[R] R Documentation(s) -- Summary

[Emmanuel Paradis]

Dear all,

Many thanks to all who replied to my message. Here follows a summary of the
most important points to me.

1. There seems to be a general agreement on a need for docs for
non-statisticians with respect to two points: (i) explaining how to get
first in R for those who are not used with command-lines, object-oriented
languages, loops, ... and (ii) illustrating to the various specialists how
they could use R to do the analyses or tests which are common practice in
their field.

2. There is a need to translate docs (and this has already started in
Japanese). This could concern only the non-technical materials, as
statisticians, mathematicians ... generally read English.

It appears that significant materials probably already exist in various
files, folders, ... around the world, so trying to fill the above needs may
be carried out by putting together efforts that have already been done.

Here are my (vague) suggestions on the objectives relative to the above needs.

1.i. Writing a simple and short tutorial on how to do basic things in R
(read data, plots, graphs...); also emphasize on the advantages of R
compared to softwares with pull-down menus.

1.ii. This could take 2 forms (but not mutually exclusive). First, write
tutorials explaining how to do the usual stats in a given field, this could
be appended to the above doc with chapters like "R for biologists", "R for
psychologists", ... Second, write packages similar to Doug Bates' Devore5,
but referring to the handbooks that are popular in other fields (for
instance, Sokal & Rohlf's "Biometry" is very popular among my colleagues).

2. Probably what is proposed above would be worth translating... but it
still needs to be written (... in any language). The "Introduction to R" at
least already exists, but (looking at it closely right now...) it is quite
a dense document and I have no idea on the time required to translate it
(it depends on the language it is translated in I suppose). On the other
hand, if it has already been translated in Japanese then it could be worth
doing it with other languages.


There is a (probably less urgent) need for advanced users on how to write
new R functions, more advanced R features... Brian Ripley mentioned that an
R Language Manual is planned, and the last book by Venables & Ripley treats
R as one of three dialects of the S language.


Again, these are simply suggestions, and I would be glad to discuss them. I
am, of course, volunteer to contribute to docs and others mentioned they
are as well. No doubt there will be enough enthusiasm among R users to
carry out the task.

Finally, many thanks to Friedrich Leisch for his proposal to create a
``contributed documentation'' section on CRAN.

Best wishes to all,

Emmanuel Paradis
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