mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up

My personal view on this is that there is need for a friendly
list with a more "customer service" attitude than r-help.

r-help is really very useful but its also intimidating
and I bet lots of people have questions that they never ask
for fear of the response.   Maybe some of them even decide
not to learn R.

---
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:49:15 +0100 
From: Martin Wegmann <wegmann_mailinglist at gmx.net>
To: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at pdf.com>, <rossini at u.washington.edu> 
Cc: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> 
Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up 

 
 
Hello, 

I agree completely that well thought out questions are important to receive 
good and quick replies and I agree as well that the replies on the R-help 
list are very good and helpful.
But I had to learn and I am still learing how to write good questions and 
appreciate Spencer's explanantion how a good question should look like in his 
opinion. 

I am not sure how this new mailing list might evolve. 
It might be that the R-beginner list takes some load of the R-help list by 
reducing the amount of "basic" questions which won't be questioned anymore 
here (what aren't many) and that new user might be taught to post "good" 
question before they start posting to R-help.
If it proves to be ineffective or might affect R-help in some unwanted manner 
it would be an easy one to shut it down. 

I doubt that it will split the R-help list - in my opinion it is unlikely that 
medium/experienced R user who will subscribe to R-beginner will unsubscribe 
from the R-help list. 
Moreover people starting with R are less likely to send any mails to this 
list, some do and are refered in most cases to the manuals. 
When I started R I looked through the archive and because I did not understand 
even one question, I was intimidated by this list and did not send any mail 
until a few weeks later (that was not because of the statistics but the 
commands)
For this kind of people the R-beginner list is thought - to encourage them to 
send "stupid" questions during their first steps in R. 

They shall recognize questions they would have asked themselves.
Therefore I think that the quality of the question is in this case less 
important than it's level.

I hope I did not misunderstood some points ,-)

best regards Martin

I agree with Tony's observation that well thought out questions
are more likely to receive an answer than something that is long,
rambling, and poorly focused. Many questions take more time to read
than I have available, so I don't bother. I like questions that include
toy examples in a few lines of code that I can copy from an email into R
and test ideas. Careful formatting that looks pretty in an email is an
obstacle for me, because it increases the work required to get it into
R. Many questioners could answer their own problems in the process of
generating such a toy example. When they can't, that exercise helps
them focus the question, which makes it easier for potential respondents
to understand the problem and reply. Without that, I must either
generate a toy example myself (which I've done many times) or respond
with untested code and risk looking stupid when my untested suggestion
doesn't work.

hope this helps.
spencer graves

A.J. Rossini wrote:

"Pascal A. Niklaus" <Pascal.Niklaus at unibas.ch> writes:

- In my experience even *very* basic questions *relating to the R
language* do get answered on r-help. I'm impressed by how much time
some members of the R core team spend answering relatively basic
questions, and by how elaborate their answers generally are. So I
cannot see much need for a new R mailing list. There are these
excellent mailing list archives, so why "fragment" this list?

To follow up, well-thought through basic questions do get answered; in
particular, they can be useful for those of us writing packages,
documentation, etc.

I have a sense that it is the quality of the question (details of what
is intended to do, or not known, signs of using other sources of
materials which folks have spent years on, no signs that this is a "do
my work for me" question) rather than the level of the question, that
is an issue.

best,
-tony

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