[R] Wikibooks

[Philippe Grosjean]

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  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
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Dieter Menne wrote:
> Ben Bolker <bolker <at> zoo.ufl.edu> writes:
> 
>>   Well, we do have an R wiki -- http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php --
>> although it is not as active as I'd like.  (We got stuck halfway through
>> porting Paul Johnson's "R Tips" to it ...)   Please contribute!
> 
> I once tried:
> 
> http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:lmer-tests
> 
> but I don't think I will do this again on the existing Wiki. I am a frequent
> Wikipedia-Writer, so I know how it works, but this was discouraging.
> 
> 1) The structure of the Wiki was and is still incomprehensibly to me. I needed
> too much time to find out how to put the stuff into it.

Really bad. This was the best design we obtained after a hard work of 
several tens of people. Sorry for you. By the way, did you ever noticed 
that Wikipedia basically has NO structure? It is intended to be mostly 
accessed by KEYWORDS. On the main page, you have: "main" (that page), 
then "content" (explanation and general links to the whole content), 
plus a couple of selected content links (featured, recent, random).

So, if you like this structure, that is, basically, no structure and 
access through keywords... why not to do the same with the R Wiki? Just 
type your keyword in the top-right text entry and click "search". Then, 
you don't need to care about that "structure that is still 
incomprehensible to you".

> 2) I decided to use the "large guides" section, because I wanted the thread
> transcript to be one one page. If you check the revision history, you will find
> that I needed more than three hours to get it working. The main reason is the
> sluggish response, and the incomprehensible error messages or the lack of it
> when some " was not matched or whatever (Thanks, Ben, for correcting the
> remaining errors). This is a problem of the Wiki software used, other Wikis such
> as Media(pedia) are much more tolerant or informant.

As I said, sluggish response is probably due to a combination of a slow 
Internet communication from your computer to the server at the time you 
edited your page, the edition of a too large page, and lack of edition 
section per section (you can edit each paragraph separately). I already 
made some corrections on the Wiki when I was in USA (the server is in 
Belgium, Europe), and it was not sluggish at all... On other 
circumstances, I noted a much slower reaction, too. That's Internet!

DokuWiki is NOT slower than Mediawiki, especially with an underused Wiki 
site as R wiki is currently.

> Then, Philippe Grosjean informed me: "Your page is way too long and is a rather
> crude copy and paste from the long thread in the mailing list."

Yes, I still believe so. Wiki pages are more effective when they are 
kept short.

> I disagree. Why do you have a "large guides" section? And taking into account
> the amount of work I put into reformatting the transcript, I decided it was my
> first and last contribution to the Wiki.

The "large guides" section is for ... large guides, of course... but who 
said that they should be all contained in a single page??? Just quoting 
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=guides:guides: "If it is a 
larger contribution with many pages, create a dedicated subsection in 
tutorials (like “stats-with-r”, for instance)." The key is there: a 
large guide should better be represented by several wiki pages collected 
together in a dedicated subsection. Is it that hard to understand?

Philippe Grosjean

> Dieter Menne
> 
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