<p>I still think that inviting R-help here is a better idea than it seems; both mailing lists and SE sites are really made to serve communities, not topics. This site is for general data science community, R-help is for data science community using R.</p>

<p>As can be seen from <a href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/" rel="nofollow">R-help archives</a>, it is discussing very similar topics as we do here; yet this community is 1) large and very active, 2) certainly more engaged in R programming issues than ours.</p>

<p>1) will result in some overwhelming (my approximation is that it will be an equivalent of merging CV with a second site of more-less the same size). However, those people are statisticians and data miners, and there is a great chance they will start to ask more core questions and it finally only end in a bigger site with more-less original topic distribution.</p>

<p>2) might lead to a serious topic drift; however there is a solution, namely maintaining the existing SO/CV split of more "sciency" and more "programmy" R questions.</p>

<p>The smaller in size but also important issue are some discursive and big-list questions that are in fact against general SE rules. SO is very broad and thus SO mods will always kill such threads; here we can at least give it more thought.</p>
