[R] How to search for packages - wrap up!

[Spencer Graves]

      What about doing more to promote the R Wiki?  Someone complained 
to me that the R Wiki is not very useful.  However, I think with the 
right encouragement, it could grow like the regular Wiki, which now has 
over 9 million entries in over 250 languages. 

      I think the R Wiki is ideal for things like the task views.  On 
the R Wiki, they would be more dynamic and less work for the R core team 
to maintain.  To those concerned about any lack of quality this might 
entail, I would ask them to review how the standard Wiki is maintained:  
They have an editorial board (or whatever it's called) with standard 
procedures for refereeing disputes.  They routine edit entries with 
comments like "needs references" or "This entry is in dispute" or "not 
balanced". 

      I'm a novice with writing and editing Wiki entries.  As my Wiki 
literacy improves, I may start posting questions to the R Wiki, inviting 
relevant package maintainers to edit my comments, clarifying how their 
function is similar to or different from a function in another package.  
If I don't get adequate replies from package maintainers, I may then ask 
R-help or R-SIG-x for clarification. 

      Spencer      

hadley wickham wrote:
>> A new user will come to the R homepage, go to CRAN via the link under
>> download and from there see Packages and then be swamped by the huge
>> number available. Having Task Views as a link on the R homepage would
>> make these more visible.
>>     
>
> I would think that a new user would see the download heading, then
> think - I don't want to download a cran (whatever that is) I want to
> downloaded R, and then continue to be confused for another 10 minutes
> until they ask their colleague down the hall for the sequence of 5
> (cran -> mirror -> windows -> base -> R-2.6.1-win32.exe) clicks that
> they need to find the installer!
>
> It would be nice to automatically provide a link to the current
> version of R for the platform that the user is browsing from (see e.g.
> getfirefox.com).  Automatic selection of a mirror would be just as
> desirable, although I still maintain it would be better to dump the
> mirror system entirely and move to a content delivery network (CDN).
>
> Hadley
>
>