[R] R Wiki - official launch!

[Philippe Grosjean]

Hello all,

We are pleased to announce the official launch of the R Wiki at 
http://wiki.r-project.org. Although there are already many sources of R 
documentation, this R Wiki is a complementary tool, in the sense that 
"users become R documentation authors", a little bit like "users become 
developers" for R code.

=====================================================================
The main sections are:

- Getting Started: dedicated to very R beginners,

- Guides: a section for books, tutorials and demos in Wiki format,

- Tips: this is a large section with many small tips&tricks, initially 
based on the excellent Paul Johnson's Rtips 
(http://pj.freefaculty.org/R/Rtips.html),

- Links: users can contribute links about R here,

- R Graph Gallery: an addition to discuss graphs in the Romain François' 
R Graph Gallery site (http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/index.php),

- R packages: packages authors/maintainers are free to add related 
material; R package users can also contribute package-specific material 
here.

- R documentation: the wiki version of all R documentation ("wikified" 
Rd files), with the possibility for everybody to comment, add examples 
or anything else useful. Note that there are still some little 
formatting and navigation problems here, but they will be solved soon 
(do not report bugs yet, please!)

- Users: sections where R users can create their own public page. It is 
also the place where everybody can comment on R events, like useR!2006 
(see http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=users:user-2006)

- Wiki and playground: sections to learn how to write wiki pages and to 
exercise.

========================================================================
As a R documentation reader, you could be interested by the additional 
information in the R Wiki. To be informed of new items added to the R 
Wiki, you have RSS feed available (see 
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:usage)

If you have something interesting to share with other R users, this is 
the place to publish it. Here, you will receive the support of other 
people to enhance and keep your document up-to-date with the rapidly 
evolving R. Here are a couple of suggested uses:

1) If you feel there is an interesting thread on this R-Help mailing 
list, summarize and illustrate it in the right subsection of 'Tips'. 
That way, one could answer "Please, visit Wiki page XXXX" for further 
similar questions on the mailing list. The rich-formatted presentation 
of a R Wiki page is much easier to read that a mailing list thread in 
the archives,

2) Contribute to the official R documentation by adding material at the 
end of the wikified man pages in the "R documentation" section. Most 
valuable addition will eventually flow into to official documentation in 
subsequent R versions.

3) As a package author/maintainer, allow users to contribute various 
material (examples, comments, tutorials, ...) by creating a Wiki page 
dedicated to your package, and by adding its link in the 'URL' section 
of your description file.

4) Add a link to your own R-related web site in the 'Links' section.

5) Consider to publish your R tutorial / demo / course / book in the 
"Guides" section. The main advantage to publish it on the Wiki is the 
possibility to get help from your readers to keep this material updated 
(most of such contributed documents, including those on CRAN, are *not* 
regularly updated, if published elsewhere and if you do not revise them 
yourself regularly, that is, every six months!)

6) Start a page in the 'Users' section to share material under development.

7) As a R beginner, share your experience with other beginners in the 
'Getting started' section.

8) For a little bit more fun, participate, or propose a new challenge. 
A challenge consists in solving a problem with optimized R code 
(optimization for speed is easy to quantify, but do not forgot to 
improve readability and style of your code!). We would like to advertise 
R Wiki challenges from time to time on this mailing list. No prize 
here,... just the satisfaction to have written the better code to solve 
a given problem.

There are numerous other ways to use the R Wiki. Browse it to discover 
how useful it can be for you.

There is also a mailing list dedicated to R Wiki developments: 
R-SIG-WIKI (https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-wiki).

On behalf of the R Wiki creators,

Philippe Grosjean
-- 
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  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Mons, Belgium
( ( ( ( (    web:   http://www.umh.ac.be/~econum
  ) ) ) ) )          http://www.sciviews.org
( ( ( ( (
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