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Dream of a wiki GUI for R

7 messages · Tobias Verbeke, freerow, ajay ohri +2 more

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Dear R fans ( and wiki fans),

I am just writing a draft to introduce confidence intervals of various
"effect sizes" to my students. Surely, I'll recommend the package
MBESS in R. Currently, it means I have to recommend R's interface at
first. As a statistics teacher in a dept of psychology, I often have
to reply why not to teach SPSS. Psychologists and their students hate
to memorize codes, or even to call any function with a list of
parameters. I know if I have an online R platform with a wiki
html-form design, I can bypass the function calls and headache
parameters to expose the power of R. Rcmdr and its plugins help some,
but students like to remember just one menu structure in the SPSS
textbook. A wiki interface means they can search and find a complete
example in psychology, with self-explained parameter inputs and
outputs.

Do I actually dream a wikipedia with front forms and back R? Most R
fans are wiki fans, but not vice verse. So, I think I should talk my
dream here rather than at wikipedia. If you know it had been a
practice rather than an idea, please tell me where to write my
teaching interface.

LI, Xiaoxu

School of Arts and Social Sciences,
Shenzhen Graduate School,
Peking Univ.(Shenzhen Campus)
China
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Hi,
Some have had similar dreams:

http://ideas.repec.org/p/hum/wpaper/sfb649dp2008-030.html
http://www.r-project.org/user-2006/Slides/Klinke.pdf
http://www.r-project.org/user-2006/Abstracts/Klinke+Schmerbach+Troitschanskaia.pdf 


HTH,
Tobias
#
Hi ohri:

Thanks for your introduction of knol. I am testing it now. I can't
google out the "Google Docs plugin for sending R output directly to
the Docs". Is it something like R(D)COM?

My point is to adopt html FORM elements (input boxes, checks,...) into
any wiki platform. R-php, R-cgi or others now provide convenient
server sides. The aim is scarcely to teach R or statistical
procedures, but to help lay end users to reach transparent statistical
results without bothering who, or whether R, or how it is doing the
server side job.

Google docs' FORM "file-type" feeds result into a google spreadsheet.
If such a form and its result page could be implemented in a wiki page
side by side, with R functions support,  it is my dream.

Does anybody see a wiki page with an interacting input box? or with
javascript or any scripts to be collaborated in a wiki style?

Xiaoxu
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Ajay ohri <ohri2007 at gmail.com> wrote:
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That's not the catch, the catch is that there is no editorial
"control" (for the lack of a better word) or quality control,
which allows every nincompoop to write "authoritative" knols
as evidenced on the web site. I am also quite sure that they
place and check cookies to increase their knowledge about users,
like they do with all their other web sites and chrome. (Not
that it bothers me much, personally...)

In any case, your elderly gynaecologist would like to be able to
look up the answers to fundamental before bothering the experts...

greetings, el


on 9/29/08 9:50 AM Ajay ohri said the following:
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Hello,

Just to add to what Ajay said: the http://wiki.r-project.org does not 
execute R code from within wiki pages. This is a choice for security 
reasons. However, there are ways to get R code from R wiki pages and run 
it in R: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:misc:wikicode

Also, there is a discussion about integrating Sweave in wiki pages: 
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=developers:latex2wiki.

If someone would like to start a "teaching stats with R" topic on the R 
wiki and organize a section for this, he is more than welcome to make a 
proposal (send it to me).

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

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( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
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( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
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Ajay ohri wrote: