>> I question 1) the usefulness of the effort necessary to get the data ; >> and 2) the very concept of data mining, which seems to be the rationale >> for this proposed effort. >> >> Furthermore (but this is seriously off-topic), I seriously despise the >> very idea of "popularity" in scientific debates... "Everybody does it" >> is *not* a valid argument. Nor "Everyone knows...". > > As long as we agree that pacakge downloads != popularity then we have > useful data. > > Usefulness of the data? Let's think... > > Suppose we discover that spatstat is downloaded 100 times more than > splancs is. Both packages compute K-functions of spatial data. Pretend > there's an enhancement to K-function computation that could be > implemented in spatstat and/or splancs. Why bother doing it in > splancs? > > Currently the only usage stats we have are even worse measures such > as number of mentions in R-help or number of bug reports. Or maybe > citation counts, but who would make important decisions based on > those? > > I'd love to go 'Hmmm how many people are using my package?' and get > an exact answer. Given the impossibility of that information, I'd love > to go 'Hmmm how many people downloaded my package?', a good > approximation to which is not beyond the bounds of our technology. Web > pages have had annoying 'this piece of software has been downloaded > 443535 times' banners (often enclosed in <blink> tags) since 1996.Yes > it would require some effort at each CRAN site, but maybe the CRAN > mirror site maintainers might be interested in doing this. If they > don't want to, then fine.
Here's a few either uses that I would put the data to: * In my tenure case, grant applications etc, I can say how many people have downloaded my packages. * If relatively few people are using a package, I'd know that I either need to promote the package more, or improve it so that it is useful to more people. * At a higher level, it would be interesting to see what types of packages are most frequently download. Modelling packages? Graphics packages? Packages for particular applications? ... Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
