Alberto Monteiro wrote: > Philippe Grosjean wrote: > >> As other have pointed out, the main reason for the lack of success >> of the R Wiki is that the mailing lists, particularly R-Help, are >> sooo successful. However, I continue to consider that the mailing >> list is suboptimal in two cases: (1) when text is not enough to >> express the idea, and (2) for frequent questions that would >> certainly deserve a good compilation on a wiki page and a >> redirection to it everytime the question is asked. >> >> > I think there's one case where the mailing list is non-optimal: > finding examples. This is where a wiki would be great. > > Say I don't know (and I can't understand the help) how to > use the rnorm function. If I do RSiteSearch("rnorm"), I > will get too much useless information. OTOH, an ideal wikipedia > would have a page http://www.r-wiki.org/rnorm, where I could > find examples, learn the theory, browse the source code, and > have links to similar functions. OK, maybe that's too much, I > would be happy just to have some examples :-) > Hi,
Do you mean something like (it fullfills basically all your requirements) : R> rnorm # get the code R> ?rnorm # get the help page The wiki already has a similar thing, for example for rnorm, you can go to: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=rdoc:stats:Normal There has been (recently and less recently) some discussions on the r-sig-wiki list about why sometimes you get ~~RDOC~~ instead of the documentation page, it is still a work in progress. The only tricky bit is how do I know that I have to go to stats:normal, well you can ask that to R, for example using that small function : wikiHelp <- function( ... , sarcasm = TRUE ){ if( length(hp <- help(...) ) > 0 ){ hp <- tail( strsplit(hp[1], "/")[[1]], 3 ) wikiPage <- sprintf("http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=rdoc:%s:%s", hp[1], hp[3]) cat("the following wiki page will be displayed in your browser:", wikiPage, ">>> Please feel free to add information if you have some, " , sep = "\n") if( sarcasm) cat( ">>> except if you are an evil person\n") browseURL(wikiPage) } else print( hp ) } R> wikiHelp( rnorm ) R> wikiHelp( tkWidgets ) R> wikiHelp( seq ) R> wikiHelp( fewqfrwasaqwetgqwtr) # no such page exists > Also, RSiteSearching is dangerous, because if someone replies > in an ignorant or malicous way (let's be creative: someone asks > "how can I open the file CONFIG.SYS", and an evil person replies > with file.remove("CONFIG.SYS")), then this wrong answer may > be accessed by newbies. A wikipedia _may_ have wrong answers, > but these are (hopefully) ephemeral. > Are there many people willing to just blindly copy anything and expect the good result to be returned ? I don't think there are many evil person around > BTW, is it too hard to include the wiki in RSiteSearch? > The wiki has its own search engine already, so you can go there and use it. I guess you can search for "search" there and get info on how to search . If you are using a Gecko based browser (firefox, flock, ...) you might want to check that extension that would search the wiki pages for you as well as the results from the R site search: http://addictedtor.free.fr/rsitesearch/ HTH, Romain > Alberto Monteiro -- Mango Solutions data analysis that delivers Tel: +44(0) 1249 467 467 Fax: +44(0) 1249 467 468 Mob: +44(0) 7813 526 123 ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.