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

Dear all,

For some time now, R is becomming more and more popular in more and
more countries. France is for sure one of them, but french people
being french one of the obstacle they might tackle is the lack of
documentation and support in their native language.

To offer this support in french an IRC channel (#Rfr on
irc.freenode.net) was created some months ago, beside the official
english channel #R. We (me (~juba) and Pierre-Yves Chibon (~pingou))
have to recognize that it has a very low activity right now but it's
related to our lack of promotion about it.

Another tool that could be useful to bring support in french (and
other languages) would be dedicated mailing-lists. I've searched the
archives to see if similar requests have already been made but
couldn't manage to find one. So I would like to ask here the question,
has there been any thought on the creation of dedicated R-help
mailing-lists for the major languages such as Spanish, French, Chinese
and others ?

We had some thought about it and we actually think that it would be
something useful for users to be able to receive some help (especially
when their english is not really fluent).

Thanks in advance for your answers,

Sincerely,

Pierre-Yves Chibon
Julien Barnier

______________________________________________
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.

_____________________________

Baptiste Augui?

School of Physics
University of Exeter
Stocker Road,
Exeter, Devon,
EX4 4QL, UK

Phone: +44 1392 264187

http://newton.ex.ac.uk/research/emag

Hi Baptiste,

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.

In my opinion, the creation of a french R support mailing list was not
an attempt to make a second R-help in another language. Like you, I
think that such an attempt would fail for the same reasons you
detailed in your mail.

I think that the lack of native language support is mostly a problem
for beginners who need to have access to help easily. In general they
don't really need to talk to highly skilled users or R core
developpers, but just to people with a bit of experience who can help
them to execute quite simple tasks such as data import, data
manipulation, graphics customization, etc. That's the feeling I've got
from the questions I see in #R on freenode.

So maybe a ?localized? support mailing list would target a different
public, whereas R-help would stay the reference list for more complex
questions.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Julien

Julien