying the R help pages into the wiki in a readonly mode with the
writeable wiki portion at the end of each such page. It would also be
necessary to be able to update the help pages in the wiki when new versions
became available.
No explicit email group or coordination would be needed. It would also address
the organization problem as they could be organized as they are now, i.e. into
packages: base, stats, utils, ...
It would require the development of a program to initially copy the help pages
and to update them while keeping the notes in place whenever a new version
of R came out.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Peter
Flom<peterflomconsult...@mindspring.com> wrote:
I certainly don't have anything against the WIKI, but I think that the
documentation
is where the action is, especially for newbies. It's the natural first step
when you want to learn about a function or when you get an error message you
don't understand.
Peter
Peter L. Flom, PhD
Statistical Consultant
www DOT peterflomconsulting DOT com
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