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 (tal.galili@gmail.com).

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.

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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!

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

• R-statistics blog (that’s me…)
• GETTING GENETICS DONE
• Struggling Through Problems
• Back side smack
• al3xandr3
• Cloudnumbers.com
• The R Tutorial Series blog
• …

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