Calling R lovers and bloggers – to work together on "The R Programming wikibook"

This post is a call for both R community members and R-bloggers, to come and help make The R Programming wikibook be amazing.

The R Programming wikibook is not just another one of the many free books about statistics/R, it is a community project which aims to create a cross-disciplinary practical guide to the R programming language.  Here is how you can join:

Dear R community member – please consider giving a visit to The R Programming wikibook.  If you wish to contribute your knowledge and editing skills to the project, then you could learn how to write in wiki-markup here, and how to edit a wikibook here (you can even use R syntax highlighting in the wikibook).  You could take information into the site from the (soon to be) growing list of available R resources for harvesting.

Dear R blogger, you can help The R Programming wikibook by doing the following:

  • Write to your readers about the project and invite them to join.
  • Add your blog’s R content as an available resourcefor other editors to use for the wikibook.  Here is how to do that:
    • First, make a clear indication on your blog that your content is licensed under cc-by-sa copyrights (*see what it means at the end of the post). You can do this by adding it to the footer of your blog, or by writing a post that clearly states that this is the case (what a great opportunity to write to your readers about the project…).
    • Next, go and add a link, to where all of your R content is located on your site, to the resource page (also with a link to the license post, if you wrote one).  For example, since I write about other things besides R, I would give a link to my R category page, and will also give a link to this post.  If you do not know how to add it to the wiki, just e-mail me about it ([email protected]).

If you are an R blogger, besides living up to the spirit of the R community, you will benefit from joining this project in that every time someone will use your content on the wikibook, they will add your post as a resource.  In the long run, this is likely to help visitors of the site get to know about you and strengthen your site’s SEO ranking.  Which reminds me, if you write about this, I always appreciate a link back to my blog 🙂

* Having a cc-by-sa copyrights means that you will agree that anyone may copy, distribute, display, and make derivative works based on your content, only if they give the author (you) the credits in the manner specified by you. And also that the user may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

———-

Three more points:

1) This post is a result of being contacted by Paul (a.k.a: PAC2), asking if I could help promote “The R Programming wikibook” among R-bloggers and their readers.   Paul has made many contributions to the book so far.  So thank you Paul for both reaching out and helping all of us with your work on this free open source project.

2) I should also mention that the R wiki exists and is open for contribution.  And naturally, every thing that will help the R wikibook will help the R wiki as well.

3) Copyright notice: I hereby release all of the writing material content that is categoriesed in the R category page, under the cc-by-sa copyrights (date: 20.06.2011), as long as the copied content comes with proper attribution which also  includes a link to the source of the article .  Now it’s your turn!

———-

List of R bloggers who have joined: (This list will get updated as this “group writing” project will progress)

For the most updated list, go to the resource page on the The R Programming wikibook.

22 thoughts on “Calling R lovers and bloggers – to work together on "The R Programming wikibook"”

  1. I’d love to contribute all the code from posts tagged with R from my blog but the wiki’s spam filter apparently blocks blogspot.com addresses.

    1. Hi Stephen – I’m happy to see you here.

      I’ve forwarded what you’ve said to Paul, in the hopes he can resolve it. In the meantime, where is there a creative commons statement? (I’d at least add your name to the list on this post)

        1. Hi Stephen,
          Your copyrights are cc-noncommercial use. I suspect that this prohibits wikibooks from using it as is (although they will be able to use the code).

          Thanks for dropping by and commenting – I hope you’ll help publish this further 🙂

          Best,
          Tal

    1. Blogspot has been black listed on Wikipedia and Wikibooks because blogs are generally not a reliable source (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist). However, if a blog is a reliable source, we can ask for an addition it on the white liste (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist).

      In any case, we can always add your blog to the sources page (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming/Sources) using the tag.

      See the discussion here :
      http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Assistance#blogspot

  2. Thanks for adding my blog. I’ll change the CC license. So the license just needs to remove the no derivative works part for the written content? Is BSD okay on the code?

    1. My pleasure Stephen.
      I suspect that the bigger issue is restricting the reuse to being noncommercial only.

      Just for the record: I do not think that this restriction is as important for blog posts in general. What is important is to have it clear that any reuse of the content requires giving proper attribution and a link to the source. This way, even if someone copies you, you still get the link. What do you think?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.