[R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki

[hadley wickham]

On 10/23/07, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> The R-Wiki is actively maintained... the addition of material to it is
> up to R users with any kind of initiative like this being warmly
> welcome. As for Bill Venable's comment, I totally agree: you should
> better test your concept first, and be ready to have very poor, as well
> as probably some excellent documents. I think it should be wise to
> announce to your students that "the best documents will be posted to the
> R wiki", so that you may place a filter somewhere.
>
> As for the format, PDF is interesting as the student could learn Sweave
> too. However, the R Wiki allows for further corrections and additions to
> the documents. For the possible section in the Wiki, may be, a dedicated
> section like "Users' guide (written by users)" could be created, and
> then, you will organize material inside as you like. Otherwise, the
> existing "Guides" section should be fine (feel free to create
> subdirectories).
>
> I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by "beginners",
> because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is
> not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed.

But they are simultaneously the worst people to provide good advice.
The wiki seems to be riddled with poor practice and "hacks" to get
around misunderstandings of the way R works.

Hadley
-- 
http://had.co.nz/