In rereading this one idea occurred to me. What if the entire R help system were turned into a wiki? That is,
?whatever would take you to the help page, but not on your computer -- rather to the same page on the wiki. You would then find the docs as they exist now plus the experiences of other people with that command all at the same place. You could similarly add your own experience to the page. --- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:53:59 -0500 (EST) From: Gabor Grothendieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up I agree that - wikis (see the successful one for the lua programming language at: http://lua-users.org/wiki/ ) - forums are nice. Actually someone did set up an R wiki some time ago at: http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome yet no one really used it. Some critical mass of use is needed to get such a project off the ground. Other ways of communicating include: - a moderated list - a blog/summary such as this one for the Python language: http://www.pythonware.com/daily/index.htm or this one for the Ruby language: http://www.rubygarden.org/rurl/html/index.html Unfortunately these last two require a sustained effort on someone's part and I suspect no one would be willing to commit to this. --- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:29:11 -0500 From: Frank E Harrell Jr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ] To: rhelp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up My opinion is that separate lists are not needed (and I'm not clear on how the person with the original idea summarized opinions in a way that led to the conclusion that a new list is needed), but that a different medium may be needed. The problem with e-mail is that to many users, especially those who don't search the archives, e-mail is "memoryless", and that individual e-mail messages become cumulative rather than being corrected or updated. How many times have we seen almost identical questions posed only days apart? A well-organized discussion board (e.g. http://www.knoppix.net/forum) or wiki (e.g. using methods provided by twiki.org - see http://web.brandeis.edu/pages/view/ITS for a nice example; other users will know of better examples) is worth considering. It would be especially nice if before pressing the "Submit New Message" button a user had to check a few boxes acknowledging that she had consulted various sources of information, and besides the checkboxes would be links to those sources. Topics and subtopics would have to be created by an administrator but users could add sub sub topics and, optimally, edit other users' responses. This approach would IMHO get better participation by both novices and experts than would having two lists. --- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
