R help - Sep 2004 - Proposal for New R List: Criticism? Comments?

Folks:
 
I would like to propose a new R list, tentatively labeled r-contents. I wish
to briefly explain the purpose and format here and solicit public comments,
pro or con, so feel free to criticize or suggest a better name and other
improvements or alternatives.
 
R presently consists of a suite of about a dozen core recommended packages
and several hundred contributed packages comprising thousands -- perhaps
tens of thousands -- of functions. Hopefully, this will continue to grow
rapidly. No one can possibly keep track of all of this, and it is therefore
a daunting task for someone seeking specific functionality to find it,
especially when they are relatively new to R. 
 
Of course, R and CRAN (and Google and ...)  have various search capabilities
that help, but these are essentially keyword-based and so require the
searcher to guess search terms that are at least reasonably close to
function names and keywords. A lot of the time this works, but it can be
tedious; some of the time one guesses wrong, and it doesn't work.
 
S-Plus and much other software addresses this by providing a
semantically-based Contents Index (or something like it) in their Help
functionality. I find this quite useful, but creating and maintaining such
an index seems to me to be extremely labor intensive, fraught with its own
issues (what heading should I look under?), and, I think, not a good fit to
the spirit and dynamics of R anyway.
 
Not surprisingly, as a result, many of the questions addressed to r-help are
of the form: "I want to do such and such. How do I do it?" While this
certainly gives answers, I think the breadth of r-help and its etiquette and
posting conventions result in an abruptness to many of our replies ("Read
the posting guide! Read the Help files and do what they say!") that
discourages many users -- especially casual ones -- from posting questions,
and thus may thus discourage use of R. Clearly, if true, this is not a good
thing; on the other hand, I think that given r-help's purpose and practices,
many of these abrupt replies may well be appropriate (I'm a curmudgeon at
heart!).
 
Hence, there is a mismatch between user needs and r-help services. To
address this mismatch, I would like to propose a new list, r-contents, to
essentially serve the same purpose as the S-Plus Contents index. Hence, it
would serve as a place for users to post queries ** only ** of the form: "I
want to do such and such. How do I do it?" and receive answers that would
all be **single phrases ** of the form "package suchandsuch" or
"?suchandsuchfunction." No further explanations regarding usage would
be
provided, though users would be free to follow up answers with private
questions to the responder, although there should be no expectation of any
response. Queries could be framed with as much or as little supporting
detail as desired, with the obvious consequence that a more clearly framed
question would be more likely to get a (better) response. No other posting
conventions (aside from the usual ones regarding civility and adherence to
topic) would be expected.
 
My hope is that such a list would both reduce unnecessary traffic on r-help
and satisfy a genuine need in a less threatening way. I can certainly see
downsides (I often learn a lot from "How can I do this?" queries), but
I
think, on balance, this approach might be useful. So I would like to subject
the idea to public scrutiny and criticism, as well as the opportunity for
improvement from suggested modifications or alternatives. If it's useful,
this will be recognized; if it's not and/or no one is interested, that, too,
will be made manifest. I would be especially grateful for the opinions of
casual users or newbies, either publicly or privately.
 
Cheers,
 
-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box
 
 

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

I think that a lot of posts on r-help are exactly of the form you
suggest: "How do I do X?"  Answer: "Use Y."  (Or maybe,
"Use Y.
And next time RTFM."  But so what.  The answer is still there.)

Often, when the answer is not of that form, the question is
unclear.  In other cases, the questioner is apparently asking for
general statistical advice, rather than which package to use.

In sum, I don't think the new list is needed.  I do not want to
archive it.  I think that, if a questioner fails to find an
answer because the terms he would use do not happen to be indexed
in help.search(), etc., then he has the option of using my search
engine as a fallback, where it is likely that someone else has
used his favored terms.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R search page: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/

The number of help requests that could be answered by either:

1) A full text search of package INDEX files

or

2) A full text search of package documentation files

is certainly large. Professor Baron's search engine does this very well.
Some
time ago, I wrote a Tck-Tk program to perform this sort of search, so that I 
could enter any word and get a list of all files in the R documentation that 
contained that word. In general, it is about as comprehensive as the UPenn 
search engine. However, neither of these are on the CRAN site. It does not 
seem difficult to program such a search on CRAN, so that someone seeking a 
package dealing with, say, "goodness of fit" could enter it and have
an HTML
page served with a list of links to documentation files that contain that 
phrase. A lot easier than working one's way through the 350+ packages listed
or attempting to divine what each package contains from their often whimsical 
names.

Yes, I would be happy to have a try.

Jim

Dear Bert,

I believe that you've identified an important issue -- and one that's
occasionally been discussed on this list previously -- but I'm not sure that
another email list is a good solution. Some method of indexing functions in
packages that would allow people to more easily locate them (e.g.,
author-supplied [i.e., not simply standard] keywords for each public object
in a package) seems to me a more promising approach.

Regards,
 John
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Berton Gunter
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:50 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Proposal for New R List: Criticism? Comments?
> 
> Folks:
>  
> I would like to propose a new R list, tentatively labeled 
> r-contents. I wish to briefly explain the purpose and format 
> here and solicit public comments, pro or con, so feel free to 
> criticize or suggest a better name and other improvements or 
> alternatives.
>  
> R presently consists of a suite of about a dozen core 
> recommended packages and several hundred contributed packages 
> comprising thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of 
> functions. Hopefully, this will continue to grow rapidly. No 
> one can possibly keep track of all of this, and it is 
> therefore a daunting task for someone seeking specific 
> functionality to find it, especially when they are relatively 
> new to R. 
>  
> Of course, R and CRAN (and Google and ...)  have various 
> search capabilities that help, but these are essentially 
> keyword-based and so require the searcher to guess search 
> terms that are at least reasonably close to function names 
> and keywords. A lot of the time this works, but it can be 
> tedious; some of the time one guesses wrong, and it doesn't work.
>  
> S-Plus and much other software addresses this by providing a 
> semantically-based Contents Index (or something like it) in 
> their Help functionality. I find this quite useful, but 
> creating and maintaining such an index seems to me to be 
> extremely labor intensive, fraught with its own issues (what 
> heading should I look under?), and, I think, not a good fit 
> to the spirit and dynamics of R anyway.
>  
> Not surprisingly, as a result, many of the questions 
> addressed to r-help are of the form: "I want to do such and 
> such. How do I do it?" While this certainly gives answers, I 
> think the breadth of r-help and its etiquette and posting 
> conventions result in an abruptness to many of our replies 
> ("Read the posting guide! Read the Help files and do what 
> they say!") that discourages many users -- especially casual 
> ones -- from posting questions, and thus may thus discourage 
> use of R. Clearly, if true, this is not a good thing; on the 
> other hand, I think that given r-help's purpose and 
> practices, many of these abrupt replies may well be 
> appropriate (I'm a curmudgeon at heart!).
>  
> Hence, there is a mismatch between user needs and r-help 
> services. To address this mismatch, I would like to propose a 
> new list, r-contents, to essentially serve the same purpose 
> as the S-Plus Contents index. Hence, it would serve as a 
> place for users to post queries ** only ** of the form: "I 
> want to do such and such. How do I do it?" and receive 
> answers that would all be **single phrases ** of the form 
> "package suchandsuch" or "?suchandsuchfunction." No
further
> explanations regarding usage would be provided, though users 
> would be free to follow up answers with private questions to 
> the responder, although there should be no expectation of any 
> response. Queries could be framed with as much or as little 
> supporting detail as desired, with the obvious consequence 
> that a more clearly framed question would be more likely to 
> get a (better) response. No other posting conventions (aside 
> from the usual ones regarding civility and adherence to
> topic) would be expected.
>  
> My hope is that such a list would both reduce unnecessary 
> traffic on r-help and satisfy a genuine need in a less 
> threatening way. I can certainly see downsides (I often learn 
> a lot from "How can I do this?" queries), but I think, on 
> balance, this approach might be useful. So I would like to 
> subject the idea to public scrutiny and criticism, as well as 
> the opportunity for improvement from suggested modifications 
> or alternatives. If it's useful, this will be recognized; if 
> it's not and/or no one is interested, that, too, will be made 
> manifest. I would be especially grateful for the opinions of 
> casual users or newbies, either publicly or privately.
>  
> Cheers,
>  
> -- Bert Gunter
> Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
> South San Francisco, CA
>