French IRC channel and mailing list ?

A few personal thoughts on this:

I recently joined a newly created R user group on google < http://groups.google.co.uk/group/gur-ugr 
  > that started with a similar impulse.

In my personal opinion, I see little overall benefit from such an  
approach. For one thing, a major strength of the R mailing list is the  
large number of very knowledgeable persons. A mailing list with only a  
few 10s of users will never provide as good a support as you can find  
in the main list. The advice you get could very easily be biased or  
even plain wrong without much of a peer-review, so to say. Another  
thing to consider is whether people who can help and understand french  
actually want to answer a question in french, thereby limiting their  
advice to a much narrower audience (people facing a similar problem  
subsequently may be unable to get help from an answer in this  
language). Perhaps even more likely is the opposite situation where  
the question has been solved many times in the main mailing list: it  
can be quite tempting to just send the link and say, "well, here is  
the solution, let me know what you don't understand" rather than doing  
a translator's job. Solving an R problem and translating somebody's  
text have very unequal appeal.

I don't know what the exact policy is for this mailing list (a search  
for "english" in the posting guide didn't return anything). Perhaps it  
is OK to send the occasional question in french, or "franglais". I  
know I don't mind seeing a few of these and answering them if I can,  
while I would not join a new list for the reasons stated above. This  
would have the advantage of keeping the knowledge together. Maybe a  
special tag could be used so that people not interested can filter out  
all questions posted in non-english languages.

Best wishes,

Baptiste

French IRC channel and mailing list ?

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