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

[Tony Plate]

hadley wickham wrote:
> 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.

Is there any way on the R-Wiki for people to quickly and easily add an 
annotation indicating that they believe some particular advice is poor 
practice?  Ideally, these annotations would be easily searchable  so 
that other users could find and fix or respond to them.

-- Tony Plate

> 
> Hadley