Dear Bert, I believe that you've identified an important issue -- and one that's occasionally been discussed on this list previously -- but I'm not sure that another email list is a good solution. Some method of indexing functions in packages that would allow people to more easily locate them (e.g., author-supplied [i.e., not simply standard] keywords for each public object in a package) seems to me a more promising approach.
Regards, John > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Berton Gunter > Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:50 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [R] Proposal for New R List: Criticism? Comments? > > Folks: > > I would like to propose a new R list, tentatively labeled > r-contents. I wish to briefly explain the purpose and format > here and solicit public comments, pro or con, so feel free to > criticize or suggest a better name and other improvements or > alternatives. > > R presently consists of a suite of about a dozen core > recommended packages and several hundred contributed packages > comprising thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of > functions. Hopefully, this will continue to grow rapidly. No > one can possibly keep track of all of this, and it is > therefore a daunting task for someone seeking specific > functionality to find it, especially when they are relatively > new to R. > > Of course, R and CRAN (and Google and ...) have various > search capabilities that help, but these are essentially > keyword-based and so require the searcher to guess search > terms that are at least reasonably close to function names > and keywords. A lot of the time this works, but it can be > tedious; some of the time one guesses wrong, and it doesn't work. > > S-Plus and much other software addresses this by providing a > semantically-based Contents Index (or something like it) in > their Help functionality. I find this quite useful, but > creating and maintaining such an index seems to me to be > extremely labor intensive, fraught with its own issues (what > heading should I look under?), and, I think, not a good fit > to the spirit and dynamics of R anyway. > > Not surprisingly, as a result, many of the questions > addressed to r-help are of the form: "I want to do such and > such. How do I do it?" While this certainly gives answers, I > think the breadth of r-help and its etiquette and posting > conventions result in an abruptness to many of our replies > ("Read the posting guide! Read the Help files and do what > they say!") that discourages many users -- especially casual > ones -- from posting questions, and thus may thus discourage > use of R. Clearly, if true, this is not a good thing; on the > other hand, I think that given r-help's purpose and > practices, many of these abrupt replies may well be > appropriate (I'm a curmudgeon at heart!). > > Hence, there is a mismatch between user needs and r-help > services. To address this mismatch, I would like to propose a > new list, r-contents, to essentially serve the same purpose > as the S-Plus Contents index. Hence, it would serve as a > place for users to post queries ** only ** of the form: "I > want to do such and such. How do I do it?" and receive > answers that would all be **single phrases ** of the form > "package suchandsuch" or "?suchandsuchfunction." No further > explanations regarding usage would be provided, though users > would be free to follow up answers with private questions to > the responder, although there should be no expectation of any > response. Queries could be framed with as much or as little > supporting detail as desired, with the obvious consequence > that a more clearly framed question would be more likely to > get a (better) response. No other posting conventions (aside > from the usual ones regarding civility and adherence to > topic) would be expected. > > My hope is that such a list would both reduce unnecessary > traffic on r-help and satisfy a genuine need in a less > threatening way. I can certainly see downsides (I often learn > a lot from "How can I do this?" queries), but I think, on > balance, this approach might be useful. So I would like to > subject the idea to public scrutiny and criticism, as well as > the opportunity for improvement from suggested modifications > or alternatives. If it's useful, this will be recognized; if > it's not and/or no one is interested, that, too, will be made > manifest. I would be especially grateful for the opinions of > casual users or newbies, either publicly or privately. > > Cheers, > > -- Bert Gunter > Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics > South San Francisco, CA > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
