On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 11:25 -0500, hadley wickham wrote: > > "Have you read the posting guide and the FAQs? If you do not get a reply > > within two days, you may want to look at both and think about reformulating > > your query. Oh, and while you are at it, look through the archives, a lot of > > questions have already been asked and answered before." > > As I say every time someone brings this up, there are currently ~130 > printed pages of FAQs. Reading all that seems a rather large burden > on the novice poster.
There is a ToC and HTML pages are searchable. Your point raises an important issue though; R is the product of voluntary offers of time and expertise and despite the large array of talented, clever individuals from a wealth of backgrounds contributing untold improvements and extensions to R, we (the R community) haven't really `solved` this documentation issue and the problem of getting people to actually read the damned stuff before firing off an email claiming x or wanting help with y, or developers to buy in and provide information in new ways. Either people don't have the time to implement a better system or we haven't come up with a better system? Maybe this is just human nature and we have to live with it? I hope Stephan's suggestion was in jest - flooding the world with yet more email traffic seems counter-productive. Instead of the list going on about these issues every couple of months or so, is there any scope for interested parties getting together and coming up with suggestions for how to improve/change things, *and*, more importantly, offers to help get it implemented? I know there are discussions/work on going to improve the design of the R website and CRAN. Now might be a good time to try and effect improvements that will help the community. How do we raise the profile of resources already out there - several people feel the Task Views aren't as well advertised as they could be for example? Do we really need a new 'type' of documentation or resource? How do we improve what we already have? G > > Hadley > -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%
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