[R] Wikibooks

[Duncan Murdoch]

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 Q&A.

Duncan Murdoch