2009/3/8 Emmanuel Charpentier <charp...@bacbuc.dyndns.org>: > I question 1) the usefulness of the effort necessary to get the data ; > and 2) the very concept of data mining, which seems to be the rationale > for this proposed effort. > > Furthermore (but this is seriously off-topic), I seriously despise the > very idea of "popularity" in scientific debates... "Everybody does it" > is *not* a valid argument. Nor "Everyone knows...".
As long as we agree that pacakge downloads != popularity then we have useful data. Usefulness of the data? Let's think... Suppose we discover that spatstat is downloaded 100 times more than splancs is. Both packages compute K-functions of spatial data. Pretend there's an enhancement to K-function computation that could be implemented in spatstat and/or splancs. Why bother doing it in splancs? Currently the only usage stats we have are even worse measures such as number of mentions in R-help or number of bug reports. Or maybe citation counts, but who would make important decisions based on those? I'd love to go 'Hmmm how many people are using my package?' and get an exact answer. Given the impossibility of that information, I'd love to go 'Hmmm how many people downloaded my package?', a good approximation to which is not beyond the bounds of our technology. Web pages have had annoying 'this piece of software has been downloaded 443535 times' banners (often enclosed in <blink> tags) since 1996.Yes it would require some effort at each CRAN site, but maybe the CRAN mirror site maintainers might be interested in doing this. If they don't want to, then fine. 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.