On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Liviu Andronic <landronim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So in the end my proposal is not necessarily for r-help to go to SE, > but more for R to have its own Q&A forum/wiki for helping R users. > This could perfectly take the form of setting up its own open-source > https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central Q&A interface (a SE-like > web interface) on R Core's servers. In this case the website would > look like the following: http://www.biostars.org/ . Have you seen Field Of Dreams? Kevin Costner builds a baseball stadium in the middle of nowhere and all his favourite baseball stars appear out of the corn. He does it because he hear a voice say "if you build it, they will come". R-core are not going to do anything for users. They are primarily, if I recall one of Brian Ripley's talks correctly, doing it for themselves. Quite right too. R Core doesn't have servers - at least not ones they can just dedicate to running and maintaining a Q+A site, especially one that could scale up massively. That requires money for hardware or cloud servers, admin time, sys maintenance time etc. So if you think something is a good idea, build it, and they (the users) will come. For example, I don't go to the r-project site for help any more. www.rdocumentation.org has a much nicer search interface. Someone started asking questions with the [R] tag on StackOverflow, and now a lot of people hang around there. The RStudio guys didn't whine on R-Core to build a nice user interface - they built it, and look what happened. Let's leave R-Core to carry on with the core, and let the community build around it. If you can raise the cash to fund an amazon server for a year that can run one of the StackExchange clones, and are willing to admin it, then you can surely advertise it here and if people like it they will come. Maybe you can build a business model round advertising, consulting, or premium Q+A services (these exist: my gf gets paid to answer what are probably homework questions...) to keep it going. If you can't then you should appreciate what you just asked R-Core to do for nothing. Barry ______________________________________________ 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.