[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it if the comments become out of date.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