Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 4:41 AM, Patrick Connolly p_conno...@slingshot.co.nz wrote: | Dear Don and Bert, | Allow me to address some of your concerns below. Which you do very clearly by positioning your responses underneath what you're commenting on. That doesn't seem to be possible on SE. In addition to Yihui's remarks (including mailing lists are good for discussions, and SO/SE is good for QA's), I would only add that on SE commenting inline is a non-existent problem. On the QA site all communication is restricted to three types, clearly separate forms of interaction: Question, Answer, or Comment. The user may ask only one clearly defined question, well, per Question. And each proposed Answer is supposed to answer that very specific clearly described question. Everything else, going from rants to requests for clarifications go (mostly) in comments (and are mostly ignored). If the question is vague, the OP doesn't need to sift through ML-like threads and comment inline, but simply edits the original Question and adds the required information to make it clear. Same mechanism works nicely for Answers. This means that when dealing with a complex situation what you do is break down the problem in clearly identifiable parts; then in the Question you explain the background and ask a simple question; then in a 2nd Question you re-explain the background (or link to the 1st Question), and ask a second simple question; and so on. This requires a self-discipline that helps the help-providers in understanding where the issue lies, and how it could be addressed. So while on a ML a discussion can quickly digress from a clearly defined question to something extremely more diffuse, threads or no threads (as Yihui mentioned, What was my original question?; and What are we discussing right now?), on a QA web interface moderators (and the community) systematically force the users to stay on topic. And personally I find that useful: no more I stop monitoring a thread because I can't follow it anymore (anyone?). Regards, Liviu __ 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.
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
On Tue, 04-Feb-2014 at 01:11AM +0100, Liviu Andronic wrote:
| Dear Don and Bert,
| Allow me to address some of your concerns below.
|
Which you do very clearly by positioning your responses underneath
what you're commenting on. That doesn't seem to be possible on SE.
[...]
| On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don
| macque...@llnl.gov wrote:
| - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant
| things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time
| since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and
| so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange
| example given in a link in one of the emails below
| (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these
| shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.
|
| Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail
| or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do.
Thunderbird with an IMAP setup avoids advertisements entirely even on
Gmail and Yahoo Mail (and is quicker).
| (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on
| SE.)
They do take up screen space where something more usable could use it.
[...]
| Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I
| can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in
| r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical
| space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I
| can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical
| space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows
| the names of several of the people contributing to the thread,
| which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can
| move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my
| keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and
| clicking, which is much less efficient.
|
| Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is
| irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to
| sort and filter the messages is using time. ...
Call me insane but I find sorting by thread within subject far more
useful. Seeing who else has already commented on the subject helps to
give me a good idea whether it's a subject I'm interested in. If not
I delete the whole thread and leave space on my screen where I can see
75 subject lines without scrolling. If it's an interesting thread, I
save it to an appropriate folder on my disk. A browser interface
can't come close to that usability. Many people have never seen mail
displayed in threads and so have little idea what I'm referring to.
[...]
| It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're
| interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those
| tags, and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only
| guess from the subject line what the question could possibly be
| about.
My mail client allows me to filter by any string in the body of the
message. It's rather useful.
rant I'm evidently in a decreasing minority group who learnt to use
computers with punch cards (and patch panels for differential
equations) which probably colours my view. The fact that simpler
effective means of communications are being taken over by whizz-bang
complicated inefficient ones is a cause for concern. I belong to a
group (as distinct from the aforementioned minority group) which has
never known the delights of an efficient mailing list and flounders
around trying to communicate via Facebook. The level of communication
is appalling: nobody ever knows what's going on. We might as well be
using punch cards./rant
best
--
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.
___Patrick Connolly
{~._.~} Great minds discuss ideas
_( Y )_ Average minds discuss events
(:_~*~_:) Small minds discuss people
(_)-(_) . Eleanor Roosevelt
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.
__
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.
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
For those defending mailing lists over StackOverflow, can you merge these threads so later readers do not have to move between multiple conversations? 1. Re: Should there be an R-beginners list? 2. Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?) 3. Re: creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:41 PM, Patrick Connolly p_conno...@slingshot.co.nz wrote: On Tue, 04-Feb-2014 at 01:11AM +0100, Liviu Andronic wrote: | Dear Don and Bert, | Allow me to address some of your concerns below. | Which you do very clearly by positioning your responses underneath what you're commenting on. That doesn't seem to be possible on SE. Sometimes hijacking in the middle of a thread like this is bad, because the discussion quickly diverges and we do not remember what previous hijackers said after a few rounds of replies (you just see [...], snip, , |, ||, |, ...). For example, what did Liviu say? [...] | On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don | macque...@llnl.gov wrote: | - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant | things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time | since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and | so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange | example given in a link in one of the emails below | (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these | shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. | | Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail | or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. Thunderbird with an IMAP setup avoids advertisements entirely even on Gmail and Yahoo Mail (and is quicker). Seriously, do you have an ad Windows 7 inside or Intel inside or an Apple icon on your laptop?... Personally I rarely notice the ads on StackOverflow. You are free to hate ads as I do, but you are also free to ignore them. Someone picked up Mathematica SE as an example, but has anyone really gone to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r and checked if there are ads? | (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on | SE.) They do take up screen space where something more usable could use it. [...] | Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I | can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in | r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical | space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I | can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical | space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows | the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, | which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can | move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my | keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and | clicking, which is much less efficient. | | Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is | irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to | sort and filter the messages is using time. ... Call me insane but I find sorting by thread within subject far more useful. Seeing who else has already commented on the subject helps to give me a good idea whether it's a subject I'm interested in. If not I delete the whole thread and leave space on my screen where I can see 75 subject lines without scrolling. If it's an interesting thread, I save it to an appropriate folder on my disk. A browser interface can't come close to that usability. Many people have never seen mail displayed in threads and so have little idea what I'm referring to. [...] | It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're | interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those | tags, and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only | guess from the subject line what the question could possibly be | about. My mail client allows me to filter by any string in the body of the message. It's rather useful. I'm hijacking here not to say anything but just to prove my first point. rant I'm evidently in a decreasing minority group who learnt to use computers with punch cards (and patch panels for differential equations) which probably colours my view. The fact that simpler effective means of communications are being taken over by whizz-bang and here. Can you see me? complicated inefficient ones is a cause for concern. I belong to a group (as distinct from the aforementioned minority group) which has never known the delights of an efficient mailing list and flounders around trying to communicate via Facebook. The level of communication is appalling: nobody ever knows what's going on. We might as well be using punch cards./rant best --
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
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 QA 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 QA 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.
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
On 05/02/2014 1:32 AM, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear all, On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Liviu Andronic landronim...@gmail.com wrote: It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ As Duncan suggested earlier, tying R Core to StackExchange may or may not be a good idea as it would make it somewhat dependent on external corporate interests. (Personally I see both advantages and disadvantages.) That's not what I said. I described the reasons *I* do not use it, I said nothing about R Core. So in the end my proposal is not necessarily for r-help to go to SE, but more for R to have its own QA 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 QA 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/ . Barry's response to this request addressed it really well. If you want it, go ahead and build it. Duncan Murdoch Regards, Liviu - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away. The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the SE QA web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists). Opinions? Liviu __ 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.
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Clint and Liviu, Stackoverflow also has rss feeds available, if you prefer being pushed the information that way. For the R tagged questions it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/r. Since some e-mail clients double as feed readers, you may be able to read the feed from your e-mail client. Otherwise, it does mean another application. Regards, Jason -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Liviu Andronic Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 11:24 PM To: Clint Bowman Cc: r-help@r-project.org; Bert Gunter Subject: Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?) Dear Clint, On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman cl...@ecy.wa.gov wrote: Liviu, Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE. However, there is a significant fraction of the population that prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well. It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r - The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, push-like) - The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon) - You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive. Regards, Liviu Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on SE.) As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of this QA interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best answers (or those most authoritative) to stand
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Jason, Thanks--I've found an RSS feed from EPA very useful and will check Stackoverflow's. Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Law, Jason wrote: Clint and Liviu, Stackoverflow also has rss feeds available, if you prefer being pushed the information that way. For the R tagged questions it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/r. Since some e-mail clients double as feed readers, you may be able to read the feed from your e-mail client. Otherwise, it does mean another application. Regards, Jason -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Liviu Andronic Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 11:24 PM To: Clint Bowman Cc: r-help@r-project.org; Bert Gunter Subject: Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?) Dear Clint, On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman cl...@ecy.wa.gov wrote: Liviu, Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE. However, there is a significant fraction of the population that prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well. It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r - The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, push-like) - The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon) - You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive. Regards, Liviu Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings --
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear all, On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Liviu Andronic landronim...@gmail.com wrote: It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ As Duncan suggested earlier, tying R Core to StackExchange may or may not be a good idea as it would make it somewhat dependent on external corporate interests. (Personally I see both advantages and disadvantages.) So in the end my proposal is not necessarily for r-help to go to SE, but more for R to have its own QA 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 QA 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/ . Regards, Liviu - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away. The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the SE QA web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists). Opinions? Liviu __ 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. -- Do you know how to read? http://www.alienetworks.com/srtest.cfm http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-dict#speed-reader Do you know how to write? http://garbl.home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/e.htm#e-mail __ 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.
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Every browser-based interface I've ever seen has a number of features that I find to be huge deterrents. To mention just two: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient. As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any time. True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and password. What ...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)? I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox. In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system for any alternative. -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, Liviu Andronic landronim...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below. On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch murdoch.dun...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. TL;DR = Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it). I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several places. It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by -the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away. The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Don: First, I apologize if this is off topic, but I thought I should reply publicly. I would only like to say thank you for so eloquently and elegantly summarizing my views, also. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur. If so, I happily accept the label. I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. Best, Bert Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics (650) 467-7374 Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom. H. Gilbert Welch On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: Every browser-based interface I've ever seen has a number of features that I find to be huge deterrents. To mention just two: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient. As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any time. True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and password. What ...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)? I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox. In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system for any alternative. -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, Liviu Andronic landronim...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below. On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch murdoch.dun...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. TL;DR = Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it). I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several places. It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by -the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Don, Thanks for the brilliant summary of my thoughts. Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Mon, 3 Feb 2014, MacQueen, Don wrote: Every browser-based interface I've ever seen has a number of features that I find to be huge deterrents. To mention just two: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient. As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any time. True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and password. What ...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)? I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox. In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system for any alternative. -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, Liviu Andronic landronim...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below. On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch murdoch.dun...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. TL;DR = Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it). I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several places. It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by -the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on SE.) As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of this QA interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has worked for the OP. Very useful stuff. Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes (100), and professional helpers (1k; think of Brian, David or, as it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The SE QA web interface---or similar---naturally handles this. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies around and whenever you close the browser and reopen SE, it identifies the cookie and auto-logs you in. Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient. Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to sort and filter the messages is using time. If a question wasn't answered in 24h (or, to be generous, a week), chances tend to zero that this question will ever be addressed. On SE it is absolutely normal for a question to be answered, with a high-quality input, 3 months or 2 years later. It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those tags, and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only guess from the subject line what the question could possibly be about. The QA interface also allows easily to redirect users to similar questions that were already answered (goodbye PLEASE do read the posting guide), thus identifying duplicate questions. It also makes it much easier to
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Liviu, Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE. However, there is a significant fraction of the population that prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well. Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on SE.) As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of this QA interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has worked for the OP. Very useful stuff. Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes (100), and professional helpers (1k; think of Brian, David or, as it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The SE QA web interface---or similar---naturally handles this. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies around and whenever you close the browser and reopen SE, it identifies the cookie and auto-logs you in. Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The From column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient. Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to sort and filter the messages is using
Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear Clint, On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman cl...@ecy.wa.gov wrote: Liviu, Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE. However, there is a significant fraction of the population that prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well. It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r - The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, push-like) - The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon) - You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive. Regards, Liviu Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov Air Quality Modeler INTERNET: cl...@math.utah.edu Department of Ecology VOICE: (360) 407-6815 PO Box 47600FAX:(360) 407-7534 Olympia, WA 98504-7600 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter gunter.ber...@gene.com wrote: I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better. On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so. I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go. The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don macque...@llnl.gov wrote: - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as votes, the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example. Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on SE.) As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of this QA interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has worked for the OP. Very useful stuff. Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes (100), and professional helpers (1k; think of Brian, David or, as it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The SE QA web interface---or similar---naturally handles this. - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is. Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies around and
[R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below. On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch murdoch.dun...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. TL;DR = Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it). I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several places. It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/?cb=1 All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold. 2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away. The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the SE QA web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists). Opinions? Liviu __ 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.
