Here we are facing two problems:
1) Traffic at the r-help list should be kept at a reasonable level lest it becomes completely unmanageable and un-r-helpful.
2) People will continue to misread, overlook or disregard the manuals and come up with questions that many others will consider silly.
R comes with superb documentation and, certainly, the "An Introduction to R" is a must for a beginner. But I am sure that my first (and many other's) hours with R would have been much more productive spending them in front of a computer with an expert in it than reading the document and toying at the keyboard. How long does it take until a novice in R starts finding more answers than questions while browsing the huge documentation? How often would he think "this is a silly question, but I cannot find the answer for it; should I had someone to ask it, a simple word would put me back on track"?
In fact, most basic questions that appear on r-help are, essentially, answered with a simple word (usually preceded by a question mark and perhaps accompanied by an invitation to re-read the manuals).
Couldn't the R-community come up with a more economical and less stark way to help these newcomers? Couldn't it devise a procedure to provide a somewhat more interactive way --even more than a mail-list-- to provide them with this one-word answers without having to replicate it in thousands of mailboxes throughout the world?
Over the years, while learning C, Java or Python, I have found very useful a few IRC channels on those languages where one could get (and provide!!) peer-to-peer support. Should a rather informal, open and publicited one exist for R, I believe it could channel many of these basic questions and, probably, many others some novices do not dare ask.
Perhaps, it does not sound as a very "serious" procedure but... there goes my "granito de arena" on the topic.
Carlos J. Gil Bellosta
______________________________________________ [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
