creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Jason,
Thanks--I've found an RSS feed from EPA very useful and will check
Stackoverflow's.
Clint
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On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Law, Jason wrote:
Clint and Liviu, Stackoverflow also has rss feeds available, if you prefer being pushed the information that way. For the R tagged questions it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/r. Since some e-mail clients double as feed readers, you may be able to read the feed from your e-mail client. Otherwise, it does mean another application. Regards, Jason -----Original Message----- From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Liviu Andronic Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 11:24 PM To: Clint Bowman Cc: r-help at r-project.org; Bert Gunter Subject: Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?) Dear Clint, On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman <clint at ecy.wa.gov> wrote:
Liviu, Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE. However, there is a significant fraction of the population that prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well.
It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r - The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, "push-like") - The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon) - You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive. Regards, Liviu
Clint
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On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote:
Dear Don and Bert, Allow me to address some of your concerns below. On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:
I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better.
On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer. *Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here: http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize: - if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively) - if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are irrelevant really All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so.
I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when they decide that R-help should go.
The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel, and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The scope of r-help could be redefined.
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don <macqueen1 at llnl.gov> wrote:
- They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as "votes", the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.
Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do. (And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad on SE.) As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of this Q&A interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has worked for the OP. Very useful stuff. Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes (<100), and professional helpers (>1k; think of Brian, David or, as it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The SE Q&A web interface---or similar---naturally handles this.
- In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too many usernames and passwords as it is.
Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies around and whenever you close the browser and reopen SE, it identifies the cookie and auto-logs you in.
Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my screen. The "From" column in my email client shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less efficient.
Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to sort and filter the messages is using time. If a question wasn't answered in 24h (or, to be generous, a week), chances tend to zero that this question will ever be addressed. On SE it is absolutely normal for a question to be answered, with a high-quality input, 3 months or 2 years later. It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those tags, and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only guess from the subject line what the question could possibly be about. The Q&A interface also allows easily to redirect users to similar questions that were already answered (goodbye "PLEASE do read the posting guide"), thus identifying duplicate questions. It also makes it much easier to search for topics of interest that were already addressed in the past; much easier than scouring the mountains of untriaged r-help content. And do not underestimate the soft incentives induced by the voting system. Users seek upvotes (you can set bounties, get moderator privileges and so on), thus making them interested in giving high-quality answers and asking high-quality questions. Very well thought-out stuff.
As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any time.
Agreed. I understand the frustration from using a different medium.
True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and password.
Mostly same happens with SE, the way they set it up.
What "...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)"? I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox.
Do you follow r-sig-gui or r-sig-teaching or r-sig-finance or r-sig-robust? Does Brian follow them all? Probably not. People who are seeking specialized help have a hugely reduced chance of getting useful help. On SE however, the efforts are not fragmented; all questions are asked and answered in the same place. If a question pertains to 'plyr' and 'finance', either a finance type or a plyr enthusiast are as likely to answer. For the r-sig-* MLs, one would need to subscribe to all MLs and monitor them all; few do so.
In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system for any alternative.
I'm not an SE evangelist, and only truly discovered it about a month ago or so (even though it seems that I had registered more than a year ago), and initially I was quite very skeptical of this "fancy forum". But when I actually realized how _efficient_ this Q&A interface is, I quickly decided that r-help and associated r-sig-* were good to go the way of the usenet. Long story short, the Q&A interface is impressive in terms of economic efficiency, i.e. matching up supply and demand; the ML is quite inefficient in comparison. Kind regards, Liviu
-Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, "Liviu Andronic" <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Duncan, I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below. On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no. Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse. TL;DR ===== Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it).
I would generally agree with you, except for a few points. 1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the compilation. As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting there is only available as long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several places.
It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-h osted-by -the-internet-archive/?cb=1 "All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. " And it is currently being mirrored at least at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to: - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com at http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary. This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu: http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ub untu - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet Archive would still hold.
2. I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing list interface, and will eventually win out. R-help needs to do nothing, once someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most of the people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away.
The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup, and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the SE Q&A web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists). Opinions? Liviu
______________________________________________ R-help at 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.
______________________________________________ R-help at 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.
______________________________________________ R-help at 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.
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______________________________________________ R-help at 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.
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______________________________________________ R-help at 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.