Joran (on StackOverflow chat, funnily enough) has just pointed us to this: http://www.win.tue.nl/~bvasiles/papers/cscw14.pdf "How Social Q&A Sites are Changing Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities"
which includes a graph of postings to R-help and questions tagged '[r]' on StackOverflow. By the end of 2012 SO was getting about twice as many [r]-tagged questions as R-help was getting new threads. The paper is a very detailed discussion on the use of mailing lists and discussion sites. On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote: > On Nov 25, 2013, at 7:56 AM, PIKAL Petr <petr.pi...@precheza.cz> wrote: > >> Hi >> >> I doubt if people start to search answers if they often do not search them >> in help pages and documentation provided. >> >> I must agree with Duncan that if Stackoverflow was far more better than >> this help list most people would seek advice there then here. Is there any >> evidence in decreasing traffic here? >> >> Anyway, similar discussion went in 2003 with outcome that was not in >> favour for separate beginner list >> http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/03b/7944.html >> >> Petr >> >> BTW it is pitty that r help archive does not extend over year 2012. I >> found that *Last message date: Tue 31 Jan 2012 - 12:19:21 GMT > > > Petr, > > I may be confusing your final statement above, but the **main** R-Help > archive is current to today: > > https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/ > > That being said, as one who has been interacting on R-Help (and other R-* > lists) for a dozen years or so, I would have to say that one would need to > have their head in the sand to not be cognizant of the dramatic decline in > the traffic on R-Help in recent years. Simply keeping subjective track of > the declining daily traffic ought to be sufficient. > > Due to work related time constraints, my posting here in recent times has > dropped notably. I do still read many of the R-Help posts and along with > Martin, am co-moderator on R-Devel. So am still involved in that capacity. > > I do follow SO and SE via RSS feed, so am aware of the increasing traffic > there, albeit, I have not posted there. > > In addition, there are a multitude of other online locations where R related > posts have begun to accumulate. These include various LinkedIn groups, R > related blogs, ResearchGate and others. I do believe, however, that SO is > the dominant force in the shift of traffic. > > To answer Petr's question above, I updated and re-ran some code that I had > used some years ago to estimate the traffic on various lists/fora: > > https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-January/184196.html > > To that end, I am attaching a PDF file that contains a barplot of the annual > R-Help traffic volume since 1997, through this month. The grey bars > represent the actual annual traffic volumes of posts to R-Help. > > For 2013, I added a red segment to the bar, which shows the projected number > of posts for the full year, albeit, it is simply based upon the mean number > of posts per day, averaged over the YTD volume, projected over the remaining > days in the year, without any seasonal adjustments. So it may be optimistic, > as we are coming into the holiday season for many. > > Bottom line, while the trend was dramatically positive through 2010, peaking > at a little over 41,000 total posts, the volume has just as dramatically > declined in 2013 to a projected ~21,400. This means that the volume for 2013 > has dropped back to the approximate volume of 2005. > > Only time will tell if the dramatic decline will continue, or reach some new > reasonable asymptote that is simply reflective of the distribution of > traffic on various other online resources. > > To the original query posted by Bert, I would say no, there is not a need > for a beginner's list. > > Regards, > > Marc Schwartz > > > > > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.