Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Michael Dewey]

At 16:06 09/01/06, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

[snip various earlier posts]


>In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
>mailing list archives, all of which one should review,
>the key thing to do if you want to really learn R is to read source code
>and lots of it.  I think there is no other way.  Furthermore, the fact that
>you can do this is really a key advantage of open source.

But that is the solution to a different problem.
Reading the source for merge tells you how R merges two dataframes, the 
beginning user wants to know how to link together the information s/he has 
in two files but does not know what the name of the relevant command is, or 
indeed whether it is even possible.

To give you some idea of how ignorant some of us are it was only quite 
recently that I realised (despite several years reading free documentation, 
books on R and R-help) that if I type cor at the prompt what I see looks 
like source code but is not _the_ source code.


Michael Dewey
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[J Dougherty]

On Monday 09 January 2006 11:31, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> . . .
>
> I certainly was not disparaging books.  I said _in addition to_ books,
> not _insted of_.  The reason I pointed this out is that I think
> most people already read the books.  What many people don't
> do as far as can tell is read the code.  Obviously if you are just
> starting out you are going to be relying on the documentation,
> books, etc. but once you get past the intro stage you need to get
> into code.  One repeatedly sees questions on this list where just
> a minute or two spent with the code would have answered the
> question.
>
Gabor,  

The issue IS the INTRO stage though, in fact well beyond the intro stage.  
Reading the code is well and good for a programmer, but many are not and 
never will be coders, and this group is going to continue to expand.  Even an 
advanced statistician migrating from a proprietary system like SPSS to R is 
going to need documentation.  They would not even know where in the code to 
look!  Code is cool, but it really isn't expository.

John

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 1/9/06, Jack Tanner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Michael Dewey wrote:
> >At 20:12 08/01/06, Jack Tanner wrote:
> >>My hypothesis is that the basic reason that people ask questions on R-help
> >>rather than first looking elsewhere is that looking elsewhere doesn't get
> >>them the info they need.
> >>
> >>People think in terms of the tasks they have to do. The documentation for
> >>R, which can be very good, is organized in terms of the structure of R,
> >>its functions. This mismatch -- people think of tasks, the documentation
> >>"thinks in" functions -- causes people to turn to the mailing list.
> >
> >Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their
> >own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most
> >questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books
> >on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
> >progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
> >millennium.
>
> I certainly agree about the value of books. After struggling with
> lme/glmmPQL documentation for a while, I found a copy of MASS, and it's been
> nothing short of illuminating.
>
> Gabor Grothendieck  gmail.com> wrote:
> >In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
> >mailing list archives, all of which one should review,
>
> I do not wish to disparage all these valuable resources. But it is apparent
> that they do not answer the (real or perceived) needs of those who ask the
> same more or less basic questions over and over on R-help. It doesn't help
> if one, or ten, or hundreds of newbies are told -- go thee and RTFM,
> because, by definition, there will be other "newbies" (presumably, until the
> entire human race consists of R experts).

I certainly was not disparaging books.  I said _in addition to_ books,
not _insted of_.  The reason I pointed this out is that I think
most people already read the books.  What many people don't
do as far as can tell is read the code.  Obviously if you are just
starting out you are going to be relying on the documentation,
books, etc. but once you get past the intro stage you need to get
into code.  One repeatedly sees questions on this list where just
a minute or two spent with the code would have answered the
question.

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Jack Tanner]

Michael Dewey wrote:
>At 20:12 08/01/06, Jack Tanner wrote:
>>My hypothesis is that the basic reason that people ask questions on R-help 
>>rather than first looking elsewhere is that looking elsewhere doesn't get 
>>them the info they need.
>>
>>People think in terms of the tasks they have to do. The documentation for 
>>R, which can be very good, is organized in terms of the structure of R, 
>>its functions. This mismatch -- people think of tasks, the documentation 
>>"thinks in" functions -- causes people to turn to the mailing list.
>
>Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their 
>own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most 
>questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books 
>on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most 
>progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last 
>millennium.

I certainly agree about the value of books. After struggling with 
lme/glmmPQL documentation for a while, I found a copy of MASS, and it's been 
nothing short of illuminating.

Gabor Grothendieck  gmail.com> wrote:
>In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
>mailing list archives, all of which one should review,

I do not wish to disparage all these valuable resources. But it is apparent 
that they do not answer the (real or perceived) needs of those who ask the 
same more or less basic questions over and over on R-help. It doesn't help 
if one, or ten, or hundreds of newbies are told -- go thee and RTFM, 
because, by definition, there will be other "newbies" (presumably, until the 
entire human race consists of R experts).

>the key thing to do if you want to really learn R is to read source code
>and lots of it.  I think there is no other way.  Furthermore, the fact that
>you can do this is really a key advantage of open source.

Absolutely, the R sources are the highest fidelity representation of the 
knowledge on R. But there's also knowledge about the sources, e.g., why a 
particular function was coded that way, and why one would want to use that 
function over others that seem similar.

The wiki proposal is thus twofold: first, to take the key advantage of open 
source, and apply it not only to the code, but to the knowledge about the 
code as well. Second, to structure the experience of learning and using R 
such that the wiki is very prominent.

Unfortunately, the site is down at the moment, but there's a really good 
example of how wikified, task-oriented documentation can help an open source 
project: http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page .

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[David Forrest]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

> On 1/9/06, Thomas Lumley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Michael Dewey wrote:
> > >
> > > Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow 
> > > their
> > > own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much 
> > > most
> > > questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many 
> > > books
> > > on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
> > > progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
> > > millennium.
> > >
> >
> > Very late last millenium, though.
> > "When I were young[er] we didn't have all these fancy yellow books."
> >
> > More seriously, yes, reading books about R and S is very effective and is
> > how most of the R experts learned.  In my case it was the Blue Book, the
> > White Book, and the Ripley/Venables/Smith notes on S-plus (which have
> > evolved to the Introduction to R).
>
> In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
> mailing list archives, all of which one should review,
> the key thing to do if you want to really learn R is to read source code
> and lots of it.  I think there is no other way.  Furthermore, the fact that
> you can do this is really a key advantage of open source.

There has to be some reason to dig into the source code.  Just starting at
line 1 and reading until you are enlightened would be frustrating,
repetetive, and nearly pointless.  The great benefits of the R books is
that they have interesting results (a fancy graph, analysis, or report)
that you can trace back to the constituent parts and (with open source
code) learn everything you want to and be confident that the rest is there
if you need it.  Books using R do an excellent job of showing what is
possible and, through recursive study of the open source code, how to do
it.  Books connect high-level tasks to low-level functions.

R has plenty of documentation, but if the measure of excellence is simply
number of pages or weight, SAS's documentation might still win even if we
include the pages of R source code.  Both packages have lots of detailed
documentation, where if you understood everything that was written, you'd
know how to do what you want.  The authors of neither R nor SAS have
failed to document their functions.

Where I think the R (and SAS) documentation is lacking is in the
connections between the documentation elements.  RTFM isn't helpful if you
can't find TFM.  For instance, there is more than one way to make a graph,
(see http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=package for 135
of them) how does a novice know which function to use?  How do you find
out the alternate ways to do things?  The hateful MS Excel solves this by
registering the alternate graphic capabilities under a hierarchical GUI
menu.  We solve it with an email list and several fuzzy searches.

Since R has such an extensive set of extensions, maybe we need a section
in the R-intro documentation near
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html#Writing-your-own-functions
titled "Finding existing functions".  It could explain the difference
between base and recommended, installed, CRAN, and how someone can find
and use things in these areas using help(), '?', help.search(),
help.start(), RSiteSearch(), and the mailing lists.

Dave
-- 
 Dr. David Forrest
 [EMAIL PROTECTED](804)684-7900w
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (804)642-0662h
   http://maplepark.com/~drf5n/

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Leif Kirschenbaum]

To avoid spam on the R wikis pages:
  If we assume that anyone who we would want to be empowered to modify the R 
wiki pages is an R-user, would it be possible to somehow incorporate a function 
into the next R release which provides a user with a key/password?
  A new R function would generate a day-of-the year dependent key: if you want 
to modify an R wiki page you need to enter the key for that day (This is not a 
proposal to make keys user specific: every R user worldwide would have the same 
key each day). Then only a person who has installed R would be able to run the 
function to get a key to modify R wiki pages. Of course anyone could read the 
wikis.

I supposed that if we wanted, that the key provided could somehow encode the 
O/S and R version being run, and then the wiki page modified would note which 
O/S and version the annotator is running, however for ease of use I suggest 
that the key generated each day be short for simplicy in typing it in.

I suppose a more complex solution would be for an R function to make a call to 
open a web-browser with a cookie or something set which thus allows the user to 
modify R wiki pages.

Leif Kirschenbaum
Senior Yield Engineer
Reflectivity, Inc.
(408) 737-8100 x307
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 1/9/06, Thomas Lumley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Michael Dewey wrote:
> >
> > Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their
> > own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most
> > questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books
> > on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
> > progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
> > millennium.
> >
>
> Very late last millenium, though.
> "When I were young[er] we didn't have all these fancy yellow books."
>
> More seriously, yes, reading books about R and S is very effective and is
> how most of the R experts learned.  In my case it was the Blue Book, the
> White Book, and the Ripley/Venables/Smith notes on S-plus (which have
> evolved to the Introduction to R).

In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
mailing list archives, all of which one should review,
the key thing to do if you want to really learn R is to read source code
and lots of it.  I think there is no other way.  Furthermore, the fact that
you can do this is really a key advantage of open source.

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Michael Dewey wrote:
>
> Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their
> own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most
> questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books
> on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
> progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
> millennium.
>

Very late last millenium, though.
"When I were young[er] we didn't have all these fancy yellow books."

More seriously, yes, reading books about R and S is very effective and is 
how most of the R experts learned.  In my case it was the Blue Book, the 
White Book, and the Ripley/Venables/Smith notes on S-plus (which have 
evolved to the Introduction to R).

-thomas

"Ptolemy once asked [Euclid] if there was in geometry any shorter way that 
that of the Elements, and he replied that there was no royal road to 
geometry." Proclus (410-485 CE)

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Michael Dewey]

At 20:12 08/01/06, Jack Tanner wrote:
>Philippe's idea to start a wiki that grows out of the content on 
>http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html is really great. Here's why.
>
>My hypothesis is that the basic reason that people ask questions on R-help 
>rather than first looking elsewhere is that looking elsewhere doesn't get 
>them the info they need.
>
>People think in terms of the tasks they have to do. The documentation for 
>R, which can be very good, is organized in terms of the structure of R, 
>its functions. This mismatch -- people think of tasks, the documentation 
>"thinks in" functions -- causes people to turn to the mailing list.

Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their 
own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most 
questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books 
on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most 
progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last 
millennium.




Michael Dewey
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[phgrosjean]

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

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Kevin Gamble]

Kris over at Wiki That! has a post today about what makes for a good  
wiki: http://www.wikithat.com/wiki_that/2006/01/wiki_of_the_wee_1.html

> Most wikis I’ve looked at are in danger of facing the same fate as  
> most websites and CMS - death by boredom. They are focused on  
> content that is used as reference for some off-line activity OR as  
> the end-result of an off-line activity.
>
> Collaboration and participation is more than just sharing  
> information and making it accessible. It’s all about the PROCESS of  
> planning and executing events, projects, tasks, and deliverables.  
> Content is boring - action is engaging. Make your wiki activity- 
> centric, not just data-centric (content).

If the wiki is a place where people just go to look things up --  
we're toast. It needs to be made into an active learning environment,  
a place where experts and beginners alike come to interact. Some to  
share their knowledge, and others to learn from the masters. It's the  
same dynamic  that makes the mailing list so active, and yet also  
what exposes its weakness (i.e. it doesn't scale well).

Kevin



Kevin J. Gamble. Ph.D.
Associate Director eXtension Initiative
Box 7647 NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27694-7641
v: 919.515.8447
c: 919.605.5815
AIM: k1v1n
Web: intranet.extension.org

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Detlef Steuer]

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 13:51:24 -0500
Jonathan Baron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On 01/07/06 12:25, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > So my $0.02 would be to a) go for it, if possible but b) make it
> > visible, and closely tied to R Core / CRAN / R News /   Which
> > poses the chicken/egg problem of people running out of spare time to
> > setup, admin, monitor, hand-hold the wiki, its database, watch out
> > for spammers, etc.  Volunteers to do this, and maybe help Jon Baron
> > on a first run using TWiki?
> 
> Great.  I agree.  But there are now at least 3 proposals floating
> around.  Mine was to base the wiki on (I think) the individual
> help pages, each file in the help or html subdirectory of each
> package would be a wiki page.  Since there are about 17000 of
> these at last count - oh, my, could that really be true? - this
> must be automated.  It should be fairly easy, but I just haven't
> done it yet.  What this would amount to is an extended help
> system.
> 
> Then there is the decision about what happens with updates.  I'm
> beginning to think that there is just no other way to handle this
> than to INCLUDE the latest version of each help file in the wicki
> page, have the comments come AFTER it, and just don't worry about
> it if the comments become out of date.  Eventually, someone will
> edit them if it is important.

Here I strongly disagree. Nothing is worse than searching for help and
stumble upon wrong hintsight. It is better to find nothing, than to
_think_ to have found an answer only to find it not working.

I was just bitten by outdated docu after updating qemu. Did cost some
time and frustration.

Think of the beginner left with useless, or worse, wrong advise.

Detlef


> 
> But I'm not at all sure this is the best way to go.  Given that
> all the functions in each package are related, it might be better 
> to have one wiki page per package.  In this case, there is less
> difference between my proposal and the other existing wikis.
> 
> It is possible that too many wikis is bad.  On the other hand, it 
> is possible that too few is bad.

May be true.

Have a nice sunday,
Detlef

> 
> > Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish
> > something.
> >   -- Thomas A.
> >   Edison
> 
> I love this.
> 
> Jon
> -- 
> Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
> Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
> 
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-- 
"Keinen Gedanken zweimal denken, außer er ist schön." Unbekannte Quelle

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[paul sorenson]

Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> paul sorenson wrote:
> 
>> I am a fan of wiki's and I reckon it would really help with making R 
>> more accessible.  On one extreme you have this email list and on the 
>> other extreme you have RNews and the PDF's on CRAN.  A wiki might hit 
>> the spot between them and reduce the traffic on the email list.
> 
> 
> Thanks Paul.  But as long as the email list is active I fear a wiki 
> won't be.

That would be sad if that were true.  They are different beasts, as 
would be an IRC channel.  I say complementary, not mutually exclusive.

A wiki takes time to reach critical mass (eg my home brew wiki 
http://brewiki.org/ or wikipedia) and you couldn't just pull the plug on 
this list without a serious impact on the uptake of R I would have thought.

Contributions to the wiki from mugs like me with less R/statistics 
experience would hopefully make R more accessible to newbies - pointing 
out the traps for new players.

One way to bootstrap it is to simply add a "wiki" menu entry into the 
r-project.org menu. This is what the guys over at 
http://wiki.wxpython.org/ have done.  Over time, some of the other items 
there might morph in to wiki pages as appropriate.

I have no doubt that if the R-Wiki was supported in the same thoughtful, 
thorough and patient way in which questions on R-Help are answered, it 
would be one of the lowest entropy wiki's around.

I have some experience with moinmoin (a python wiki) and would be 
willing to contribute some time and skills if that would help.

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Jonathan Baron]

On 01/07/06 12:25, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> So my $0.02 would be to a) go for it, if possible but b) make it visible, and
> closely tied to R Core / CRAN / R News /   Which poses the chicken/egg
> problem of people running out of spare time to setup, admin, monitor,
> hand-hold the wiki, its database, watch out for spammers, etc.  Volunteers to
> do this, and maybe help Jon Baron on a first run using TWiki?

Great.  I agree.  But there are now at least 3 proposals floating
around.  Mine was to base the wiki on (I think) the individual
help pages, each file in the help or html subdirectory of each
package would be a wiki page.  Since there are about 17000 of
these at last count - oh, my, could that really be true? - this
must be automated.  It should be fairly easy, but I just haven't
done it yet.  What this would amount to is an extended help
system.

Then there is the decision about what happens with updates.  I'm
beginning to think that there is just no other way to handle this
than to INCLUDE the latest version of each help file in the wicki
page, have the comments come AFTER it, and just don't worry about
it if the comments become out of date.  Eventually, someone will
edit them if it is important.

But I'm not at all sure this is the best way to go.  Given that
all the functions in each package are related, it might be better 
to have one wiki page per package.  In this case, there is less
difference between my proposal and the other existing wikis.

It is possible that too many wikis is bad.  On the other hand, it 
is possible that too few is bad.

> Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>   -- Thomas A. Edison

I love this.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 7 January 2006 at 17:14, Uwe Ligges wrote:
| Jonathan Baron wrote:
| > Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.
| 
| But then, everybody loads stuff from CRAN master and does not use an 

Round-robin DNS to spread the load among several machines answering for
cran.r-project.org would fix that. They'd have to be reasonably in-sync and
cover identical features such as search etc pp, of course.

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
  -- Thomas A. Edison

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 7 January 2006 at 10:15, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| The difficulty is getting it going.  

Right. Which goes along with 'needs official endorsement'.  Debian recently
moved a more-or-less grassroots wiki to an official domain of the project,
and for the last few days I have been hitting

http://wiki.debian.org/RecentChanges

frequently just to see what's happening. And it's brisk. It seems to have
take off. Debian has the same problem of list that have too many posts (and a
much lower signal/noise ratio that r-help) so this is welcome addition as a
means of communication and information store.

Yet the 'no silver bullet' rule still holds. There isn't one media to suit
everybody. Some prefer a list as list, some as digest, some channelled as a
news group, some read it via Gmane over the web, some read the rss feed. This
will offer another option, but we all will have to work jointly at it.

So my $0.02 would be to a) go for it, if possible but b) make it visible, and
closely tied to R Core / CRAN / R News /   Which poses the chicken/egg
problem of people running out of spare time to setup, admin, monitor,
hand-hold the wiki, its database, watch out for spammers, etc.  Volunteers to
do this, and maybe help Jon Baron on a first run using TWiki?

Regards, Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
  -- Thomas A. Edison

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Gabor Grothendieck]

The trouble with a fixed link is that either that server gets overloaded
or one has to post to a list of servers which is a nuisance.  Perhaps
this could be included at the bottom of each post instead:

Before posting, search docs for xyz via R command: RSiteSearch("xyz")
and if you still need to post please include a REPRODUCIBLE code snippet.
See posting guide for more info: http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html

On 1/7/06, John Sorkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Uwe,
> I think you suggestion for giving the URL of the archives as,
>  "cran-MIRROR/search.html" (emphasis added) is not optimal, because the URL 
> as does not work. The URL given should work as given. Thus,
>  http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html
> http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/search.html
> or
>  http://cran.r-project.org/search.htm
> are more helpful.
> John
>
>
> John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
> Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
> Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC and
> University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude Pepper OAIC
>
> 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
>
> 410-605-7119
> -- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> >>> Uwe Ligges <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/07/06 11:14 AM >>>
> Jonathan Baron wrote:
>
> > On 01/07/06 10:51, John Sorkin wrote:
> >
> >>The situation
> >>would be greatly helped if the mailing list would automatically add a 
> >>header or
> >>footer to all Email messages giving the URL of the archived Email threads. 
> >>Don't
> >>expect people to know that what are not told! Those people who, in their 
> >>answers,
> >>suggest that people should search the archives should include the URL of 
> >>the archives
> >>in their response (http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word 
> >>SEARCH in the
> >>left-hand column ).
> >
> >
> > Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.
>
>
> But then, everybody loads stuff from CRAN master and does not use an
> appropriate mirror.
> I'd like to suggest *not* to use any mirror URL explicitly in R-help
> mails (always, not only related to this thread).
> In this case, I'd propose to write something like "CRAN-mirror/search.html"
>
> Uwe
>
>
>
> > http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html is a mirror, and there
> > are other mirrors.
> >
> > Jon
>
> __
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>

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Sorkin]

Uwe,
I think you suggestion for giving the URL of the archives as, 
 "cran-MIRROR/search.html" (emphasis added) is not optimal, because the URL as 
does not work. The URL given should work as given. Thus,
 http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html 
http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/search.html 
or 
 http://cran.r-project.org/search.htm
are more helpful.
John


John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC and
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude Pepper OAIC

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

410-605-7119 
- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>>> Uwe Ligges <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/07/06 11:14 AM >>>
Jonathan Baron wrote:

> On 01/07/06 10:51, John Sorkin wrote:
> 
>>The situation
>>would be greatly helped if the mailing list would automatically add a header 
>>or
>>footer to all Email messages giving the URL of the archived Email threads. 
>>Don't
>>expect people to know that what are not told! Those people who, in their 
>>answers,
>>suggest that people should search the archives should include the URL of the 
>>archives
>>in their response (http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word SEARCH 
>>in the
>>left-hand column ).
> 
> 
> Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.


But then, everybody loads stuff from CRAN master and does not use an 
appropriate mirror.
I'd like to suggest *not* to use any mirror URL explicitly in R-help 
mails (always, not only related to this thread).
In this case, I'd propose to write something like "CRAN-mirror/search.html"

Uwe



> http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html is a mirror, and there
> are other mirrors.
> 
> Jon

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Uwe Ligges]

Jonathan Baron wrote:

> On 01/07/06 10:51, John Sorkin wrote:
> 
>>The situation
>>would be greatly helped if the mailing list would automatically add a header 
>>or
>>footer to all Email messages giving the URL of the archived Email threads. 
>>Don't
>>expect people to know that what are not told! Those people who, in their 
>>answers,
>>suggest that people should search the archives should include the URL of the 
>>archives
>>in their response (http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word SEARCH 
>>in the
>>left-hand column ).
> 
> 
> Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.


But then, everybody loads stuff from CRAN master and does not use an 
appropriate mirror.
I'd like to suggest *not* to use any mirror URL explicitly in R-help 
mails (always, not only related to this thread).
In this case, I'd propose to write something like "CRAN-mirror/search.html"

Uwe



> http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html is a mirror, and there
> are other mirrors.
> 
> Jon

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Sorkin]

Jon,
Thank you for the terse form of the URL. I hope the mailing list will 
automatically include it in there Email messages.
John 

John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC and
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude Pepper OAIC

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

410-605-7119 
- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>>> Jonathan Baron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/07/06 11:00 AM >>>
On 01/07/06 10:51, John Sorkin wrote:
> The situation
> would be greatly helped if the mailing list would automatically add a header 
> or
> footer to all Email messages giving the URL of the archived Email threads. 
> Don't
> expect people to know that what are not told! Those people who, in their 
> answers,
> suggest that people should search the archives should include the URL of the 
> archives
> in their response (http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word SEARCH 
> in the
> left-hand column ).

Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.

http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html is a mirror, and there
are other mirrors.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron 

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Jonathan Baron]

On 01/07/06 10:51, John Sorkin wrote:
> The situation
> would be greatly helped if the mailing list would automatically add a header 
> or
> footer to all Email messages giving the URL of the archived Email threads. 
> Don't
> expect people to know that what are not told! Those people who, in their 
> answers,
> suggest that people should search the archives should include the URL of the 
> archives
> in their response (http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word SEARCH 
> in the
> left-hand column ).

Or, more tersely, http://cran.r-project.org/search.html.

http://cran.us.r-project.org/search.html is a mirror, and there
are other mirrors.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Sorkin]

Several people have stated that one of the problems with the current Email help 
model is that many questions are asked over, and over again and that people do 
not search for past answers. Let me point out that the existence of past 
answers and how to find and search is not known by many people, particularly 
novice R users. The situation would be greatly helped if the mailing list would 
automatically add a header or footer to all Email messages giving the URL of 
the archived Email threads. Don't expect people to know that what are not told! 
Those people who, in their answers, suggest that people should search the 
archives should include the URL of the archives in their response 
(http://carn.us.r-project.org then click on the word SEARCH in the left-hand 
column ). Even if a novice would think about searching the R archives he, or 
she, might have difficulty finding the correct site. A naive google search of 
"R-archive" and "R archive" did not return the correct URL. Even if a n!
 ovice would know about the CRAN web site (CRAN is not an intuitive acronym for 
R), when the novice would get to the CRAN web site they would have to know to 
click on SEARCH. It might help if the CRAN web site contained a link titled 
SEARCH R ARCHIVES.
John 


John Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
Baltimore VA Medical Center GRECC and
University of Maryland School of Medicine Claude Pepper OAIC

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

410-605-7119 
- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>>> Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/07/06 10:15 AM >>>
On 1/6/2006 8:02 PM, paul sorenson wrote:
> I am a fan of wiki's and I reckon it would really help with making R 
> more accessible.  On one extreme you have this email list and on the 
> other extreme you have RNews and the PDF's on CRAN.  A wiki might hit 
> the spot between them and reduce the traffic on the email list.

The difficulty is getting it going.  I haven't used Wikis, and visited 
the two that have been mentioned, aiming to answer the example question 
Frank posed ("ylim in barplots").  It's not addressed on either, which 
is not too surprising, but then I didn't know what to do next, either as 
someone who wanted the answer, or someone who wanted to provide it.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> 
>>I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis 
>>will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or 
>>discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely 
>>helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get 
>>too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active 
>>and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for 
>>e-mail to be effective.
>>
>>The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for 
>>data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a 
>>compendium of examples.
>>
>>Just my .02 Euros
>>
>>Frank
> 
> 
> __
> 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 

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 1/6/2006 8:02 PM, paul sorenson wrote:
> I am a fan of wiki's and I reckon it would really help with making R 
> more accessible.  On one extreme you have this email list and on the 
> other extreme you have RNews and the PDF's on CRAN.  A wiki might hit 
> the spot between them and reduce the traffic on the email list.

The difficulty is getting it going.  I haven't used Wikis, and visited 
the two that have been mentioned, aiming to answer the example question 
Frank posed ("ylim in barplots").  It's not addressed on either, which 
is not too surprising, but then I didn't know what to do next, either as 
someone who wanted the answer, or someone who wanted to provide it.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> 
>>I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis 
>>will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or 
>>discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely 
>>helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get 
>>too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active 
>>and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for 
>>e-mail to be effective.
>>
>>The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for 
>>data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a 
>>compendium of examples.
>>
>>Just my .02 Euros
>>
>>Frank
> 
> 
> __
> 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

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[paul sorenson]

I am a fan of wiki's and I reckon it would really help with making R 
more accessible.  On one extreme you have this email list and on the 
other extreme you have RNews and the PDF's on CRAN.  A wiki might hit 
the spot between them and reduce the traffic on the email list.


Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis 
> will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or 
> discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely 
> helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get 
> too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active 
> and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for 
> e-mail to be effective.
> 
> The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for 
> data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a 
> compendium of examples.
> 
> Just my .02 Euros
> 
> Frank

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[ecoinfo]

I use free Gmail to receive R-help emails. It is nice since

1. You can search your email quickly.
2. Replies to the same emails would be grouped together chronologically.
3. You can set up filters to put emails to different labels according
to the key words.

Please check the detailed description at
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/why_gmail.html

On 1/6/06, Don MacQueen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I don't have any significant experience with wikis, but I have yet to
> use any discussion board that was anywhere near as useful to me, or
> as easy to use, as an email list.
>
> Discussion boards have a web browser interface. Typically, they
> display at most a dozen topics at a time. Scrolling to get the next
> dozen is slow, as it requires a download from some web server. There
> is a huge amount of wasted screen space. When there is a topic that
> generates many messages scrolling through them is slow, as some
> discussion board interfaces show only 6 or 7 at a time. Search
> engines provided by the discussion board software are limited and
> slow.
>
> In contrast, in my email client I can show about three dozen subject
> lines at a time, I can quickly scroll up and down through the list, I
> can quickly group all the messages with the same subject line with a
> single click of the mouse. I can easily and quickly store selected
> messages of particular interest to a place where I can easily find
> them again. My email software searches very quickly through a huge
> number of messages.
>
> Then there's the question of administration and maintenance. Who is
> going to set up the wiki or discussion board categories? As far as I
> can tell (and that's actually not very far), either of them would
> require a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain than the
> present email list.
>
> Yes, r-help has a huge volume -- right now, my R-help mailbox has
> almost 22,000 messages in it, 2004-01-02 to the present; its size is
> about 124 mb. Yes, there is a lot of duplication. None the less, I
> find it easier and quicker to scan the subject lines a few times a
> day for interesting-looking topics than it would be to go to a
> browser and have to navigate up and down through various categories,
> looking for interesting-looking topics.
>
> As far as I can tell, the wiki concept is more along the lines of a
> reference library, whereas mailing lists and discussion boards are
> meant for people to ask each other questions, and give each other
> answers. If that perception is at all accurate, I would have to say
> that a wiki is by no means a suitable replacement for an email list.
> And when it comes to a choice between an email list and a discussion
> board, I have a strong preference for the email list.
>
> -Don
>
> At 7:04 PM -0600 1/5/06, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> >I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis
> >will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or
> >discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely
> >helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get
> >too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active
> >and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for
> >e-mail to be effective.
> >
> >The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for
> >data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a
> >compendium of examples.
> >
> >Just my .02 Euros
> >
> >Frank
> >--
> >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
>
>
> --
> --
> Don MacQueen
> Environmental Protection Department
> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
> Livermore, CA, USA
>
> __
> 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
>



--
Xiaohua Dai, Dr.

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Don MacQueen]

I don't have any significant experience with wikis, but I have yet to 
use any discussion board that was anywhere near as useful to me, or 
as easy to use, as an email list.

Discussion boards have a web browser interface. Typically, they 
display at most a dozen topics at a time. Scrolling to get the next 
dozen is slow, as it requires a download from some web server. There 
is a huge amount of wasted screen space. When there is a topic that 
generates many messages scrolling through them is slow, as some 
discussion board interfaces show only 6 or 7 at a time. Search 
engines provided by the discussion board software are limited and 
slow.

In contrast, in my email client I can show about three dozen subject 
lines at a time, I can quickly scroll up and down through the list, I 
can quickly group all the messages with the same subject line with a 
single click of the mouse. I can easily and quickly store selected 
messages of particular interest to a place where I can easily find 
them again. My email software searches very quickly through a huge 
number of messages.

Then there's the question of administration and maintenance. Who is 
going to set up the wiki or discussion board categories? As far as I 
can tell (and that's actually not very far), either of them would 
require a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain than the 
present email list.

Yes, r-help has a huge volume -- right now, my R-help mailbox has 
almost 22,000 messages in it, 2004-01-02 to the present; its size is 
about 124 mb. Yes, there is a lot of duplication. None the less, I 
find it easier and quicker to scan the subject lines a few times a 
day for interesting-looking topics than it would be to go to a 
browser and have to navigate up and down through various categories, 
looking for interesting-looking topics.

As far as I can tell, the wiki concept is more along the lines of a 
reference library, whereas mailing lists and discussion boards are 
meant for people to ask each other questions, and give each other 
answers. If that perception is at all accurate, I would have to say 
that a wiki is by no means a suitable replacement for an email list. 
And when it comes to a choice between an email list and a discussion 
board, I have a strong preference for the email list.

-Don

At 7:04 PM -0600 1/5/06, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
>I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis
>will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or
>discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely
>helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get
>too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active
>and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for
>e-mail to be effective.
>
>The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for
>data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a
>compendium of examples.
>
>Just my .02 Euros
>
>Frank
>--
>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


-- 
--
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Tony Plate]

I second Frank's comment!  I wonder if questioners who receive a bunch 
of useful replies could be encouraged to enter a summary of those on a 
Wiki, in much the same way as users of S-news were expected to post a 
summary of their answers as a way of giving something back.

An existing R Wiki is located at 
http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome

However, there's currently not much on it.  Recently on R-help there was 
  a summary of using databases with R, which looked very useful, so I 
put that on the Wiki.  Maybe if others just start putting things there 
it can gather momentum?

-- Tony Plate

Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis 
> will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or 
> discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely 
> helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get 
> too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active 
> and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for 
> e-mail to be effective.
> 
> The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for 
> data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a 
> compendium of examples.
> 
> Just my .02 Euros
> 
> Frank

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Seth Falcon]

Regarding systems for presenting documentation and allowing user
comments, I recently came across Commentary (see homepage
http://pythonpaste.org/commentary/).

Haven't used it, but my impression is that comments and the main doc
are both stored in svn (and auto-committed for comment changes).  This
might help solve the problem of updating the doc upon a new R release
because you could take advantage of svn merge.

Of course, svn merge won't know whether the comments are still
appropriate or not :-(

Nevermind.

+ seth

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 1/6/2006 9:15 AM, Jonathan Baron wrote:
> On 01/06/06 13:40, John Marsland wrote:
>> Going back to the wiki issue, it might be wise to this about using Trac
>>  which is an open source project that
>> integrates a wiki with the SVN code versioning system (used by R-project) 
>> and a
>> replacement for bugzilla's ticketing system. We use it to document our own 
>> code.
>> 
>> Trac would have the advantage of pushing questions on the R list back towards
>> the  actual source code and allowing all users to participate in the future
>> development of the software.
> 
> It isn't clear to me what this would be for.  I'm not sure that I
> trust users to modify code.
> 
> I was thinking myself that user input might be most useful for
> the documentation of functions.  Not that this is so bad, but
> rather it might be possible to have an extended system of
> documentation on the web, with FAQ-type questions answered as
> part of the documentation itself, so that people would not have
> to rely on R-help so much (even in its archived forms).
> 
> And I was thinking of setting up a Wiki with one page per
> function.  (Given that there are now hundreds or thousands of
> functions, setting this up would have to be automated.)  I've
> just installed (for another purpose) TWiki, which seems to have
> some nice features for this sort of thing (in particular, data
> stored as text files, hence easily manipulated by other
> programs), but I will not have time to think through how to do
> this for some time.  Just another idea to throw into the hopper.

I think this sounds like a great idea.  I would like to see two way 
connections between this and the existing man pages, e.g. in the HTML or 
PDF versions, links that go directly to the Wiki, and links from the 
Wiki to an online copy of the man pages.

If your automatic setup permitted it, then showing the output of the 
examples on the man pages would be nice.

One issue that you'll need to think about is whether there is one page 
per function, or one page per .Rd file, or some other organization:  and 
you'll need to be prepared for changes in the organization of the 
documentation with new R releases (and changes in function names, and 
changes in the examples...).

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> In principle, another possibility is to do something like the PHP 
> manual at http://www.php.net/manual/en/, which is not a wiki but
> more like a bulletin board, with discussion of each command.  But 
> I think a wiki is better.  I found it time consuming to read
> through all those comments, almost as bad as reading through
> R-help postings. :)
> 
> Jon

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Barry Rowlingson]

Jonathan Baron wrote:

> And I was thinking of setting up a Wiki with one page per
> function.  (Given that there are now hundreds or thousands of
> functions, setting this up would have to be automated.) 

  One page per R manual page file would probably suffice. You could do 
something along the lines of the Zope book, where users can add comments 
but you can browse with comments off:

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/AdvDTML.stx

  then toggle the 'Com On' button. This is less of a wiki and more of an 
annotation service.

but I think you'd run into problems with losing all the annotation when 
a new R version comes out.

Barry

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Marsland]

It isn't so much that users modify the code as they would have to do
that in the usual way by checking out the project from the SVN.

Rather that extended documentation, features and enhancements etc. can
easily locate and quote from the code base and the differencing engine
as applied to the code base between versions.

On 1/6/06, Jonathan Baron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> It isn't clear to me what this would be for.  I'm not sure that I
> trust users to modify code.

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Marsland]

On 1/6/06, John Marsland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I see your point. Maybe the answer is to use the list for R-help style
> questions, but encourage people who answer questions to point the the
> answers in the wiki - which they might have enhanced if necessary.
>
> On 1/6/06, Fernando Henrique Ferraz P. da Rosa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > John Marsland writes:
> > > Trac would have the advantage of pushing questions on the R list back 
> > > towards
> > > the  actual source code and allowing all users to participate in the 
> > > future
> > > development of the software.
> > >
> >
> > I see that this could be useful for R-devel, but considering the
> > volume of traffic and the kind of contents on R-help, I don't think such
> > tying to the actual source code would be so useful. Perhaps trac could
> > be used as an integrated interface for r-devel/svn and the bug track
> > system, and another wiki solution be used exclusiverly for the r-help
> > community (which includes many people not directly interested in coding
> > or development issues).
> >
> > --
> > "Though this be randomness, yet there is structure in't."
> >Rosa, F.H.F.P
> >
> > Instituto de Matemática e Estatística
> > Universidade de São Paulo
> > Fernando Henrique Ferraz P. da Rosa
> > http://www.feferraz.net
> >
> >
>

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Jonathan Baron]

On 01/06/06 13:40, John Marsland wrote:
> Going back to the wiki issue, it might be wise to this about using Trac
>  which is an open source project that
> integrates a wiki with the SVN code versioning system (used by R-project) and 
> a
> replacement for bugzilla's ticketing system. We use it to document our own 
> code.
> 
> Trac would have the advantage of pushing questions on the R list back towards
> the  actual source code and allowing all users to participate in the future
> development of the software.

It isn't clear to me what this would be for.  I'm not sure that I
trust users to modify code.

I was thinking myself that user input might be most useful for
the documentation of functions.  Not that this is so bad, but
rather it might be possible to have an extended system of
documentation on the web, with FAQ-type questions answered as
part of the documentation itself, so that people would not have
to rely on R-help so much (even in its archived forms).

And I was thinking of setting up a Wiki with one page per
function.  (Given that there are now hundreds or thousands of
functions, setting this up would have to be automated.)  I've
just installed (for another purpose) TWiki, which seems to have
some nice features for this sort of thing (in particular, data
stored as text files, hence easily manipulated by other
programs), but I will not have time to think through how to do
this for some time.  Just another idea to throw into the hopper.

In principle, another possibility is to do something like the PHP 
manual at http://www.php.net/manual/en/, which is not a wiki but
more like a bulletin board, with discussion of each command.  But 
I think a wiki is better.  I found it time consuming to read
through all those comments, almost as bad as reading through
R-help postings. :)

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Fernando Henrique Ferraz P. da Rosa]

John Marsland writes:
> Trac would have the advantage of pushing questions on the R list back towards
> the  actual source code and allowing all users to participate in the future
> development of the software.
> 

I see that this could be useful for R-devel, but considering the
volume of traffic and the kind of contents on R-help, I don't think such
tying to the actual source code would be so useful. Perhaps trac could
be used as an integrated interface for r-devel/svn and the bug track
system, and another wiki solution be used exclusiverly for the r-help
community (which includes many people not directly interested in coding
or development issues).

--
"Though this be randomness, yet there is structure in't."
   Rosa, F.H.F.P

Instituto de Matemática e Estatística
Universidade de São Paulo
Fernando Henrique Ferraz P. da Rosa
http://www.feferraz.net

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[John Marsland]

I agree.

In desperation at my inbox being swamped by messages I contacted the R-core team
to ask about other solutions. They recommended gmane.org who compile a
web-viewable archive of thousands of email lists - it even provides RSS feeds
for new topics.

Going back to the wiki issue, it might be wise to this about using Trac
 which is an open source project that
integrates a wiki with the SVN code versioning system (used by R-project) and a
replacement for bugzilla's ticketing system. We use it to document our own code.

Trac would have the advantage of pushing questions on the R list back towards
the  actual source code and allowing all users to participate in the future
development of the software.

John Marsland

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Re: [R] Wikis etc.

[Kevin E. Thorpe]

Frank makes an intersting point.  For those interested, A site I spend
quite a bit of time on for Linux related stuff is IMHO really well done.
There are fora for many different linux distrubtions.  There is a wiki,
a collection of tutorials, etc.  If you want to take a look, the url is
http://www.linuxquestions.org/

Kevin

Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis 
> will not be successful.  I think we need to move to a central wiki or 
> discussion board and to move away from e-mail.  People are extremely 
> helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get 
> too long without factorization of old text.  R-help is now too active 
> and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for 
> e-mail to be effective.
> 
> The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for 
> data manipulation.  I think that new users would profit immensely from a 
> compendium of examples.
> 
> Just my .02 Euros
> 
> Frank


-- 
Kevin E. Thorpe
Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]  Tel: 416.946.8081  Fax: 416.946.3297

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