Hello, All:
I think there is a logic to Gabor's perspective, especially
regarding unintended consequences.
For example, if the as a result of changing policy, our most
creative and substantive contributors decide to reduce their level of
contribution and are not effectively replaced by others, then it would
be a great loss for humanity.
This group, especially the R Core team and the R-devel community
more generally, has been incredibly productive. The result is a
substantive contribution to humanity. It would be a loss if any change
reduced that. However, if rudeness is driving away potential
contributors as was claimed, then this community might be more
productive with a "no RTFM" policy.
I accept that the experience of the Ubuntu Forums and
LinuxQuestions.org may not be perfectly relevant to R, but I think they
could provide some insight: I would expect them to have some of the
same "rationing" problems as experienced on the R help lists.
The exchange that generated my original comment on this was a
question from "r.ookie" to R-Help. I don't know why this person chose
to hide their real identity, but I was subsequently informed off line
that the RTFM comment I saw was a response to an apparently rude reply
by "r.ookie" to a previous suggestion by a regular contributor. I still
think a better response is not to escalate: Either ignore the post or
say something like, "I don't understand your question. Please provide a
self-contained minimal example as suggested in the Posting Guide ... ."
Best Wishes,
Spencer
On 8/21/2010 2:08 AM, Simone Giannerini wrote:
Dear Gabor,
I do not agree with your claim
"In the case of the R list there is a
larger potential demand for free help than resources to answer and
without the usual monetary economics to allocate resources I believe
that the functional purpose of rudeness here is to ration those
resources and minimize duplication of questions"
In fact, apart from the fact that rudeness should never be justified, I was
amazed at the amount of time dedicated by some people to give unhelpful
replies to dumb (and less dumb) questions (at least on R-devel). In my
opinion this behaviour causes some damages to the whole R project for at
least two reasons:
1. On the bug report side if you want to have a good percentage of true
positive reports you should allow for a high percentage of false positive
reports. But if people are scared to post you will lose the true positive
together with false ones.
2. People that are potentially willing to contribute are discouraged to do
it.
Kind regards
Simone
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Gabor Grothendieck<ggrothendi...@gmail.com
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Paul Johnson<pauljoh...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Spencer Graves
<spencer.gra...@structuremonitoring.com> wrote:
What do you think about adding a "No RTFM" policy to the R mailing
lists?
Per, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM":
I think this is a great suggestion.
I notice the R mailing list already has a gesture in this direction:
"Rudeness and ad hominem comments are not acceptable. Brevity is OK."
But the people who behave badly don't care about policies like this
and they will keep doing what they do.
Although it may seem hard to justify rudeness its often the case that
even the most bizarre behavior makes sense if you view it from the
perspective of that person. In the case of the R list there is a
larger potential demand for free help than resources to answer and
without the usual monetary economics to allocate resources I believe
that the functional purpose of rudeness here is to ration those
resources and minimize duplication of questions. If that is correct
one can predict that if civility were to become the norm on this list
then other rationing mechanisms would arise to replace it.
For example, it might become the norm that most questions are not
answered or are answered less thoroughly or the list might be replaced
as the de facto goto medium for R questions by some other list or web
site so we have to be careful about unintended consequences.
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