Clint and Liviu,
Stackoverflow also has rss feeds available, if you prefer being pushed the information that way. For the R tagged questions it's here: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/r. Since some e-mail clients double as feed readers, you may be able to read the feed from your e-mail client. Otherwise, it does mean another application.
Regards,
Jason
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Liviu Andronic
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 11:24 PM
To: Clint Bowman
Cc: r-help at r-project.org; Bert Gunter
Subject: Re: [R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)
Dear Clint,
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Clint Bowman <clint at ecy.wa.gov> wrote:
Liviu,
Thanks for the excellent description of the advantages of SE.
However, there is a significant fraction of the population that
prefers that information be pushed out to them rather than having to
pull it to them. The best system is one that accommodates both equally well.
It's not exactly the same as in a mail client, but you also have a push-like interface on SE, sort of:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r
- The 'Newest' tab displays all recent questions, sorted in chronological order with latest on top; it gets refreshed automatically, as in a mail client (hence, "push-like")
- The 'Active' tab displays all questions with recent activity (question asked, answered or commented upon)
- You also have the very useful 'Unanswered' tab, which allows to identify questions that haven't yet received useful advice
Another push-like element in SE is that once you ask a question or answer, any subsequent comments on your post will be notified to you either in the web interface or by email. This helps keep discussions alive.
Regards,
Liviu
Clint
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On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Liviu Andronic wrote:
Dear Don and Bert,
Allow me to address some of your concerns below.
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com>
wrote:
I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I
wish merely to post or to read the posts of others without being
subjected to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings
competition. That alone keeps me away. But Don said it better.
On SO voting is irrelevant for either posting a question or an answer.
*Anyone* (with an account) can ask a question, and *anyone* can
answer a question. Their system of privileges is explained here:
http://askubuntu.com/help/privileges . But to summarize:
- if you're interested only in giving help, then the only really
relevant threshold is 10 and 50 votes (removing some new user
restrictions and allowing you to comment on posts, respectively)
- if you're interested only in seeking help, then all thresholds are
irrelevant really
All other thresholds are relevant only if you're interested in
contributing to the organization of information, or in moderating
this whole forum-slash-wiki thingy. And as a note, given the quality
of your answers on r-help, Bert, I have no doubt that you will clock
upwards 50 upvotes in a couple of hours or so.
I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the
masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when
they decide that R-help should go.
The proposal is not necessarily to close down r-help. From the myriad
lists it currently has, R Core could keep only r-help and r-devel,
and encourage new users to seek help on r.stackexchange.com. The
scope of r-help could be redefined.
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don <macqueen1 at llnl.gov>
wrote:
- They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things
such as "votes", the number of views, the elapsed time since
something or other happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh,
and advertisements. The Mathematica stackexchange example given in
a link in one of the emails below
(http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these
shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.
Well, I've seen my fair share of advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo Mail
or what have you. I know some use dedicated clients, but not all do.
(And sofar I haven't noticed one single intrusive or distracting ad
on
SE.)
As for the number of votes, this is actually the most useful bit of
this Q&A interface: it allows for the best questions (or most often
asked) to stand out from all the noise. And it allows for the best
answers (or those most authoritative) to stand out, too. Accepted
answers immediately indicate to others seeking similar help what has
worked for the OP. Very useful stuff.
Voting also naturally allows to differentiate between neophytes
(<100), and professional helpers (>1k; think of Brian, David or, as
it happens, Bert). If you remember long ago someone proposed on
r-help a reputation system for our professional helpers, only to be
rebuffed essentially because it is unfeasible in a ML interface. The
SE Q&A web interface---or similar---naturally handles this.
- In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have
too many usernames and passwords as it is.
Fair point. However SE found a neat way around this: it keeps cookies
around and whenever you close the browser and reopen SE, it
identifies the cookie and auto-logs you in.
Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can
see and browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And
that's using only about half of my screens vertical space. In
contrast, in the Mathematica stackexchange example, I can see at
most 10, and that only by using the entire vertical space of my
screen. The "From" column in my email client shows the names of
several of the people contributing to the thread, which the browser
interface does not. In the email client, I can move through
messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a
browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much
less efficient.
Again, fair point, but with SE you quickly realize that this is
irrelevant. On ML, even more so on r-help, the only sane way to sort
and filter the messages is using time. If a question wasn't answered
in 24h (or, to be generous, a week), chances tend to zero that this
question will ever be addressed. On SE it is absolutely normal for a
question to be answered, with a high-quality input, 3 months or 2
years later.
It is also much easier to filter questions by topics: if you're
interested in GUI or plyr related questions, just display those tags,
and then answer relevant questions. On r-help you may only guess
from the subject line what the question could possibly be about.
The Q&A interface also allows easily to redirect users to similar
questions that were already answered (goodbye "PLEASE do read the
posting guide"), thus identifying duplicate questions. It also makes
it much easier to search for topics of interest that were already
addressed in the past; much easier than scouring the mountains of
untriaged r-help content.
And do not underestimate the soft incentives induced by the voting
system. Users seek upvotes (you can set bounties, get moderator
privileges and so on), thus making them interested in giving
high-quality answers and asking high-quality questions. Very well
thought-out stuff.
As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up
a browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's
new at any time.
Agreed. I understand the frustration from using a different medium.
True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a
username and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have
to login before posting, which means I don't have to remember yet
another username and password.
Mostly same happens with SE, the way they set it up.
What "...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)"?
I have no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at
all, since the messages come to me. There was some initial setup,
i.e., to filter different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my
email client, but now that that's done, it's as simple as clicking
on the correct mailbox.
Do you follow r-sig-gui or r-sig-teaching or r-sig-finance or
r-sig-robust? Does Brian follow them all? Probably not. People who
are seeking specialized help have a hugely reduced chance of getting
useful help.
On SE however, the efforts are not fragmented; all questions are
asked and answered in the same place. If a question pertains to
'plyr' and 'finance', either a finance type or a plyr enthusiast are
as likely to answer. For the r-sig-* MLs, one would need to subscribe
to all MLs and monitor them all; few do so.
In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing
list approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing
list system for any alternative.
I'm not an SE evangelist, and only truly discovered it about a month
ago or so (even though it seems that I had registered more than a
year ago), and initially I was quite very skeptical of this "fancy forum".
But when I actually realized how _efficient_ this Q&A interface is, I
quickly decided that r-help and associated r-sig-* were good to go
the way of the usenet. Long story short, the Q&A interface is
impressive in terms of economic efficiency, i.e. matching up supply
and demand; the ML is quite inefficient in comparison.
Kind regards,
Liviu
-Don
--
Don MacQueen
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627
Livermore, CA 94550
925-423-1062
On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, "Liviu Andronic" <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Duncan,
I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and
mirroring of user-contributed material on StackExchange. Please read below.
On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no.
Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse.
TL;DR
=====
Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be
moving to StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it).
I would generally agree with you, except for a few points.
1. I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the
compilation.
As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone
to download and duplicate all postings about R. So a posting
there is only available as long as they choose to make it
available. Postings to the mailing list are archived in several
places.
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