Hello all, Sorry for not taking part of this discussion earlier, and for not answering Detlef Steuer, Martin Maechler, and others that asked more direct questions to me. I am away from my office and my computer until the 16th of January.
Just quick and partial answers: 1) I did not know about Hamburg RWiki. But I would be happy to merge both in one or the other way, as Detlef suggests it. 2) I choose DokuWiki as the best engine after a careful comparison of various Wiki engines. It is the best one, as far as I know, for the purpose of writting software documentation and similar pages. There is an extensive and clearly presented comparison of many Wikki engines at: http://www.wikimatrix.org/. 3) I started to change DokuWiki (addition of various plugins, addition of R code syntax coloring with GESHI, etc...). So, it goes well beyond all current Wiki engines regarding its suitability to present R stuff. 4) The reasons I did this is because I think the Wiki format could be of a wider use. I plan to change a little bit the DokuWiki syntax, so that it works with plain .R code files (Wiki part is simply embedded in commented lines, and the rest is recognized and formatted as R code by the Wiki engine). That way, the same Wiki document can either rendered by the Wiki engine for a nice presentation, or sourced in R indifferently. 5) My last idea is to add a Rpad engine to the Wiki, so that one could play with R code presented in the Wiki pages and see the effects of changes directly in the Wiki. 6) Regarding the content of the Wiki, it should be nice to propose to the authors of various existing document to put them in a Wiki form. Something like "Statistics with R" (http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html) is written in a way that stimulates additions to pages in perpetual construction, if it was presented in a Wiki form. It is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, that is, exactly the same one as DokuWiki that I choose for R Wiki. Of course, I plan to ask its author to do so before putting its hundreds of very interesting pages on the Wiki... I think it is vital to have already something in the Wiki, in order to attract enough readers, and then enough contributors! 7) Regarding spamming and vandalism, DokuWiki allows to manage rights and users, even individually for pages. I think it would be fine to lock pages that reach a certain maturity (read-only / editable by selected users only) , with link to a discussion page which remaining freely accessible at the bottom of locked pages. 8) I would be happy to contribute this work to the R foundation in one way or the other to integrate it in http://www.r-project.org or http://cran.r-project.org. But if it is fine keeping it in http://www.sciviews.org as well, it is also fine for me. I suggest that all interested people drop a little email to my mailbox. I'll recontact you when I will be back to my office to work on a more elaborate solution altogether when I am back at my office. Best, Philippe Grosjean ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html