Better 'documenting' R? (Was: Re: bug when subtracting decimals?)

"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

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