[R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)

Duncan Murdoch murdoch.duncan at gmail.com
Wed Feb 5 14:37:01 CET 2014


On 05/02/2014 1:32 AM, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> Dear all,
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated
> > content for download/mirroring:
> > http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/?cb=1
> >
> > "All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under
> > the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. " And it is currently being
> > mirrored at least at the Internet Archive:
> > https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
> >
> > So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to:
> > - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at
> > http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE
> > site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/
> >
> As Duncan suggested earlier, tying R Core to StackExchange may or may
> not be a good idea as it would make it somewhat dependent on external
> corporate interests. (Personally I see both advantages and
> disadvantages.)

That's not what I said.  I described the reasons *I* do not use it, I 
said nothing about R Core.
>
> So in the end my proposal is not necessarily for r-help to go to SE,
> but more for R to have its own Q&A forum/wiki for helping R users.
> This could perfectly take the form of setting up its own open-source
> https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central Q&A interface (a SE-like
> web interface) on R Core's servers. In this case the website would
> look like the following: http://www.biostars.org/ .

Barry's response to this request addressed it really well.  If you want 
it, go ahead and build it.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> Regards,
> Liviu
>
>
> > - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary.
> > This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu:
> > http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu
> > - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is
> > produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the
> > info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet
> > Archive would still hold.
> >
> >
> >> 2.  I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list
> >> interface, and will eventually win out.  R-help needs to do nothing, once
> >> someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the
> >> people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away.
> >>
> > The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to
> > efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to
> > appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only
> > note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup,
> > and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the
> > SE Q&A web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui
> > would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of
> > monitoring multiple mailing lists).
> >
> > Opinions?
> >
> > Liviu
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
>




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