No RTFM?

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Spencer Graves
<spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com> wrote:

?What do you think about adding a "No RTFM" policy to the R mailing lists?
Per, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM":

I think this is a great suggestion.

I notice the R mailing list already has a gesture in this direction:
"Rudeness and ad hominem comments are not acceptable. Brevity is OK."

But the people who behave badly don't care about policies like this
and they will keep doing what they do.

Although it may seem hard to justify rudeness its often the case that
even the most bizarre behavior makes sense if you view it from the
perspective of that person.   In the case of the R list there is a
larger potential demand for free help than resources to answer and
without the usual monetary economics to allocate resources I believe
that the functional purpose of rudeness here is to ration those
resources and minimize duplication of questions.  If that is correct
one can predict that if civility were to become the norm on this list
then other rationing mechanisms would arise to replace it.

For example, it might become the norm that most questions are not
answered or are answered less thoroughly or the list might be replaced
as the de facto goto medium for R questions by some other list or web
site so we have to be careful about unintended consequences.