Re: [R] Wikibooks
I think we occasionally think that it is very easy to get information
because we know how to find the information. This does not mean that other
people know how to find the answer. It is for this reason that questions
appear on the listserver that we might think could be easily found from
other sources.
John
As a relative n00b user I agree with this. The R organization pages are
not very readable especially if you aren't even sure what you're looking
for (not know the name of a specific function etc.) and pdf:s, search.help
or ? are not the best ways always either. I did not even now there was R
wiki. I couldn't find a link from the R organization pages to it or am I
just blind?
Katja Löytynoja FM
John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC,
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude D. Pepper OAIC,
University of Maryland Clinical Nutrition Research Unit, and
Baltimore VA Center Stroke of Excellence
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Division of Gerontology
Baltimore VA Medical Center
10 North Greene Street
GRECC (BT/18/GR)
Baltimore, MD 21201-1524
(Phone) 410-605-7119
(Fax) 410-605-7913 (Please call phone number above prior to faxing)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
hadley wickham [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3/29/2007 7:47 PM
Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply
by
checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why
would
a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing
list
than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer
people
to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at
issue
here, I think, not the form of the docs.
I agree - and there's also a problem that until the wiki becomes
useful there's no point referring people to it, and because no one
visits it, it doesn't get better.
http://www.wikipatterns.com provides some good advice for getting a wiki
going.
Hadley
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Re: [R] Wikibooks
G'day Kaltja, On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:19:00 +0300 (EEST) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] I did not even now there was R wiki. I couldn't find a link from the R organization pages to it or am I just blind? If you talk about CRAN (e.g. http://cran.r-project.org/) then no, but if you really talk about The R Project for Statistical Computing pages, i.e. http://www.r-project.org/ then yes. :) On www.r-project.org you have the following links under documentation: Manuals FAQs Newsletter Wiki Books Other Note that CRAN (and mirrors) have a link called R Homepage under About R. Cheers, Berwin __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Bert Gunter wrote: Question: Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply by checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why would a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing list than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer people to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at issue here, I think, not the form of the docs. Answer: The online help, vignettes and manuals have a very intimidating (i.e., technical) presentation for people that tend to be afraid of such a crude presentation. It is apparently not your case, and this is probably why you even don't realize this could be a problem for a non negligible fraction of R. The Wiki was primarily targeted to them. As you say: it's psychology at issue here. 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. Best, Philippe Grosjean -- ..°})) ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Prof. Philippe Grosjean ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems ) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium ( ( ( ( ( .. Disclaimer 1: None of this is meant to reflect one way or ther other on the usefulness of Wikis as a documentation format -- only their ability to change the Help list culture. Disclaimer 2: Others have repeatedly made similar comments (asking us to refer people to the docs rather than providing explicit answers, I mean). Cheers, Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Statistics South San Francisco, CA 94404 650-467-7374 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Frank E Harrell Jr Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 3:32 PM To: Ben Bolker Cc: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] Wikibooks Ben Bolker wrote: Alberto Monteiro albmont at centroin.com.br writes: As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming Alberto Monteiro Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! Most of the (considerable) effort people expend in answering questions about R goes to the mailing lists -- I personally would like it if some tiny fraction of that energy could be redirected toward the wiki, where information can be presented in a nicer format and (ideally) polished over time -- rather than having to dig back through multiple threads on the mailing lists to get answers. (After that we have to get people to look for the answers on the wiki.) I would like to strongly second Ben. In some ways, R experts are too nice. Continuing to answer the same questions over and over does not lead to a better way using R wiki. I would rather see the work go into enhancing the wiki and refactoring information, and responses to many r-help please for help be see wiki topic x. While doing this let's consider putting a little more burden on new users to look for good answers already provided. Frank Just my two cents -- and I've been delinquent in my wiki'ing recently too ... Ben Bolker __ 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. __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
..°})) ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Prof. Philippe Grosjean ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems ) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium ( ( ( ( ( .. Dieter Menne wrote: Ben Bolker bolker at zoo.ufl.edu writes: Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! I once tried: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:lmer-tests but I don't think I will do this again on the existing Wiki. I am a frequent Wikipedia-Writer, so I know how it works, but this was discouraging. 1) The structure of the Wiki was and is still incomprehensibly to me. I needed too much time to find out how to put the stuff into it. Really bad. This was the best design we obtained after a hard work of several tens of people. Sorry for you. By the way, did you ever noticed that Wikipedia basically has NO structure? It is intended to be mostly accessed by KEYWORDS. On the main page, you have: main (that page), then content (explanation and general links to the whole content), plus a couple of selected content links (featured, recent, random). So, if you like this structure, that is, basically, no structure and access through keywords... why not to do the same with the R Wiki? Just type your keyword in the top-right text entry and click search. Then, you don't need to care about that structure that is still incomprehensible to you. 2) I decided to use the large guides section, because I wanted the thread transcript to be one one page. If you check the revision history, you will find that I needed more than three hours to get it working. The main reason is the sluggish response, and the incomprehensible error messages or the lack of it when some was not matched or whatever (Thanks, Ben, for correcting the remaining errors). This is a problem of the Wiki software used, other Wikis such as Media(pedia) are much more tolerant or informant. As I said, sluggish response is probably due to a combination of a slow Internet communication from your computer to the server at the time you edited your page, the edition of a too large page, and lack of edition section per section (you can edit each paragraph separately). I already made some corrections on the Wiki when I was in USA (the server is in Belgium, Europe), and it was not sluggish at all... On other circumstances, I noted a much slower reaction, too. That's Internet! DokuWiki is NOT slower than Mediawiki, especially with an underused Wiki site as R wiki is currently. Then, Philippe Grosjean informed me: Your page is way too long and is a rather crude copy and paste from the long thread in the mailing list. Yes, I still believe so. Wiki pages are more effective when they are kept short. I disagree. Why do you have a large guides section? And taking into account the amount of work I put into reformatting the transcript, I decided it was my first and last contribution to the Wiki. The large guides section is for ... large guides, of course... but who said that they should be all contained in a single page??? Just quoting http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:guides: If it is a larger contribution with many pages, create a dedicated subsection in tutorials (like “stats-with-r”, for instance). The key is there: a large guide should better be represented by several wiki pages collected together in a dedicated subsection. Is it that hard to understand? Philippe Grosjean Dieter Menne __ 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. __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/2007 5:27 AM, Philippe Grosjean wrote: Bert Gunter wrote: Question: Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply by checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why would a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing list than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer people to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at issue here, I think, not the form of the docs. Answer: The online help, vignettes and manuals have a very intimidating (i.e., technical) presentation for people that tend to be afraid of such a crude presentation. It is apparently not your case, and this is probably why you even don't realize this could be a problem for a non negligible fraction of R. The Wiki was primarily targeted to them. As you say: it's psychology at issue here. 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. But the wiki doesn't offer a way to ask questions. I'd be just as happy to answer questions there as here, but there are none there to answer (and the advice there is to ask questions here). I don't know how to organize a wiki to make it easy to ask and answer questions. It's a reasonably good way to collect reference information, but it's not very well suited to QA. Duncan Murdoch __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
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 :-) 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. BTW, is it too hard to include the wiki in RSiteSearch? Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/2007 7:34 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Duncan Murdoch wrote: But the wiki doesn't offer a way to ask questions. I'd be just as happy to answer questions there as here, but there are none there to answer (and the advice there is to ask questions here). I don't know how to organize a wiki to make it easy to ask and answer questions. It's a reasonably good way to collect reference information, but it's not very well suited to QA. The way to ask questions in the Wiki is to micro-vandalize it :-))) Since anyone can edit, if I don't know how to use some function, I can _create_ this page and fill it with my doubts - in the hope that someone will then fix it latter. Example: rnorm This is a very weird function, because things like rnorm(0.975) should return 1.96, but returns numeric(0) And then someone would either rename the page to qnorm, or write a new rnorm page. If entering a new page is really the way to ask a question, then you should write this on the front page, and as a possible way to contribute on the getting-started page. It would also be a good idea to tell people like me how to find those questions. (Recent Edits seems a little too broad, with too little in the way of subject matter in the comments, but maybe that's just because nobody's asking questions yet.) And it would be a good idea to seed the wiki with a lot of questions, just to get some activity going. And maybe set up a page for pointers to questions that are languishing unanswered? I think the key is to make it easy to ask a question and easy to answer one, so don't put too much bureaucracy into the process. Duncan Murdoch __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Duncan Murdoch wrote: But the wiki doesn't offer a way to ask questions. I'd be just as happy to answer questions there as here, but there are none there to answer (and the advice there is to ask questions here). I don't know how to organize a wiki to make it easy to ask and answer questions. It's a reasonably good way to collect reference information, but it's not very well suited to QA. The way to ask questions in the Wiki is to micro-vandalize it :-))) Since anyone can edit, if I don't know how to use some function, I can _create_ this page and fill it with my doubts - in the hope that someone will then fix it latter. Example: rnorm This is a very weird function, because things like rnorm(0.975) should return 1.96, but returns numeric(0) And then someone would either rename the page to qnorm, or write a new rnorm page. Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
I once tried: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:lmer-tests but I don't think I will do this again on the existing Wiki. I am a frequent Wikipedia-Writer, so I know how it works, but this was discouraging. 1) The structure of the Wiki was and is still incomprehensibly to me. I needed too much time to find out how to put the stuff into it. Really bad. This was the best design we obtained after a hard work of several tens of people. Sorry for you. By the way, did you ever noticed that Wikipedia basically has NO structure? It is intended to be mostly accessed by KEYWORDS. On the main page, you have: main (that page), then content (explanation and general links to the whole content), plus a couple of selected content links (featured, recent, random). Why is how wikipedia structured relevant? The R wiki is not an encyclopedia, it has a quite different purpose which would be facilitiated by better structure. Obviously at some point the decision was made to structure the site by type of document (large guide, short tips, package information etc), but why? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to organise it around subjects? (Of course coming up with a good subject classification is fiendishly difficult, but perhaps the R keywords hierarchy would have been a good start). So, if you like this structure, that is, basically, no structure and access through keywords... why not to do the same with the R Wiki? Just type your keyword in the top-right text entry and click search. Then, you don't need to care about that structure that is still incomprehensible to you. If search is the most important navigational element why is it not more obvious? Additionally the recent changes button right next to the search box makes it harder to distinguish whether the text field is related to search or recent changes. 2) I decided to use the large guides section, because I wanted the thread transcript to be one one page. If you check the revision history, you will find that I needed more than three hours to get it working. The main reason is the sluggish response, and the incomprehensible error messages or the lack of it when some was not matched or whatever (Thanks, Ben, for correcting the remaining errors). This is a problem of the Wiki software used, other Wikis such as Media(pedia) are much more tolerant or informant. As I said, sluggish response is probably due to a combination of a slow Internet communication from your computer to the server at the time you edited your page, the edition of a too large page, and lack of edition section per section (you can edit each paragraph separately). I already made some corrections on the Wiki when I was in USA (the server is in Belgium, Europe), and it was not sluggish at all... On other circumstances, I noted a much slower reaction, too. That's Internet! Regardless of the reasons, the fact remains that at least one person has found it difficult and slow. Whenever one person complains you can be sure that 10 other people have tried and given up without complaining. Wiki syntax is difficult and the page explaining it is poorly structured. DokuWiki is NOT slower than Mediawiki, especially with an underused Wiki site as R wiki is currently. Then, Philippe Grosjean informed me: Your page is way too long and is a rather crude copy and paste from the long thread in the mailing list. Yes, I still believe so. Wiki pages are more effective when they are kept short. This is not a good way to build up a community around a wiki. The evidence regarding whether many small interlinked pages is more preferrered or more effective than one large page is scanty, and often it comes down to personal preference. Hadley __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Romain Francois wrote:
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 :-)
Do you mean something like (it fullfills basically all your
requirements) :
R rnorm # get the code
R ?rnorm # get the help page
This works when there's a decent documentation for the function.
The functions in the tcltk package, for example, are horribly
undocumented, and asking for help only loops to a general
help about all (and none) of the functions.
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
I didn't like the way it worked. I searched for rnorm and Norm,
and I got a list of pages. Even for this trivial example, I
have no idea how I could find anything using the Search.
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 ) }
Nice code :-)
R wikiHelp( rnorm )
~~RDOC~~ # what is this?
R wikiHelp( tkWidgets )
No documentation for 'tkWidgets' in specified packages and libraries:
you could try 'help.search(tkWidgets)'
R wikiHelp( seq )
Here it worked as expected.
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.
:-)
Or I could ask help(help) to learn how help works :-P
Alberto Monteiro
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/2007 9:16 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Romain Francois wrote:
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 :-)
Do you mean something like (it fullfills basically all your
requirements) :
R rnorm # get the code
R ?rnorm # get the help page
This works when there's a decent documentation for the function.
The functions in the tcltk package, for example, are horribly
undocumented, and asking for help only loops to a general
help about all (and none) of the functions.
I don't remember if you've said which platform you're working on, but if
you're on Windows, the TCL/TK documentation is available to you. It's
in RHOME/Tcl/doc. This is mentioned in the ?tcltk R help topic.
I believe most Unix-like systems with TCL/TK support installed would
have the same documentation available, but I don't know where.
That documentation assumes you're using a TCL interpreter rather than R,
so the syntax is all wrong, but there's a mechanical translation from it
to R syntax which is described in the ?TkCommands R help topic.
So these functions may be horribly documented, but they're not horribly
undocumented.
Duncan Murdoch
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
I didn't like the way it worked. I searched for rnorm and Norm,
and I got a list of pages. Even for this trivial example, I
have no idea how I could find anything using the Search.
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 ) }
Nice code :-)
R wikiHelp( rnorm )
~~RDOC~~ # what is this?
R wikiHelp( tkWidgets )
No documentation for 'tkWidgets' in specified packages and libraries:
you could try 'help.search(tkWidgets)'
R wikiHelp( seq )
Here it worked as expected.
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.
:-)
Or I could ask help(help) to learn how help works :-P
Alberto Monteiro
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
__
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Duncan Murdoch wrote: This works when there's a decent documentation for the function. The functions in the tcltk package, for example, are horribly undocumented, and asking for help only loops to a general help about all (and none) of the functions. I don't remember if you've said which platform you're working on, but if you're on Windows, the TCL/TK documentation is available to you. It's in RHOME/Tcl/doc. This is mentioned in the ?tcltk R help topic. I always find it easier to get the help from the Internet, even using Google (search for tcl/tk grid, for example) than with the internal documentation... I believe most Unix-like systems with TCL/TK support installed would have the same documentation available, but I don't know where. That documentation assumes you're using a TCL interpreter rather than R, so the syntax is all wrong, but there's a mechanical translation from it to R syntax which is described in the ?TkCommands R help topic. So these functions may be horribly documented, but they're not horribly undocumented. :-)) Ok, maybe I should shut up complaining and actually _do_ something useful, like going into the R-Wiki and _writing_ everything I learned about R in the past 6 months... Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Duncan Murdoch wrote: This works when there's a decent documentation for the function. The functions in the tcltk package, for example, are horribly undocumented, and asking for help only loops to a general help about all (and none) of the functions. I don't remember if you've said which platform you're working on, but if you're on Windows, the TCL/TK documentation is available to you. It's in RHOME/Tcl/doc. This is mentioned in the ?tcltk R help topic. I always find it easier to get the help from the Internet, even using Google (search for tcl/tk grid, for example) than with the internal documentation... I believe most Unix-like systems with TCL/TK support installed would have the same documentation available, but I don't know where. That documentation assumes you're using a TCL interpreter rather than R, so the syntax is all wrong, but there's a mechanical translation from it to R syntax which is described in the ?TkCommands R help topic. So these functions may be horribly documented, but they're not horribly undocumented. :-)) Ok, maybe I should shut up complaining and actually _do_ something useful, like going into the R-Wiki and _writing_ everything I learned about R in the past 6 months... Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
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
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 :-) Good documentation is hard to write, usually much harder than writing the code it documents. I think coming up with good documentation for a package is on the order of difficulty of a large refereed paper (or a book!), and yet you never get any recognition for it, only complaints when it is inadequate. Journals like JSS are an attempt to allow software to recieve academic credit, but only provide recognition for a specific form of documentation, the expanded tutorial. http://tinyurl.com/l7ufz has a good description of the multiple types of documentation that are needed. Many of the functions in R can not be properly used without the appropriate statistical background and it is impossible to provide this in the documentation. Many R functions are very well documented, by experts in the field, in conjunction with a book that provides the statistical background. Unfortunately all the best things in life are NOT free, unless you happen to be attached to a good academic library. The r wiki is a technical solution to a sociological problem. Hadley __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
If entering a new page is really the way to ask a question, then you should write this on the front page, and as a possible way to contribute on the getting-started page. It would also be a good idea to tell people like me how to find those questions. (Recent Edits seems a little too broad, with too little in the way of subject matter in the comments, but maybe that's just because nobody's asking questions yet.) I don't think it's a good idea to use the wiki as a way to ask questions. We already have a great forum to ask questions - this mailing list. Creating a new place to ask questions potentially fragments the community of people available to answer questions. I think the wiki would be more appropriate as a way to record collective best practices, but this relies on it being easy to find them again. And it would be a good idea to seed the wiki with a lot of questions, just to get some activity going. That's good for people who want to ask questions, but people who want their questions answered are presented with many blank pages (http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Empty+Pages), and will be discouraged. And maybe set up a page for pointers to questions that are languishing unanswered? I think the key is to make it easy to ask a question and easy to answer one, so don't put too much bureaucracy into the process. I think it's useful to consider more the purpose of the wiki - what makes it different to the mailing list? to the website? to the existing documentation? How can the strengths of the wiki form be used to our advantage? Hadley __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/07, Dieter Menne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Bolker bolker at zoo.ufl.edu writes: Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! I once tried: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:lmer-tests I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? I'm not saying that anyone involved would object, but there is the technicality of licensing: the wiki page claims to be under a certain creative commons license; was permission obtained from all the contributors? Does posting to r-help automatically constitute such permission? More importantly, since the wiki contents can be edited, where is the guarantee that some text attributed to someone is really what someone said? One solution would be to link to the posts rather than repeating them, perhaps with a one line summary of what information is contained in the post. This could then form the basis of more comments and links over time. In any case, the wiki needs to provide some guidance on this. -Deepayan __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). So, in the US, nobody has the right to take one person's words and put them in another form. The mailing list archive is one thing, but putting material from that archive into a wiki (rather than linking to it) requires the author's permission, at least technically. I'm by no means an expert on copyright, but this is something that comes up periodically on many email lists. Sarah -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). That's true in almost any country - see the Berne convention. Hadley __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. There's a difference between public archiving and copying. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright. -Deepayan [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On a related note, one might be interested in checking out citizendium which is spin off wikipedia but 1) has more stringent identity verification and 2) uses a two-tier system of editors and authors. See http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html. Deepayan Sarkar wrote: On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. There's a difference between public archiving and copying. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright. -Deepayan [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png __ 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. __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Deepayan Sarkar wrote: On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. There's a difference between public archiving and copying. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright. -Deepayan [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png Yes. It's pretty obvious that by posting you agree to publication, and presumably also to archiving. Think Letters to the Editor. However, you do not agree to just any republication (in particular not to commercial usage -- say someone wants to publish the collected works of a particularly prolific correspondent, without paying and obtaining consent). Interestingly, BYTE magazine back in the late 80's actually ran a Best of BIX column with postings from their bulletin board. I've always wondered how (and whether) they handled the copyright issues. There is a middle ground of fair use and the right to citation, though. I certainly don't expect to be cited by everyone using code snippets from one of my posts. -pd __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Peter Dalgaard wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. There's a difference between public archiving and copying. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright. -Deepayan [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png Yes. It's pretty obvious that by posting you agree to publication, and presumably also to archiving. Think Letters to the Editor. However, you do not agree to just any republication (in particular not to commercial usage -- say someone wants to publish the collected works of a particularly prolific correspondent, without paying and obtaining consent). Interestingly, BYTE magazine back in the late 80's actually ran a Best of BIX column with postings from their bulletin board. I've always wondered how (and whether) they handled the copyright issues. There is a middle ground of fair use and the right to citation, though. I certainly don't expect to be cited by everyone using code snippets from one of my posts. -pd My wife has edited just such a collection (of Compuserve forum messages) and is currently engaged in writing another. And yes, obtaining and keeping track of a hundred citations through the editing process is quite the chore--but not so bad that she isn't willing to embark on another book. Needless to say, she cringes at the looseness of copyright tracking that occurs on email lists and wikis. Clint Clint BowmanINTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Air Dispersion Modeler INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Air Quality Program VOICE: (360) 407-6815 Department of Ecology FAX:(360) 407-7534 USPS: PO Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600 Parcels:300 Desmond Drive, Lacey, WA 98503-1274 __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
On 3/30/2007 5:05 PM, Peter Dalgaard wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Deepayan Sarkar wrote: I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include that in a Wiki? Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today, but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world. There's a difference between public archiving and copying. It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse. Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author, it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words are used). I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright. -Deepayan [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png Yes. It's pretty obvious that by posting you agree to publication, and presumably also to archiving. Think Letters to the Editor. However, you do not agree to just any republication (in particular not to commercial usage -- say someone wants to publish the collected works of a particularly prolific correspondent, without paying and obtaining consent). Interestingly, BYTE magazine back in the late 80's actually ran a Best of BIX column with postings from their bulletin board. I've always wondered how (and whether) they handled the copyright issues. There is a middle ground of fair use and the right to citation, though. I certainly don't expect to be cited by everyone using code snippets from one of my posts. Fair use varies quite a bit from country to country. I've no idea about Denmark's laws, but Canada has no fair use doctrine in the US sense, just a much more limited fair dealing doctrine. Last time I looked Wikipedia had a pretty good description of this. Duncan Murdoch __ 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.
[R] Wikibooks
As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming Alberto Monteiro __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Alberto Monteiro albmont at centroin.com.br writes: As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming Alberto Monteiro Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! Most of the (considerable) effort people expend in answering questions about R goes to the mailing lists -- I personally would like it if some tiny fraction of that energy could be redirected toward the wiki, where information can be presented in a nicer format and (ideally) polished over time -- rather than having to dig back through multiple threads on the mailing lists to get answers. (After that we have to get people to look for the answers on the wiki.) Just my two cents -- and I've been delinquent in my wiki'ing recently too ... Ben Bolker __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
I think sometime ago someone suggested that we append a comments/discussion/wiki section to the end of every R functions' help page that is editable by everyday users. In other words, every R function help page has a fixed component that has met R-core's approval and a clearly marked and more flexible components by everyday users. The comments section on every function could contain suggestions, warnings (e.g. the use of c versus as.vector thread that was discussed today), examples, do's and don'ts, suggestion for clarification in documents. I think starting from function-level is an interesting idea to complement Paul Johnson's R tips. This comments could perhaps be cleaned up and integrated for future releases if the R-core agrees on its usefulness. Think of as a Bayesian approach for maintaining information. Regards, Adai Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: Ben Bolker wrote: Alberto Monteiro albmont at centroin.com.br writes: As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming Alberto Monteiro Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! Most of the (considerable) effort people expend in answering questions about R goes to the mailing lists -- I personally would like it if some tiny fraction of that energy could be redirected toward the wiki, where information can be presented in a nicer format and (ideally) polished over time -- rather than having to dig back through multiple threads on the mailing lists to get answers. (After that we have to get people to look for the answers on the wiki.) I would like to strongly second Ben. In some ways, R experts are too nice. Continuing to answer the same questions over and over does not lead to a better way using R wiki. I would rather see the work go into enhancing the wiki and refactoring information, and responses to many r-help please for help be see wiki topic x. While doing this let's consider putting a little more burden on new users to look for good answers already provided. Frank Just my two cents -- and I've been delinquent in my wiki'ing recently too ... Ben Bolker __ 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. __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Question: Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply by checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why would a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing list than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer people to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at issue here, I think, not the form of the docs. Disclaimer 1: None of this is meant to reflect one way or ther other on the usefulness of Wikis as a documentation format -- only their ability to change the Help list culture. Disclaimer 2: Others have repeatedly made similar comments (asking us to refer people to the docs rather than providing explicit answers, I mean). Cheers, Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Statistics South San Francisco, CA 94404 650-467-7374 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Frank E Harrell Jr Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 3:32 PM To: Ben Bolker Cc: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] Wikibooks Ben Bolker wrote: Alberto Monteiro albmont at centroin.com.br writes: As a big fan of Wikipedia, it's frustrating to see how little there is about R in the correlated project, the Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming Alberto Monteiro Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php -- although it is not as active as I'd like. (We got stuck halfway through porting Paul Johnson's R Tips to it ...) Please contribute! Most of the (considerable) effort people expend in answering questions about R goes to the mailing lists -- I personally would like it if some tiny fraction of that energy could be redirected toward the wiki, where information can be presented in a nicer format and (ideally) polished over time -- rather than having to dig back through multiple threads on the mailing lists to get answers. (After that we have to get people to look for the answers on the wiki.) I would like to strongly second Ben. In some ways, R experts are too nice. Continuing to answer the same questions over and over does not lead to a better way using R wiki. I would rather see the work go into enhancing the wiki and refactoring information, and responses to many r-help please for help be see wiki topic x. While doing this let's consider putting a little more burden on new users to look for good answers already provided. Frank Just my two cents -- and I've been delinquent in my wiki'ing recently too ... Ben Bolker __ 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. -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University __ 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. __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply by checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why would a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing list than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer people to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at issue here, I think, not the form of the docs. I agree - and there's also a problem that until the wiki becomes useful there's no point referring people to it, and because no one visits it, it doesn't get better. http://www.wikipatterns.com provides some good advice for getting a wiki going. Hadley __ 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.
Re: [R] Wikibooks
I think we occasionally think that it is very easy to get information because
we know how to find the information. This does not mean that other people know
how to find the answer. It is for this reason that questions appear on the
listserver that we might think could be easily found from other sources.
John
John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC,
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude D. Pepper OAIC,
University of Maryland Clinical Nutrition Research Unit, and
Baltimore VA Center Stroke of Excellence
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Division of Gerontology
Baltimore VA Medical Center
10 North Greene Street
GRECC (BT/18/GR)
Baltimore, MD 21201-1524
(Phone) 410-605-7119
(Fax) 410-605-7913 (Please call phone number above prior to faxing)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
hadley wickham [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3/29/2007 7:47 PM
Many (perhaps most?) questions on the list are easily answerable simply by
checking existing R Docs (Help file/man pages, Intro to R, etc.). Why would
a Wiki be more effective in deflecting such questions from the mailing list
than them? Why would too helpful R experts be more inclined to refer people
to the Wiki than the existing docs? Bottom line: it's psychology at issue
here, I think, not the form of the docs.
I agree - and there's also a problem that until the wiki becomes
useful there's no point referring people to it, and because no one
visits it, it doesn't get better.
http://www.wikipatterns.com provides some good advice for getting a wiki going.
Hadley
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and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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