I knew I had seen this in action! But as you mention, most pages only
display ~~RDOC~~ at the moment.
I second the idea of using the wiki for such collaborative work. If the
current (r-devel) version of all help pages could be automatically
copied to the wiki, users would have a convenient way to propose
changes. The coloured diff, user identification, and RSS feed make for a
very user-friendly alternative to svn access (unthinkable anyway for
non-R core members).
Best,
baptiste
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
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
( ( ( ( (
..............................................................
--
_____________________________
Baptiste Auguié
School of Physics
University of Exeter
Stocker Road,
Exeter, Devon,
EX4 4QL, UK
Phone: +44 1392 264187
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/research/emag
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