Is there any chance of making the 'r' tage display as 'R'? I think it would make its meaning clearer. Must confuse newbies.
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$\begingroup$ Confuse newbies? That's what we have tag wiki's in order to avoid... $\endgroup$– ShaneJan 31, 2011 at 20:07
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$\begingroup$ Maybe someone should write one for 'r' then. I'm not allowed to. $\endgroup$– onestopJan 31, 2011 at 20:29
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3 Answers
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It is fairly easy to make one or more tags show as uppercase for someone who has access to the CSS stylesheet which is used for the page layout.
This line in the CSS file or on the site would make the r tag show as R:
a[href="questions/tagged/r"] { text-transform: uppercase; }
Of course, until this is implemented, anyone who wants to view it this way on his/her Firefox browser can use one of the many custom stylesheet addons, some of which are also available for Google Chrome.
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Well I agree with your point, but currently all tags are lower-case by design. And I don't think SE team will ever consider changing it.
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$\begingroup$ @onestop I also agree with you both. But other softwares are also displayed in lower case (e.g.,
spssfor SPSS,statafor Stata) -- it might be a mess to change them all. $\endgroup$– chlJan 27, 2011 at 18:08 -
1$\begingroup$ I'm not proposing changing them all. spss and stata are less ambiguous, while 'r' could mean correlation coefficient. $\endgroup$– onestopJan 27, 2011 at 20:12
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$\begingroup$ I guess an alternative would be to rename the tag
r-project, which would agree with the domain name r-project.org. $\endgroup$– onestopJan 27, 2011 at 20:13 -
$\begingroup$ @onestop Yes, that's right (software vs. correlation). Still, I found
r-projecttoo much reminiscent of CRAN or R website. Sorry, I have no solution to propose. This is a great question... $\endgroup$– chlJan 27, 2011 at 20:35 -
1$\begingroup$ @onestop, @mbq, how about "r-programming", "programming: r", "r-code", "r-dev" or "r-language"? (First and last are my favorites...I think.) $\endgroup$– cardinalFeb 6, 2011 at 16:03
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R is great, but the name is terrible and invites many problems on scale much larger than the one you highlight here.
It lacks searchability in general and possibly memorability for would-be users.
Those and the smaller problem you highlight could be fixed by moving to a different name (I nominate "R-Statistics" or "R-Stats"), but of course that would be a much larger effort than a tag change here!
I don't know that it is up to StackExchange to try to deal with what is a bad name to begin with. Of course, excepting r from the no-capitals rule on the basis of it being a single letter seems reasonable if it is easy to do.
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$\begingroup$ The name "R" really isn't an issue for this forum. $\endgroup$– Nick CoxAug 4, 2013 at 7:52
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$\begingroup$ My entire point was that problems with the name "R" are not really an issue for this site. The question above brought it up in this forum. I was actually just trying to make the same point you made. $\endgroup$– A.M.Aug 4, 2013 at 13:40
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$\begingroup$ OK, but it didn't seem that anyone was arguing or implying otherwise. Equally, raising the question of what R should be called might have puzzled others apart from myself. $\endgroup$– Nick CoxAug 4, 2013 at 13:43
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$\begingroup$ The question itself implicitly brings up that issue, being an outgrowth of it, and does argue for problems with the name "R" being dealt with in this forum (and by CV/SE). I imagined that others might not see that (a guess backed up by your view that it didn't seem that anyone was arguing it), which is why I wanted to highlight it. The talk of alternative names was to better explain the point and to demonstrate that any solution to the root problem really lies outside SE. $\endgroup$– A.M.Aug 4, 2013 at 14:01
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$\begingroup$ I didn't see any issue here beyond use of lower case when upper case is standard. $\endgroup$– Nick CoxAug 4, 2013 at 14:04