creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear all,
On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 10:49 PM, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated content for download/mirroring: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-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/
As Duncan suggested earlier, tying R Core to StackExchange may or may not be a good idea as it would make it somewhat dependent on external corporate interests. (Personally I see both advantages and disadvantages.) So in the end my proposal is not necessarily for r-help to go to SE, but more for R to have its own Q&A forum/wiki for helping R users. This could perfectly take the form of setting up its own open-source https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central Q&A interface (a SE-like web interface) on R Core's servers. In this case the website would look like the following: http://www.biostars.org/ . Regards, Liviu
- 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-ubuntu - 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
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