A wiki for shiny apps

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Hanno Evard

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Oct 24, 2015, 11:35:51 AM10/24/15
to ShinyApps Users
Is there a wiki for shiny apps? I mean a wiki where users could use and contribute to the apps. Something similar to a usual wiki but the shiny app would be the Article (like in wikipedia).
Or would it be possible to create one? (I've never created a wiki page so I'm not 100% certain of possible problems)

Tareef Kawaf

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Oct 24, 2015, 9:03:08 PM10/24/15
to Hanno Evard, ShinyApps Users
Hi Hanno,
I must admit I am a little confused about the use case you are describing.  Are you asking if it would be easy to make a shiny application that essentially allows multiple people to edit the content of the page? What is the content of the page?  Shiny is a framework that makes it easy to create interactive web applications out of your R analyses, and although you could create different types of web applications with it, it isn't really meant to replace more general purpose web frameworks which are likely to be better suited for non statistical analyses use cases. 

Tareef

On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Hanno Evard <evard...@gmail.com> wrote:
Is there a wiki for shiny apps? I mean a wiki where users could use and contribute to the apps. Something similar to a usual wiki but the shiny app would be the Article (like in wikipedia).
Or would it be possible to create one? (I've never created a wiki page so I'm not 100% certain of possible problems)

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Hanno Evard

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Oct 26, 2015, 5:16:39 AM10/26/15
to ShinyApps Users, evard...@gmail.com
Hi,

Thanks for the answer and sorry about the confusion. I am not really sure myself about technically how the idea would work.

The idea would be to make the app so that people can edit it like people can edit a wikipedia page. 
I don't think the shiny app should replace the general purpose web framework - I'm hoping more that the shiny app would bring all the statistical analysis possibilities to everyone. At the moment (as much as I know) all the statistical programs are quite complex and often not for free. I think R itself is too complex for many applications. But with this kind of a wiki with simple shiny apps offering statistical tools to everyone openly it would make things a lot easier for people.

I'm a chemistry PhD student and I see that these apps could be very useful for e.g. chemists or life scientists who need to do statistical analysis of their data. But the programs are complex and the statistics they need to use is complex - the result is that the scientists spend a lot of time studying statistics and the programs (and therefore not working on the topic they should be focusing on) and then it is still quite possible that the statistics is used in a wrong way (e.g. you can find numerous articles on how scientists often misinterpret the results of statistical tests because they don't understand quite correctly what the p-value they obtain means). That's the problem I'm hoping to solve with this wiki. Shiny apps could be made simple to learn and use, and quite foolproof so that results are not misinterpreted. And of course they can be made free for everyone. 

I hope I clarified my question a little bit now.

All the best,
Hanno

Tareef Kawaf

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Oct 26, 2015, 12:46:24 PM10/26/15
to Hanno Evard, ShinyApps Users
Hi Hanno,
From your description, it sounds to me that what you really want is to provide people with different shiny applications that tackle different problems.  You can have shiny applications that accept UI based inputs, but you can also create shiny applications that will take say an upload of a file that has data that this particular application is particularly well suited to handle.  
We have several examples and pointers to multiple galleries on shiny.rstudio.com if you wanted to explore that approach further.

Hope I understood your use case well enough.

Best,
Tareef

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