[R] a proposal regarding documentation

[Philippe Grosjean]

baptiste auguie wrote:
> I knew I had seen this in action! But as you mention, most pages only 
> display ~~RDOC~~ at the moment.
> I second the idea of using the wiki for such collaborative work. If the 
> current (r-devel) version of all help pages could be automatically 
> copied to the wiki, users would have a convenient way to propose 
> changes. The coloured diff, user identification, and RSS feed make for a 
> very user-friendly alternative to svn access (unthinkable anyway for 
> non-R core members).

Well, the help page itself is read-only, but you can use all this in the 
Wiki discussion section.

PhG

> Best,
> 
> baptiste
> 
> 
> Philippe Grosjean wrote:
>> Ironically, this function is present since the beginning, although a 
>> little buggy. If you try this in R on a computer that is connected to 
>> the Internet:
>>
>> wikihelp <- function(topic)
>>   browseURL(paste("http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/rhelp.php?id=",
>>     topic, sep = ""))
>> wikihelp("barplot")
>>
>> You got the help page of ?barplot in wiki format (with a few 
>> presentation bugs, but everything is there, basically)... plus a Wiki 
>> discussion section where people can add more material, links, etc.
>>
>> The help page is not physically contained in the wiki page, but it is 
>> a file stored elsewhere on the R Wiki server, and that is supposed to 
>> be updated regularly (but it is not the case for the moment). In the 
>> wiki page you see, there is only a ~~RDOC~~ marker indicating where to 
>> include the help page.
>>
>> I have a problem with the R Wiki cache: until someone adds comments to 
>> such a page, the content is not refreshed, but you just see ~~RDOC~~.
>>
>> Try, for instance:
>>
>> wikihelp("chisq.test")
>>
>> If the engine thinks 'topic' is ambiguous, it displays a list of 
>> possibilities (i.e., our wikihelp() function is somehow a mix of 
>> help() and of apropos()). For instance:
>>
>> wikihelp("help")
>>
>>
>> This should not be ambiguous, but it is considered as it currently by 
>> rhelp.php (a minor bug probably easy to correct).
>>
>> Finally, all wiki pages are spelled with lowercase. It is the same for 
>> help pages. So,
>>
>> wikihelp("RSiteSearch")
>> wikihelp("rsitesearch")
>>
>> lead to the same rdoc:utils:rsitesearch wiki page. I have no solutions 
>> for that!
>>
>> So, to conclude, most of the required mechanism is already installed 
>> on R Wiki. It  just needs a little bit of debugging and fine-tuning to 
>> become completely operational. A little help here would be very 
>> appreciated!
>>
>> ... and, of course, a refined version of the wikihelp() function must 
>> be made widely available to "reveal" this function. One could even 
>> consider to write a pager that displays local help page and warns if 
>> there are comments on this topic posted on the wiki... or that link to 
>> a personal wiki engine where everybody could add its own comments to 
>> the help pages, with full-text search ability!
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Philippe Grosjean
>>
>> ..............................................<°}))><........
>>  ) ) ) ) )
>> ( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
>>  ) ) ) ) )
>> ( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
>>  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
>> ( ( ( ( (
>> ..............................................................
> 
>