Hi Baptiste, > In my personal opinion, I see little overall benefit from such an > approach. For one thing, a major strength of the R mailing list is the > large number of very knowledgeable persons. A mailing list with only a > few 10s of users will never provide as good a support as you can find > in the main list. The advice you get could very easily be biased or > even plain wrong without much of a peer-review, so to say. Another > thing to consider is whether people who can help and understand french > actually want to answer a question in french, thereby limiting their > advice to a much narrower audience (people facing a similar problem > subsequently may be unable to get help from an answer in this > language). Perhaps even more likely is the opposite situation where > the question has been solved many times in the main mailing list: it > can be quite tempting to just send the link and say, "well, here is > the solution, let me know what you don't understand" rather than doing > a translator's job. Solving an R problem and translating somebody's > text have very unequal appeal.
In my opinion, the creation of a french R support mailing list was not an attempt to make a second R-help in another language. Like you, I think that such an attempt would fail for the same reasons you detailed in your mail. I think that the lack of native language support is mostly a problem for beginners who need to have access to help easily. In general they don't really need to talk to highly skilled users or R core developpers, but just to people with a bit of experience who can help them to execute quite simple tasks such as data import, data manipulation, graphics customization, etc. That's the feeling I've got from the questions I see in #R on freenode. So maybe a «localized» support mailing list would target a different public, whereas R-help would stay the reference list for more complex questions. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Julien -- Julien ______________________________________________ R-help@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.
