From tplate at blackmesacapital.com  Tue Jan 10 01:56:38 2006
From: tplate at blackmesacapital.com (Tony Plate)
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:56:38 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Wikis (was about prod(numeric(0)))
In-Reply-To: <43C2FF2E.5060601@zoo.ufl.edu>
References: <43C2FF2E.5060601@zoo.ufl.edu>
Message-ID: <43C30646.4030900@blackmesacapital.com>

I agree with everything you say about the structure and organization of 
the Wiki (needs top-level R-related structure, the 
Wiki-administration/editing stuff dominates, etc.)  But, it's also 
possible to spend so much time talking about how to do it, that it never 
gets done...

Still, it really does look like it would be worth putting some effort 
into the top level structure early on, because from the material I saw 
about maintaining the wiki, it looks like a bit of a chore to impose a 
new top-level structure (requires scripts, admittedly simple, that 
rename files and change links within files -- so, presumably, can only 
be done by the Wiki administrator.)

Also, I had a little difficulty figuring out exactly how to create new 
pages, and my attempts were not clean -- I seemed to have left two items 
with the same name at the same level in the index.

Everything is an experiment!

Maybe when Phillippe Grosjean returns to his work he can put some more 
R-related top-level structure on his wiki?

In the meantime, anyone else can go in there and start proposing some 
structure...

-- Tony Plate

PS. Detlef Steuer did say that he would be happy to shut down his wiki 
and let the sciviews one be "the" R Wiki.  I had previously put some 
material on Detlef's Wiki, but this time on put it on the sciviews Wiki.

Ben Bolker wrote:
> Tony Plate <tplate <at> acm.org> writes:
> 
>  >
>  > Since the virtue and reliability of Wikis was brought up, I created a R
>  > Wiki page for this at
>  > 
> http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/wiki/doku.php?id=beginners:surprises:emptysetfuncs
>  >
>  >
>  > Anyone: please correct errors and improve it!
>  >
>  > Tony Plate
>  >
> 
>    OK, now I have another question:
> I see a wiki at
> http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome
> administered by Detlef Steuer
>    I see another at http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/wiki/doku.php
> (Phillippe Grosjean)
> which is nominally geared toward beginners/GUI interfaces.
> 
>   I'm not saying I could do any better, but both of these look
> as though they'd be pretty hard to get into if you were really
> a beginner or intermediate R user looking for info ... Paul
> John's Rtips (http://www.ku.edu/~pauljohn/R/Rtips.html) is actually
> about the best example about there -- the flat hierarchy might not
> work too well for a really big wiki, but having at least
> a good first-level hierarchy set up (and making sure that
> what new users see is not a lot of detail about how to extend
> the wiki) seems really important.
> 
>    Sorry to criticize, but I am happy to start working
> on populating a wiki -- but only if the structure is there
> so that I can figure out where to put stuff and hope that
> someone who needs it will ever be able to find it ...
>



[Rd] Wikis (was about prod(numeric(0)))
Tony Plate